Mississippi senator James Eastland lent his Delta-accented voice to the segregationist cause. A Democrat and cotton farmer from Sunflower County, Eastland had earned a reputation as a conspiracy-minded anticommunist who used his Internal Security Subcommittee to probe into politically suspect activities. He offered a simple explanation for the Brown decision: the Supreme Court had fallen victim to “left-wing brainwashing.” He criticized Eisenhower directly for expressing even tepid support of the Court’s decision and asserted that Ike himself would not send his own grandchildren to integrated schools. “Ike is like all interracial politicians,” Eastland sneered. “He wants it for the other fellow.”20
Eastland articulated the view, common among powerful white southerners, that the race problem had been manufactured by outside troublemakers. “There is no discrimination in the South,” he declared on NBC’s Meet the Press. “There are social questions that we think we know more about than others do who don’t have those social questions. Segregation is in the best interest of both races. Both races develop their own culture, and develop better when they are separated.” In March 1956 this passionate defender of Jim Crow segregation was elevated to the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee.21
Eisenhower, in his usual fashion, tried to pour oil on these troubled waters. In a press conference on March 14 he downplayed the nature of the constitutional challenge from the states. “No one in any responsible position anywhere has talked nullification,” he declared disingenuously. He went on to stress that the Supreme Court had recognized the emotional dimension of the subject and had called only for “gradual” desegregation of schools. He hailed “people who are ready to approach this thing with moderation.” In a masterful example of double-speak, Ike said that Americans “must be patient without being complacent.” While deploring “extremists on either side,” he said it seemed perfectly understandable for southerners to “take time to adjust their thinking” to a new legal reality. He concluded in a matter-of-fact way that all he would do was “uphold the Constitution of the United States”—as if that might settle the issue.22
Hoping to avoid any personal role in the debate, Eisenhower turned to the nation’s white church leaders in search of support. He met with his friend and adviser Billy Graham on March 20 and exchanged letters with Graham in the following days. Ike wanted ministers to talk up the need for “progress in our race relations.” He suggested to Graham that southern pastors call for a few modest, concrete measures in order to fend off heavy-handed federal action. Putting black citizens on school boards and city and county commissions, getting blacks into graduate schools, and easing Jim Crow laws in public transportation—such simple steps would help moderate black demands and posed no threat to white authority. Could not church leaders emphasize the need for such actions?23
Graham promised to convene leaders of the major southern denominations and urge them to speak out in favor of “moderation, charity, compassion and tolerance toward compliance with the Supreme Court.” But Graham advised Eisenhower to stay away from the issue until after the November elections. “You have so wonderfully kept above the controversies that necessarily raged from time to time,” he wrote. It would be best “to stay out of this bitter racial situation that is developing.” Eisenhower was only too happy to take this advice. “Let’s don’t try to think of this as a tremendous fight that is going to separate Americans and get ourselves into a nasty mess,” he told reporters on March 21. For Eisenhower, civil rights politics should simply be avoided.24
As the 1956 presidential campaign approached, Ike adopted what his speechwriter Emmet Hughes called “the most conservative caution” toward the subject of civil rights. Although Max Rabb, the “minorities officer” in the White House, urged Sherman Adams to push Eisenhower on civil rights, the president remained wary. He did not think there was much to be gained politically by drawing attention to the Brown decision. On August 8, just before a press conference, Hagerty advised Eisenhower that black voters in the North were likely to fall in line behind the Democrats anyway, and too much pressure on civil rights would alienate white southerners. Ike agreed. When asked by reporters later that day if the GOP platform should explicitly embrace the Brown decision, Eisenhower dodged the question. “I don’t know how the Republican plank on this particular point is going to be stated,” he said.25
In fact Ike was working behind the scenes to avoid just such an endorsement of Brown. He had grown frustrated by the civil rights issue. He mused privately to Ann Whitman that the “troubles brought about by the Supreme Court decision were the most important problem facing the government domestically today.” But he had no desire to attack that problem head-on. Instead he wished the Supreme Court had ordered a much more gradual process of school desegregation, starting with graduate schools and then colleges, and only then integrating high schools and lower grades. He bemoaned the “passionate and inbred attitudes” of white southerners, yet he sought every opportunity to express his sympathy for their position.26
In the days before the Republican convention in San Francisco, Eisenhower directly intervened in the drafting of the party platform. On August 19 he called Herbert Brownell to demand a change in the civil rights plank. Ike had seen a draft put together by Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, the chairman of the platform committee, which stated that the Eisenhower administration “concurred” with the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. The president insisted that was untrue: his administration merely “accepted” the ruling and would follow the law; the Court’s decision was its own. He expressed his frustration to Brownell at being caught “between the compulsion of duty on the one side, and his firm conviction on the other that because of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the whole issue had been set back badly.” He felt that any direct link between himself and Brown would appear as an affront to the white South. If the platform drafters did not change the language to distance Eisenhower from Brown, “he would refuse to go to San Francisco.” Needless to say, Bush altered the language of the civil rights plank as directed by Eisenhower.27
The president also shaped his acceptance speech, which he delivered to the GOP convention on August 23, to avoid any provocative language on civil rights. Speechwriter Arthur Larson, who worked with Eisenhower throughout July and August on this speech, tried to insert a “strong and unequivocal condemnation of racial discrimination,” but the president objected. In a number of conversations with Larson, Eisenhower repeated by-now familiar themes about the need to “understand the Southerners as well as the Negroes.” In Larson’s account of these discussions, Eisenhower stressed the point that “equality of political and economic opportunity did not mean necessarily that everyone has to mingle socially—‘or that a Negro should court my daughter.’ ” Larson reluctantly drafted a speech that omitted the charged terms race, racial, and Negro, downplayed any notion of a national civil rights crisis, and instead hailed a number of “quietly effective actions conceived in understanding and good will for all.” Larson drew a painful and damning conclusion after this experience: “President Eisenhower, during his presidential tenure, was neither emotionally nor intellectually in favor of combatting segregation in general.”28
Most of Eisenhower’s advisers found the president’s caution on civil rights profoundly distressing, especially as racial violence spiked in the South with the opening of the new school year in late August. In Mansfield, Texas, where a district court had ordered the integration of the high school in response to a suit filed by the NAACP, 12 black students arrived at school on the morning of August 30 to enroll. They encountered an angry mob of 400 stone-throwing, placard-toting white residents. Three ghastly black effigies hung from ropes strung up over the school entrance and from the school flagpole. Life magazine carried photographs of the hand-painted signs that adorned the necks of these blood-smeared dummies: “This Negro tried to enter a white school,” one read. The mob gathered in the schoolyard shrieked, “Go home, niggers” at the black teenagers.
A few days later an angry mob at Texarkana Junior College blocked black students from enrolling. White students there erected a 14-foot cross on school grounds, and when night came, they set it alight.29
In Clinton, Tennessee, local residents staged protests and angry demonstrations to halt the enrollment of black students at the public high school. The mayor feared he could not keep order and asked Governor Frank G. Clement for help. On September 2 the Tennessee National Guard arrived in Clinton in force, bringing with them seven tanks, three armored personnel carriers, and over 100 jeeps and trucks. This show of force dispersed the rioters but also generated considerable press across the country. Newspaper reports about the tanks parked in Clinton’s town square showed a national readership that for the South, the struggle against integration was starting to look like a war.30
When Eisenhower took questions in his weekly press conference on September 5, Robert Clark of the International News Service pointed out that “Negro children are risking physical injury to attend school” in the South. Was there something the federal government could do to help? Eisenhower said no: “Under the law the Federal Government cannot . . . move into a State until the State is not able to handle the matter.” And in any case, “when police power is executed . . . by the Federal Government, we are in a bad way.” When another reporter asked him if he had any message about the civil rights crisis for the nation’s young people who were just about to start the school year, Eisenhower fell back on his usual platitudes: “It is difficult through law and through force to change a man’s heart.” He denounced the actions of “extremists on both sides,” thus equating the actions of stone-throwing segregationists with the work of black lawyers and church leaders who, he said, “want to have the whole matter settled today.”
Pressed once again by reporters to endorse the Brown decision—the very thing he had so far refused to do—Ike snapped. “I think it makes no difference whether or not I endorse it. The Constitution is as the Supreme Court interprets it, and I must conform to that.” In a narrow, technical sense he was right. But a great chance to side with the forces of justice and history had passed.31
Hearing Ike’s remarks, a crestfallen Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, made a public reply: “All the nation is watching in shocked horror at men making war upon children and upon the Supreme Court of the United States . . . and from the White House, not a mumbling word. Here is the one man who without favoring your child or mine or trespassing upon any right of a state, could set a moral tone for the nation in this sorry mess, but he chooses to stand mute.” African Americans who had looked with such hope upon the important achievements of Eisenhower’s first years in office now felt the president had turned his back on their struggle.32
IV
As Republicans gathered for their national convention in San Francisco in late August 1956, the party faithful tried hard to talk up the boom times of the Age of Eisenhower. The crowds that gathered at the Cow Palace on the edge of town—a cavernous concrete exhibition hall—wanted to revel in the near-certainty of Eisenhower’s reelection, and they chortled with glee at the prospect of facing Stevenson again, a man Ike had so thoroughly thumped in 1952. The convention itself was described by reporters as “slumberous” and “soporific” because it lacked any drama whatsoever. It was merely a coronation of a leader who received the adulation of his party with good-natured bemusement. Ike put in a sporting effort in delivering his acceptance speech, bellowing from the rostrum, “The Republican Party is the party of the future.” But few of the delegates seemed to be thinking too much about the future because the present, at least for them, was so good. “Rarely in American political history,” wrote newsman Edward Folliard, “has any man dominated a political convention as President Eisenhower dominates this one. In the eyes of the assembled Republicans he is a soldier-statesman of colossal proportions, and they regard criticism of him as almost sinful.”33
What a change from four years earlier! Then Ike had barely won the nomination, nimbly snatching it away from Robert Taft and earning the bitter enmity of the Ohioan’s devoted supporters. Columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop recalled that in 1952 Eisenhower had been untried and unpolished as a politician, giving poor speeches and struggling to connect with the voters. “Now, he is a new master of the political art who has stolen or quietly muffled just about every issue the Democrats could possibly use against him. . . . In pure political terms, the performance of the first Eisenhower years has been nothing less than brilliant.” According to Life magazine, Eisenhower had masterfully pulled together a once-divided party. The Old Guard that had nearly stymied his bid for the nomination in 1952 no longer mattered. Ike had “captured the party and put his progressive stamp on it.” Republicans “love and revere their leader” and are “proud to belong to the Eisenhower party. That’s something new.”34
Eisenhower left San Francisco buoyed by the rapturous reception he had received and spent a quiet week playing golf at the Cyprus Point Golf Club in Monterey, California, in the company of old friends Bill Robinson, Ellis Slater, and Bob Woodruff. On September 12, back in Gettysburg, he officially kicked off his 1956 campaign at an informal picnic on his own large lawn. Some 500 GOP operatives gathered under a large circus tent, merrily wolfing down fried chicken and baked beans and enjoying the partisan atmosphere. Nixon spoke to the group first, promising a fighting campaign on behalf of the Republican Party. He insisted he would vigorously “set the record straight” if the Democrats should ever dare to distort Ike’s record. He relished his role as attack dog, saying with glee, “You don’t win campaigns on a diet of dishwater and milk toast.”
The president then addressed the group, and as usual took the high road. His message was somewhat off the cuff, drawing on his usual battery of stories from the war years and homespun yarns about the importance of leadership. But as he wound up, he found his theme. What did the Republican Party really stand for? What was the 1956 election really all about? Unlike 1952, when Eisenhower was a newcomer to the party, he had now earned the right to define the values of the GOP—his party.
Republicans, he said, wanted a government that promotes individual liberty and freedom while also protecting each citizen “against falling into the depths of poverty and misery through no fault of his own.” Good government must enhance free enterprise but also encourage community values and mutual goodwill so that no American will be left behind. Government must operate with thrift and integrity but “must never pinch pennies where the security of the nation is concerned.” Government must arm for war but strive toward world peace through cooperation and diplomacy. Here in a nutshell was the basic message of the Age of Eisenhower: Government must be moderate, efficient, empathetic, responsive, and compassionate. It must govern with restraint, wisdom, and a constant insistence on frugality. Above all, government must adhere to a disciplined policy of limited spending and limited interference in the lives of American citizens.35
These themes had appeared in Eisenhower’s correspondence and public speeches going back to the 1940s. Yet they had recently been given great precision in a short book called A Republican Looks at His Party by Arthur Larson, who at the time was a lawyer working in the Labor Department and had since become one of Eisenhower’s chief speechwriters. The book appeared in the spring of 1956, and Eisenhower read it while he was convalescing from his abdominal surgery. Larson argued that during the 1950s the people of the United States had converged toward a common set of principles—a consensus about what constituted the right balance between the federal government, the states, and the free market—and that President Eisenhower expressed this new consensus. While the Democrats were divided between big government New Dealers and conservative southerners, Eisenhower had “established the Authentic American Center in politics.” Far from being just a genial caretaker, Eisenhower had engineered a new politics in America. On the campaign trail, Eisenhower called it “modern Republicanism.”36
Eisenhower could never have espouse
d such centrist ideas in 1952, when so many Republicans still thrilled to the Taft brand of conservatism. But in his first term in office Eisenhower had governed by these principles, and his popularity in the nation provided all the rebuttal he needed to quiet any critics. Under a flapping white circus tent on his Gettysburg lawn, he casually blended the New Deal ethos with a dose of homespun conservative rhetoric about states’ rights and individual liberty. His concoction raised not a single Republican eyebrow amid the picnickers—an indication of his supremacy over a party that had once viewed him as a dangerous outsider.
The 1956 presidential campaign did not tax Eisenhower’s stamina. Over six weeks the president made about a dozen appearances across the country. On a typical visit he would fly from Washington to Peoria or Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Denver, allow himself to be driven through adoring crowds and submit to a ticker-tape parade, and then give a speech. Usually he hastened back to the White House on the same day so as to avoid too much time on the road. It was as clinical and streamlined a campaign as possible, designed to avoid too much stress on Eisenhower’s health. Since the Stevenson campaign never landed any real blows, there was no need to alter this compact schedule. Indeed Ike found time to attend the opening game of the 1956 World Series, between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. His son John advised against it, urging Ike to take the election more seriously and do more vigorous campaigning. “Dad sat back and roared with laughter,” recalled John. Referring to Stevenson, Ike said, “This fellow’s licked and what’s more, he knows it! Let’s go to the ball game.” Though critics used such nonchalance against him, his supporters admired his confidence. An editorial in Life magazine, which favored Ike, captured the spirit of the 1956 election: “This is an era of good feeling. In such an era, it is hard to find much to fight about.”37
The Age of Eisenhower Page 41