Elastic, agonistic publics: John Dewey's call for a third party.

• Author: Finnegan, Cara A.

In April, 1931, George Coleman of Lincoln, Nebraska, wrote a letter to the editor of the New Republic, responding to a series of articles written by John Dewey. Coleman wrote approvingly of Dewey's call for a new party to challenge the political orthodoxy in a time of great economic and social crisis. The letter concluded, "John Dewey bears watching. He is a clever politician as well as a great philosopher" (1931, p. 238). This essay reflects upon Coleman's statement by exploring the implications for public sphere studies of Dewey's series on the need for a third political party, published in the New Republic in March and April 1931.

By the early 1930s, Dewey had retired from his faculty position at Columbia. Though still heavily involved in academe, he also turned his attention squarely to more public concerns. Throughout his career but particularly beginning in the post-war years, Dewey had consistently and quite visibly engaged a range of political concerns on the dais and in print. In addition to publishing widely and holding top positions in political organizations such as the People's Lobby and the League for Independent Political Action (LIPA), he sat on the editorial boards of a number of journals of opinion that routinely published his writings. (1) Throughout the 1930s, Dewey continued and escalated a strategy of using the pages of left-leaning and progressive periodicals such as the New Republic, Common Sense, Social Frontier, and Survey Graphic to test out ideas, communicate to a broader audience; and advocate for a social liberalism that would protect - publics from the dangers posed by the encroachment of private industry in to political life. (2)

The goal of this essay is to demonstrate that attention to Dewey's public writings bears fruit for argumentation scholars in ways both pedagogical and conceptual. First--and no small matter to those of us who teach Dewey in our classes--Dewey's public writing is quite accessible when compared to the often convoluted features of his scholarly work. (3) Max Eastman recalled Dewey's notorious opacity fondly in an Atlantic Monthly profile of the man who had been his teacher: "He has published 36 books and 815 articles and pamphlets, but if he ever wrote one quotable sentence it has got permanently lost in the pile" (1941, p. 671). Indeed, for students reading Dewey for the first time (often, in my graduate seminars, starting with The Public and Its Problems), the barrier of Dewey's writing style can seem insurmountable. Although students are always quick to recognize the immense value of Dewey, they also experience a great deal of frustration in reading his prose. As a result, they sometimes miss critical moves v ital to understand if we wish to make Dewey relevant to the questions of public sphere studies. One way around this problem is, of course, simply to encourage students that the reward is worth the effort. Another is to engage Dewey's public writings.

Attention to Dewey's public writing is also warranted because, quite simply, Dewey wrote in public. Unfortunately, Dewey scholarship (both in the field of communication as well as outside of it) typically fails to make use of the material Dewey published in journalistic contexts, or does so only as this material has been anthologized in Dewey's massive collected works. (4) As a result, Dewey scholarship tends to privilege Dewey the "great philosopher" at the expense of seeing the full rhetoricality of Dewey as "clever politician." Attention to Dewey's public writing may thus function as a corrective to emphasis on Dewey's philosophical works and thus provide a fuller picture of Dewey's engagement with the political and social issues facing publics in his own time.

What exactly might that "fuller picture" reveal? In this essay I offer a brief but, I hope, illustrative set of observations about how Dewey's third party series gestures toward some of the concerns of public sphere studies. First, by mixing his pragmatist's interest in the experiential with a concrete commitment to politics, Dewey reveals in the series his commitment to the construction of an "elastic" social imaginary responsive to the rhetorical needs of a public in crisis. Second, rather than embrace the conversational, dialogic mode he theorized elsewhere, Dewey argues in the New Republic that a new third party must adopt a decidedly agonistic mode of communication. Thus, the kind of rhetoric Dewey advocates in the New Republic departs from the approach to communication that has traditionally made Dewey's philosophy so attractive to communication scholars. Finally, Dewey's series is suggestive regarding the potential relationship between third parties and counterpublic theory. In offering a prescription for how a third political party should work, Dewey describes the role of a third party in ways that may prove productive for scholars interested in exploring the intersections between third party politics and counterpublicity. After first discussing the context in which Dewey's third party series appeared, I take up each of these three observations in detail.

DEWEY AND THE Question OF A THIRD PARTY

As the official spokesperson for the League for Independent Political Action (LIPA), Dewey published an open letter to U.S. Senator George Norris of Nebraska in the New York Times on Christmas Day 1930. Dewey asked the avowedly progressive senator to abandon the Republican party and work with Dewey and other frustrated progressives in the LIPA to form a third political party: "Renounce both of these old parties and. . . help give birth to a new party based upon the principles of planning and control for the purpose of building happier lives" (qtd. in Bordeau, 1971, p. 70). Norris turned down Dewey's very public request, but the provocative overture turned heads in both parties and set the stage for Dewey's fourpart series in the New Republic, published in March and April of 1931. The first two parts of the series, called "The Need for a New Party" and "The Breakdown of the Old Order," explain Dewey's view of the root causes of the current economic and political crisis and argue that the "old order" of the two parties is not positioned to produce real social change. In parts three and four, "Who Might Form a New Party?" and "Policies for a Third Party," Dewey goes on to make explicit recommendations regarding who should (and should not) participate in a third party, and what that party's platform should be.

Dewey begins the series by noting that if one is to advocate on behalf of a third party, one must first explain the necessity for one, "for it is the pressure of necessity which creates and directs all political changes" (1931a, p. 115). He observes that the recurring frustration regarding political parties is even more intense now, during a time of Depression. Voters are not only apathetic, Dewey remarks, but "jaded": "They have lost all confidence that politics can accomplish anything significant." In addition, "old" political parties, Dewey explains, are not positioned to deal with this dissatisfaction and unrest. And because the Hoover administration is beholden to the interests of finance capital, solutions on a federal scale--mass, public solutions--are not directed where they should be. The problems of people "are connected with problems of consumption," that is, of attaining and maintaining a reasonable standard of living. But government's focus, to the contrary, has been on production: "The statement that our politics has been controlled for production purposes at the cost of consumption cannot be overemphasized, nor can it be too sweeping" (p. 116). Thus the pressing problems facing the masses of people, Dewey observes, are precisely those with which the government is not able to deal effectively. Dewey concludes that there "is the need for something radically new in our political life, which only a new party can promulgate and execute" (p. 117).

Dewey continues his call for overturning the political orthodoxy in part two, "The Breakdown of the Old Order." Here Dewey explains in greater detail how neither of the two parties has been able to handle the economic and social crisis brought forth by the Depression. Concerns about "the growing domination of industry by finance," particularly in the public utilities arena, are valid, he says, but such concerns should not be isolated to particular issues. Rather, all specific instances lead to the same broad conclusion: a third political party is needed to liberate issues of public relevance from their stranglehold by industry.

Dewey begins part three by pointing out that mere dissatisfaction with the status quo does not by itself constitute a good argument for the launching of a new third party. In addressing the question "Who might form a new party?," he first explores some of the reasons why it cannot be expected that Democrats or Republicans could reform their own parties. Both parties are too fractured internally and geographically (northern Democrats in conflict with southern ones, eastern Republicans with western ones), to have anything in common with their own party members, much less have the capacity to mobilize new members to join a fractured "old" party. The Communist and Socialist parties may appear to be viable alternatives; however, Dewey does not believe that either party is positioned to be accepted by the American people as a true alternative to traditional parties.

Finally, in the middle of part three, Dewey arrives at the solution portion of his argument: a discussion of the new party itself. Who will belong? What policies will it support and oppose? Dewey flatly observes that the new party should be a bourgeois party, made up of middle class professionals: "teachers, the average retail merchant, the fairly well-to-do householder, the struggling white-collar worker, including his feminine counterpart, and the farmer" (1931c, p. 178). Dewey is...