Americans For Democratic Action - History

History

The ADA grew out of a predecessor group, the Union for Democratic Action (UDA). The UDA was formed by former members of the Socialist Party of America and Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies as well as labor union leaders, liberal politicians, theologians, and others who were opposed to the pacifism adopted by most left-wing political organizations in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It supported a strongly interventionist, internationalist foreign policy and a pro-union, liberal domestic policy. It was strongly anti-communist as well. It undertook a major effort to support left-wing Democratic members of Congress in 1946, but this effort was an overwhelming failure.

James Isaac Loeb (later an ambassador and diplomat in the John F. Kennedy administration), the UDA's executive director, advocated disbanding the UDA and forming a new, more broadly-based, mass-membership organization. The ADA was formed on January 4, 1947, and the UDA shuttered. ADA's leaders considered communism (especially as practiced in the Soviet Union) to be both morally wrong and a threat to the United States.

Founding members included:

• Reinhold Niebuhr
• Hubert Humphrey
• John Kenneth Galbraith
• Joseph P. Lash
• Walter Reuther
• Eleanor Roosevelt
• Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Over its 60-year history, ADA played a role in many major American movements—civil rights, women's rights, opposition to the Vietnam and Iraq wars—while supporting legislation that resulted from these movements.