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.
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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.
Throughout her life, she was involved in a variety of organizations, including Americans for Democratic Action, Baltimore Community Action Commission, United Nations Association, Southern Conference Education Fund, Maryland Commission on the Status of Women, and the Jewish Labor Committee.
In Why Conservative Churches are Growing, Kelley pointed out what he saw as the essential difference between liberal and conservative churches: conservative churches concentrated on spiritual needs, liberal churches on political causes, which causes were better promoted by political organizations such as the Democratic Party and the Americans for Democratic Action.
He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Chicago Public Library and of Americans for Democratic Action, founder of the Independent Voters of Illinois (IVI), and President of the Citizens Schools Committee.
In 1968 he led the union out of the Liberal Party of New York State, which it had helped to found, and he severed the ILGWU's ties to the Americans for Democratic Action.
In the 1950s he worked for a period as chair of Americans for Democratic Action and in this role was openly critical of Eisenhower's conservative policies.
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A charter member of Americans for Democratic Action (founded in 1947), she later became the first woman to serve as head of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Jewish Committee.