THE PLATFORM: Rights of Man–1960 Style

My promises are in the platform.

—John F. Kennedy I accept . . . the happy privilege of campaigning on your platform.

—Lyndon B. Johnson

Party platforms have traditionally been ramshackle structures—ill-assorted odds and ends of lumber loosely nailed together by cautious, compromise-minded committees. By comparison, the 1960 Democratic platform, grandly entitled “The Rights of Man,” is a well-made document: straightforward, clear, brief and—as platforms go—probably the most coherent blueprint for Utopia ever to come out of a convention. As such, it reflected not only the promises of the candidate but the leanings of its principal architect: Platform Committee Chairman Chester Bowles, 59, Congressman from Connecticut, prospeous ex-adman (Benton & Bowles), Harry Truman’s best-known Ambassador to In dia, Kennedy’s chief foreign policy ad viser, and an anchor man of Democratic liberals.

Like Caesar’s Gaul, the platform is divided into three principal parts: Defense & Foreign Policy. The essential goal of foreign policy, says the platform is “an enduring peace in which the universal values of human dignity, truth and justice under law are finally secured for all men everywhere on earth” — a more elaborate statement of President Eisenhower’s “peace with justice.” As aids to the cause of peace, the platform proposes more foreign economic aid, expanded world trade (with a cryptic promise of “international agreements to assure . . . fair labor standards to protect our own workers”), liberalized immigration policies, “more sensitive” overseas information programs, and a “national peace agency for disarmament planning and research.” Until peace is secured, the Democratic Party promises “forces and weapons of a diversity, balance and mobility sufficient in quantity and quality to deter both limited and general aggressions,” plus a “strong and effective” civil defense. To the “rulers of the Communist world,” the platform addresses a bracing declaration: “We confidently accept your challenge to competition in every field of human effort . . .

“We believe your Communist ideology to be sterile, unsound and doomed to failure. We believe that your children will reject the intellectual prison in which you seek to confine them, and that ultimately they will choose the eternal principles of freedom.

“In the meantime, we are prepared to negotiate with you whenever and wherever there is a realistic possibility of progress without sacrifice of principle . . .

“But we will use all the will, power, resources and energy at our command to resist the further encroachment of Communism on freedom—whether at Berlin, Formosa, or new points of pressure.”

Civil Rights. In its sweeping promises of R’ahts Government-enforced equality for Negroes, the civil rights plank reaches far beyond any previous party platform, Democratic or Republican. “The time has come,” it says, “to assure equal access for all Americans to all areas of community life, including voting booths, schoolrooms, jobs, housing and public facilities.” If the platform is translated into action, every school district in the country will undertake “at least first-step compliance” with the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision by 1963, the xooth anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The Attorney General should be “empowered and directed to file civil injunction suits in federal courts to prevent the denial of any civil rights on grounds of race, creed or color.” The plank’s most controversial proposal: a federal Fair Employment Practices Commission “to secure for everyone the right to equal opportunity for employment”-a proposal (already law in 16 states) that Florida’s Senator Spessard Holland warned would “make it frightfully impossible to carry ten states of the Southland.”

The Welfare State. In its economics, the platform offers a kind of Populism that has gone to Harvard (home of Kennedy’s professorial advisers John Kenneth, Galbraith and Archibald Cox). Instead of lacing the “wolves of Wall Street” and the bankers for such high crimes as tight money and high interest rates, it blames Republican Washington—and offers a glittering prospect if the Democrats are returned to office. The platform makes bows to the free-enterprise system (“the most creative and productive form of economic order that the world has seen”) and to fiscal sobriety (“needs can be met with a balanced budget, with no increase in present tax rates”), but then it goes on to call for a broad and costly expansion of federal services. And how are they to be paid for? In the real world, the answer would have to be either inflationary deficit spending or increased taxes, but in the platform’s Utopia the Democrats propose to pay the added welfare costs by rubbing liberalism’s newest Aladdin’s lamp—the force-fed 5% economic growth rate (growth rate of the U.S. economy over the past half-century: 3%). Platform Committee Chairman Bowles admitted fortnight ago in Los Angeles that he did not know how a 5% growth rate could be achieved without inflation, but no such candor intrudes, into the platform.

Along with more veterans’ benefits (already costing some $5 billion a year), greatly expanded “programs to aid urban communities.” aid for depressed areas, federal help for schools, a youth conservation corps for the underprivileged, and even federal “incentives” for artists, the platform proposes to implement, on a grand scale, the “Economic Bill of Rights” that Franklin Roosevelt put forward during his 1944 campaign. Among them:

¶ The “right to a useful and remunerative job.” The platform vows “support of full employment as a paramount objective of national policy.”

¶The “right of every farmer” to a “decent living.” With federal farm programs already costing upwards of $6 billion a year, the platform promises farmers a return to even costlier price supports (“not less than 90% of parity”).

¶The “right of every family to a decent home.” Called for: a big increase in federal housing aid, including a “low-rent housing program authorizing as many units as local communities require and are prepared to build.”

¶The “right to adequate medical care.” Among other things, the platform promises a federal program of medical care for the aged, built into the Social Security System, along the lines of the controversial Forand Bill.

The platform invokes Thomas Jefferson as the sponsor of its “Rights of Man.” But the “rights” envisaged by Bowles & Co. in 1960 are radically different from the “rights” that Jefferson advocated. In the Democratic platform, rights emerge as goods or services—a “decent” home, “adequate” medical care, etc.—that everybody is entitled to, and that ever-expanding government is obliged to provide.

Tom Jefferson and the framers of the Bill of Rights (“Congress shall make no law . . .”) saw rights as essential restraints on government in the name of individual liberties.