The Age of Eisenhower

by William I Hitchcock

  Americans also approved, overwhelmingly, of his performance in office. During his eight years as president he enjoyed an average approval rating of 65 percent. He was especially popular in his first term, winning approval from 70 percent of the American public in those four years. The lowest score Eisenhower tallied was in the midst of a recession in the spring of 1958, when his approval rating dropped briefly to 48 percent—still higher than the average rating for Truman’s entire presidency. In short, Americans loved Ike.2

  Why? Peace and prosperity helped, though even when crises in Korea, China, Taiwan, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East erupted, Ike remained popular. Nor did significant slowdowns of the economy in 1953–54 and 1957–58 substantially mar his reputation. It would be easy to chalk up Eisenhower’s popularity simply to his personality, his charm, his affability, and above all the lingering effect of his wartime laurels. Yet there is more to the story than that, for the key to Eisenhower’s success lay in his ability to balance, in his own person and in his policies, the contradictions in American society. People liked him because he seemed to embody so many virtues that they admired—even when these virtues were in tension with one another. As an acute observer of the era, William Lee Miller, noted in a 1958 essay, Ike was ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. He “combined the perennial grandeur of success in battle with the familiar friendliness of the man next door.” He found a way to reconcile the cross-cutting tendencies of the American character: the “practical, competitive, individualistic, externally-minded, environment-mastering and success-seeking on the one side, and the spiritual, idealistic, friendly, team-working, moralizing, and reform-seeking on the other. Mr. Eisenhower exactly summarized both.”3

  Actions that might have seemed hypocritical and even schizophrenic in a lesser man appeared, when performed by Eisenhower, to be evidence of a tempered and moderate philosophy that transcended mere politics. He could trumpet the virtues of capitalism and individual success even as he called for Americans to go to church more often and abjure materialism. He insisted on conservative government, demanded tight budgets, and inveighed against the dangers of “statism,” yet he also hailed the beneficial role of government in providing public schools, roads and bridges, airports and public housing, hospitals and old-age pensions to American citizens. The last president born in the 19th century welcomed innovation, modernity, new technologies, the space age, and global travel and communication. Liberal intellectuals like Adlai Stevenson and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., as well as right-wing pundits such as William F. Buckley, found Ike’s political shape-shifting infuriating. But the voters admired his uncanny ability to float above the partisan scrum.

  No wonder, then, that Americans loved Ike. He was big enough to embody their collective hopes and dreams. He was a Texan, a Kansan, a Coloradan, and a New Yorker; a soldier and a peacemaker; a poor country boy and a wealthy elitist; a devoted reader of Scripture who seldom went to church until he was 62; a beer-and–hot dog man who fêted his powerful White House guests with pheasant under glass. With his example in mind, Americans could aspire to riches, power, and personal success without losing their moral compass. They could earnestly talk up the importance of bootstraps and personal responsibility while demanding that their government care for them. They could embrace change and modernity while also venerating their elders and attending church in record-breaking numbers. Here lie the elements of the Eisenhower phenomenon: by personifying and reconciling these contradictions, he made Americans believe that they, like him, could have it all.

  II

  On Sunday, February 7, 1954, the president and Mrs. Eisenhower went to worship at the National Presbyterian Church in Washington. Immediately after the service the president appeared on a CBS television and radio broadcast to kick off the American Legion’s “Back to God” campaign. Started in 1951 as a way to honor the famous “four chaplains”—ministers of four different denominations who died at sea during the war when they gave their life jackets to others on board their sinking ship—the Back to God campaign had become a signature annual event in which leading churchmen and rabbis, gathered in ecumenical fellowship, called upon their listeners to rededicate themselves to a life of godliness and spirituality.

  Eisenhower’s remarks on the broadcast aimed to link the American experience to religious zeal. “Out of faith in God, and through faith in themselves as His children, our forefathers designed and built the Republic,” the president said. He gave a brief civics lesson that recalled the struggles of the Pilgrims, the testing of George Washington at Valley Forge, and the determined battle of Abraham Lincoln to save the Union: all of them shared a steadfast belief in God. The one unifying feature of the American experience, Eisenhower insisted, was faith: “By the millions, we speak prayers, we sing hymns, and no matter what their words may be, their spirit is the same—In God is our Trust.” In 1954, as America again faced a time of crisis and struggle, “there is a need for positive acts of renewed recognition that faith is our surest strength.”

  This brief speech captured perfectly Eisenhower’s instrumental view of religion: the doctrinal content of religious devotion need not divide Americans so long as they shared a basic commitment to faith and belief. The differences between sects paled in contrast to the yawning gap between believers and nonbelievers. And of course the seedbed of such nonbelief was “atheistic Communism.” To believe in God was itself an act of resistance and defiance of communism; however one worshipped God did not matter, so long as one was willing to acknowledge the power of a higher being.4

  The president was joined in this televised appeal by two of the leading public religious figures of the day: the Rev. Fulton J. Sheen, a bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, pastor of the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City. Bishop Sheen was well known as the longtime host of the radio show The Catholic Hour and, since 1951, the impresario of the television program Life Is Worth Living. Among the first clergymen to use the new medium of television to reach his flock, Sheen, with his gaunt face and deep-set eyes, could be seen weekly at 8:00 p.m. across the nation. Robed in a full-length cassock, bearing a pectoral cross on a chain around his neck, topped by a small skullcap, Sheen delivered commentary on topics ranging from marriage and alcoholism to freedom, the devil, love, and purgatory. He stood before a chalkboard, occasionally turning away from the camera to jot down a few keywords like a skilled 10th-grade English teacher. He usually started by recounting a humdrum tale of ordinary life, perhaps sent to him in a letter from a viewer. He would mine this for its didactic value and throw in a few light witticisms along the way. Quiet, composed, articulate, Sheen’s TV personality entranced millions of Americans, drawing audiences as large as those that tuned in to Milton Berle and Bob Hope.

  Peale, a pudgy, bespectacled Methodist with a flair for homespun stories and down-to-earth verities, had become a national phenomenon as the author of wildly popular Christian self-help books. The idea for such guidebooks was not Peale’s alone: in 1939, Alcoholics Anonymous appeared on America’s bookshelves, offering a 12-step method for treating not just alcoholism but other “social” diseases. The crucial step in these programs was the recognition of a “higher power” that could provide spiritual sustenance as one progressed through the prescribed treatment.

  Peale saw a church-building opportunity in the yearning of Americans to overcome their personal problems and achieve success. He offered a simple therapy for any affliction: belief in God. In a stream of publications as well as radio and television appearances, he provided audiences simple steps to improve their lives and grasp the financial, personal, social, and professional success they desired. Books like Inspired Messages for Daily Living compiled passages from the Bible that could serve as “health-producing, life-changing, power-creating Thought Conditioners” for people experiencing anxiety, insomnia, fatigue, lack of confidence, frustration, and more. These troubles were easily treatable by reciting Scripture. If you wanted to know
, for example, “how to break the worry habit” or “how to make your work easy” or “how to get people to like you,” Peale offered easy techniques, all of which amounted to reciting a few passages of the Bible, selected by Peale himself. Such spiritual exercises, Peale claimed, amounted to a “magic formula” for personal happiness and success. He found an enormous audience for his Christian home remedies. His book The Power of Positive Thinking appeared in 1952 and stayed on the best-seller list for 186 weeks. He became a much-admired public figure and would go on to develop a close personal friendship with Richard Nixon.5

  If Peale and Sheen were friendly Christian showmen, Ike’s own pastor, Rev. Edward Elson, offered sterner counsel. In 1954 Elson published a small book, America’s Spiritual Recovery, dedicated to the president. (The introduction was written by another parishioner, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.) Elson declared that America found itself “in a period of real moral sag and deterioration.” He drew a desperate portrait of the nation’s ills: soaring crime, the “kow-towing admiration for the tycoons of business and the captains of industry,” the veneration of money and profit, and the lapse of religious worship. Children, he said, no longer respected their parents. Jazz, modern art, and vulgar films like Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire that glorified “a deteriorating personality” offered more evidence of a collapse of morals. Schools no longer taught Christian precepts. The militant atheism of communism threatened the world.

  Yet Elson also found reason for optimism: amid these grave moral threats, “the greatest religious awakening in the history of our nation” was under way. American worshippers were filling the churches and making plans to build many more. “Six out of every ten Americans formally belonged to a church—the highest ratio in the country’s history,” he wrote. Every week 85 million Americans bowed their heads in prayer in a house of worship. Students on college campuses had shown renewed enthusiasm for religious instruction. The recent best-selling books in the nation included the Bible, books by Rev. Peale and Bishop Sheen, and other inspirational texts and tales. Elson did not mention that this was also the period in which Hollywood produced blockbuster movies on religious themes, such as Quo Vadis (1951), The Ten Commandments (1956), and Ben Hur (1959).

  Elson believed that Eisenhower’s election to the presidency had triggered this religious revival. Ike had become “the focal point of a moral resurgence and spiritual awakening of national proportions.” His inaugural prayer, given on the steps of the Capitol, had signaled the return of faith into public life, as did his decision to start his cabinet meetings with prayer. “It is not an exaggeration to say that the business which receives the attention of the president is surrounded with an atmosphere of prayer.” Ike’s moral and spiritual leadership could save America from what Elson saw as a grave threat: not only the nation’s internal moral collapse but the gathering forces of atheism and communism. Marxism presented such a great danger because it offered a “new world religion” and aimed to unseat Christianity. The philosophies of “the sickle and the cross,” Elson said, “are irreconcilable,” and only one of them could survive. If Christianity was to triumph, communism must be vanquished.6

  This kind of public piety, moralism, and prophetic speech saturated the Age of Eisenhower, and it squared perfectly with the language of the new administration. It is not surprising, then, that Ike found himself drawn to and befriended by the most significant evangelist of the postwar years, Billy Graham, with whom he shared many basic ideas about the relationship of spiritual faith to the creation of a well-ordered society. Graham, a tall, rangy Baptist, grew up on a dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina, went to college in Wheaton, Illinois, and started his preaching in a Chicago-based organization called Youth for Christ in the mid-1940s. His talent, sincerity, zeal, and sheer charisma sped him on his way to stardom. In 1949 his enormous Los Angeles revival meeting—which he called a “crusade”—attracted nationwide press coverage. In 1951 Texas oil man Sid Richardson urged Graham to add his voice to the chorus then calling for General Eisenhower to run for president. Graham gladly complied, asking Eisenhower to “offer himself to the American people.”7

  Richardson arranged for Graham to meet the general at SHAPE headquarters in Paris in March 1952, just after Ike won the New Hampshire primary. Eisenhower welcomed Graham into his modern, newly constructed office and spoke with the pastor of his spiritual life, especially his upbringing among the devout River Brethren in Kansas; Graham reported on the “crusade” he had recently concluded in Washington, D.C. They sat together for two hours and formed a bond. In August, after Eisenhower won the GOP nomination, he invited Graham to Denver to the Brown Palace Hotel, where he asked Graham to help him find appropriate themes and scriptural passages to work into his campaign speeches.

  Graham’s influence hung on some of Eisenhower’s campaign statements. When Ike was asked to describe his religious beliefs for the Episcopal Church News in September 1952, he responded, “You can’t explain free government in any other terms than religious. The founding fathers had to refer to the Creator in order to make their revolutionary experiment make sense. . . . It is ours to prove that only a people strong in Godliness is strong enough to overcome tyranny and make themselves and others free.” He concluded, “What is our battle against communism if it is not a fight between anti-God and belief in the Almighty?” America’s problems might be easier to solve, Eisenhower opined, if every American “would dwell more upon the simple virtues: integrity, courage, self-confidence, and an unshakeable belief in his Bible.”8

  After the election Graham sent the new president a fairly steady stream of correspondence, updating him on the activities of his ministry. In June 1953 Graham reported that his monthlong revival in Dallas drew 25,000 people a night and was “the largest evangelistic crusade in the history of the United States.” He found the American people “hungry for God,” and he told Eisenhower that in Dallas a crowd of 75,000 at the Cotton Bowl rose up as one, bowed their heads, and prayed that “God would give you wisdom, courage and strength.” To see so many people praying for their president, Graham wrote, “was one of the most beautiful and moving sights I have ever seen.” A few months later Graham sent word that the president’s “constant references to spiritual needs and faithful attendance at church have done much to help in the spiritual awakening that is taking place throughout the nation.”9

  In November 1953, Graham called on Eisenhower in the White House to update the president on his long-planned crusade in Britain and present to him a startling gift: a book signed by several hundred Chinese and North Korean prisoners who, while being held in South Korean camps, were converted to Christianity. These were POWs who had asked not to be repatriated after the Korean armistice; alongside their names they stamped their fingerprints, using their own blood as ink. Upon leaving the White House that day, Graham told the press that Eisenhower’s religious devotion had “inspired the nation.”10

  Graham’s ministry suited an era of robust individualism, for the evangelist spoke about the need to bring people to Christ as the answer to the world’s problems. “We must be born again,” he said. “If we change men, we can change the world. We’ve got to do something about all the hating, cheating, lying and stealing in the world today.” He summed up his approach to the temporal world by saying repeatedly, “Human nature, not the hydrogen bomb, is the world’s chief problem.” Fix human nature by conversion, and the anxieties of the atomic age would disappear. This emphasis on the freedom of the individual to choose a way of life—to make what Graham called a “decision for Christ”—squared with Eisenhower’s belief that religious values, because they bring people to do the right thing, are crucial to a well-ordered society. “Religious principles,” Eisenhower told an audience of interfaith leaders in February 1955, “must not be kept in a realm apart from everyday life. . . . Without God, there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the supreme being is the first, the most basic expre
ssion of Americanism.” Human rights, Eisenhower asserted, are granted by God, not the state. And as such they are inviolable. The government must protect and defend these rights; it must never abridge them. Between man and his Creator, no government should intervene.11

  On March 6, 1955, Graham achieved a milestone: he delivered a sermon directly to an American president. As the guest of Rev. Elson at the National Presbyterian Church, Graham spoke on “Faith in Our Times.” Again he stressed the message that the cold war and the H-bomb, juvenile delinquency, racial strife, moral weakness—all these worries could be cured instantly by conversion to Christ. They all sprang from a single source: sinful human nature. Fix that, and the world would be free of trouble. Not every theologian shared Graham’s simple answer to the problems of the age. Reinhold Niebuhr, the leading Christian intellectual of the era and a professor at Union Theological Seminary, published a searing essay in the New Republic in June 1955 that addressed the surge in popular piety. Niebuhr had no time for the likes of Norman Vincent Peale and Bishop Sheen, whom he described as mere entertainers. Graham he treated with more respect and more venom. Niebuhr attacked Graham’s “perfectionist illusions” and his “simple religious moralism,” which claimed that “conversion to Christianity could solve the problem of the hydrogen bomb.” Niebuhr accused Graham—and Eisenhower—of equating faith with “good plumbing” as the core values of the “American Way of Life.” What angered Niebuhr was the smug, complacent, self-regarding contentment of powerful men, both in government and in the churches, who decided that simple “religious faith” would resolve the social and political crises of the age.12