The term The Vital Center was first coined by Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in his 1949 book of that title. He himself objects to the domestic use of the phrase, though:
"Vital center" refers to the contest between democracy and totalitarianism, not to contests within democracy between liberalism and conservatism, not at all to the so-called "middle of the road" preferred by cautious politicians of our own time. The middle of the road is definitely not the vital center: it is the dead center. Within democracy the argument adheres to FDR's injunction to move always "a little to the left of center."
— Arthur Schlesinger, from "Introduction to the Transaction Edition" of The Vital Center (page xiii, 1998 edition)
U.S. President Bill Clinton started to use the phrase "vital center" in speeches given during his term of office. Schlesinger wrote an article for Slate magazine noting that Clinton hoped to appropriate this term to mean "middle of the road" or something that his "DLC fans" might prefer its meaning to be, which would locate it "somewhere closer to Ronald Reagan than to Franklin D. Roosevelt". In the Slate article, Schlesinger strongly rejected this interpretation of the term, and reiterated his argument from the 1998 introduction:
In my view, as I have said elsewhere, that middle of the road is definitely not the vital center. It is the dead center.
— Arthur Schlesinger, "It's My Vital Center", Slate magazine
Famous quotes containing the words vital and/or center:
“In view of this half-sight of science, we accept the sentence of Plato, that, “poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Louise Bryant: I’m sorry if you don’t believe in mutual independence and free love and respect.
Eugene O’Neill: Don’t give me a lot of parlor socialism that you learned in the village. If you were mine, I wouldn’t share you with anybody or anything. It would be just you and me. You’d be at the center of it all. You know it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.”
—Warren Beatty (b. 1937)