Eisenhower had made a serious miscalculation. He had invited a governor who was in flagrant violation of a federal court order to meet with him without securing his capitulation beforehand. Faubus was a slippery character, as Brownell had warned, and Eisenhower failed to nail him down. As the New York Times editorial page described it, Faubus regarded federal court orders “as a matter for horse-trading between a State Governor and a President of the United States,” and Eisenhower had participated in the deal-making. A group of influential liberal Democrats termed Eisenhower’s handling of the crisis “tragic” and “weak.” Black leaders too were restive. Adam Clayton Powell, one of Ike’s most prominent black supporters, demanded action. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson called for Eisenhower to meet with black leaders to discuss the problem. Famed band leader Louis Armstrong told the press he would cancel a government-sponsored tour of Europe because the president “lacked guts” and had failed to end the standoff. Eisenhower’s patience and moderation now appeared to many in the North to be little more than appeasement of the southern segregationists.50
On September 20 the much-anticipated showdown in Judge Davies’s courtroom duly unfolded. Spectators and participants gathered early in Room 436 of the federal building in Little Rock. Camera crews mounted bright lights. The nine black students who had sought admission to the high school filed in, perfectly attired in suits and dresses. Just before 10:00 in walked Thurgood Marshall, chief legal counsel for the NAACP and a nationally recognized attorney. Judge Davies took his seat at 10:00 sharp. Governor Faubus did not appear, but his lawyers asked Davies to dismiss the case against him, asserting that the court had no authority over a state governor. This ludicrous assertion was denied by Davies, prompting the governor’s lawyers to walk out of the courtroom. After taking testimony from witnesses, Davies issued an injunction, demanding that Faubus halt his obstructionism and allow “the attendance of Negro students at Little Rock High School.”
Three hours later Faubus complied. He gave the order for the National Guard to leave the school grounds, but not before making an announcement to the press. He denounced the Court’s rulings and its proceedings, claiming them rigged and unconstitutional. He lashed out at his critics. And he concluded by suggesting that since his own powers to keep the peace had been revoked, any violence that followed would be the problem of the federal authorities. Before leaving the state to attend a governors’ conference in Georgia, he offered a “fervent prayer” that the mob would not come out to the school on Monday morning, September 23, and instigate any trouble.51
VII
But of course there was trouble. On Monday morning Daisy Bates and her nine student charges gathered at her home before setting out for Little Rock High School. They knew there was a crowd of over 1,000 people waiting for them, though the city and state police were also present in a small contingent. As they arrived at the high school, they noticed a great commotion among the large and unruly mob but hastily made their way to a side entrance of the school building and entered. Only then did they discover that the mob was assaulting four black reporters who had arrived at the scene early and had been mistaken for the students. One, L. Alex Wilson of the Tri-State Defender in Memphis, was badly beaten. Photographs show a brick-wielding punk kicking him in the face; other hoodlums jumped him from behind and punched and kicked him to the ground amid cheers and hollers. These actions had briefly distracted enough of the angry crowd to allow the black students to enter the school. But within a few minutes, the cry went up: “They’re in! The niggers are in!”
Chaos ensued. About 300 white students walked out of the building, chanting “Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t gonna integrate!” The increasingly belligerent crowd outside harassed the thin blue line of officers and seemed prepared to storm the school. Fearing for the safety of the black students, who were huddled in the principal’s office, the mayor and the superintendent decided to have them removed and taken back to Daisy Bates’s home. Bates told reporters she would not send them back to school until “they have the assurance of the President of the United States that they will have protection against the mob.” The first day of integration at Little Rock High School had lasted about three hours.52
That afternoon Mayor Woodrow Wilson Mann sent off an anxious message to the president, which was intercepted by Brownell. Praising the “valiant effort” of the police to hold off the demonstrators, the mayor accused Governor Faubus of directing the crowd through various intermediaries, and said he would turn over evidence of this claim to the Justice Department. Brownell called the president, who was on his way to the golf course, and filled him in on the details. Eisenhower was profoundly annoyed and aggrieved. He drafted a statement for public release, stating that federal law cannot be “flouted with impunity by any individual or mob of extremists.” The president would “use the full power of the United States including whatever force may be necessary to prevent any obstruction of the law.” But he was, he told his advisers, “loath to use troops.” He hoped that the threat of force would suffice. He issued that night a “proclamation” that ordered “all persons engaged in such obstruction of justice to cease and desist.” It was a last effort to compel obedience. But it did not work.53
The following day, September 24, 1957, marks one of the most significant dates in the Age of Eisenhower. Although no black students appeared at Little Rock High School that morning, a crowd of angry protestors gathered menacingly. The mayor, fearing that he would not be able to control the mob without a larger police force, sent another and perhaps exaggerated telegram to the president. “The immediate need for federal troops is urgent. . . . Mob is armed and engaging in fisticuffs and other acts of violence. Situation is out of control.” Mann fairly begged the president, “in the interest of humanity, law and order,” to send federal troops to restore order in the city.
Here was the invitation Brownell needed to complete his legal case that local authorities had asked for federal intervention to halt the actions of mob violence. He recommended that Eisenhower send in federal troops, drawing for authority on Sections 332 and 333 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which enshrines the Insurrection Act of 1807. According to the statute, “Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State or Territory by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.” Faubus’s defiance presented just such a case of rebellion. Eisenhower reluctantly acknowledged this fact and agreed to use federal troops to enforce the law. According to Adams, this decision was “the most repugnant to him of all his acts in his eight years at the White House.”
Repugnant, for it made a prophet of the many Richard Russells of the South who had predicted just this kind of “integration at the end of a bayonet.” Nevertheless, once committed, Eisenhower went all in. “If you have to use force,” he told Brownell, “use overwhelming force.” He ordered the army chief of staff Gen. Maxwell Taylor to send in units of the 101st Airborne and also issued an executive order federalizing the Arkansas National Guard, thus placing those troops under his command. By 7:00 that evening, the first of over 1,000 army troops rolled into Little Rock and began to deploy around the high school. Eisenhower flew from Newport to the White House, and at 9:00 he spoke to the nation.54
Speaking “from the house of Lincoln, of Jackson and of Wilson,” he expressed “sadness” for the decision to send troops to the city. He pointed to “demagogic extremists” and “disorderly mobs” who had refused to abide by federal law, and asserted that in such a case, “the President’s authority is inescapable.” Unless he carried out the orders of federal courts, “anarchy would result.” He was fulfilling his oath to defend the Constitution. With a flourish he added, “Mob rule cannot be allowed to ov
erride the decisions of our courts.”
Predictably he avoided the moral questions at hand. He did not champion the need for equality and fairness in America, nor did he embrace the Brown decision or praise the Little Rock Nine as heroes every bit as courageous as the men he had led into battle. He had no interest in engaging the history of race relations in America. He never mentioned Orval Faubus; he did not refer to the Southern Manifesto; he did not quote any of the prolonged declarations in favor of racial segregation made that summer in the U.S. Senate by leading statesmen of the age. In fact he went out of his way to praise the great majority of southerners, who “are of good will, united in their efforts to preserve and respect the law.”55
In short, he positioned himself not as a champion of civil rights but as a defender of law and order. As he would say again and again to his southern critics, he sent troops to Little Rock to uphold the courts. The country was faced with “open defiance of the Constitution,” and if he were to tolerate that, he would invite “anarchy.” His decision, he told one southern senator, had nothing to do with “integration, desegregation or segregation”: he aimed to uphold the law. To fail in that duty was “to acquiesce in anarchy, mob rule, and incipient rebellion,” which would “destroy the Nation.”56
Eisenhower would later be much criticized for his narrow reading of the nature of the desegregation crisis. His own speechwriter Arthur Larson, looking back on the issue in 1968, criticized Eisenhower for his “failure” to use the presidency to “set a tone of broad presidential concern for racial justice” in the manner that Larson’s hero, John Kennedy, later did. Looking at the president’s record on civil rights, one prominent biographer asserted that “Eisenhower’s refusal to lead was almost criminal.” From the perspective of the late 1960s and subsequent decades, Eisenhower’s unwillingness to grasp the moral dimension of the issue certainly seems obtuse. But he did not govern in the late 1960s. In 1957 he saw himself acting as Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln did, and it was no accident that he invoked them both in his speech. Jackson, though a champion of states’ rights, insisted on the constitutional powers of the federal government to enforce federal law in the face of South Carolina’s defiance during the Nullification Crisis of 1832. And in 1861, when confronting the secession of southern states, Lincoln too looked to the Constitution for his authority to preserve the Union. Eisenhower believed he was following the playbook written by his illustrious predecessors.57
What is more, at the time few Americans spoke of Eisenhower’s timidity or weakness in confronting Governor Faubus. As the soldiers of the elite 101st Airborne Division took up positions around the school, holding back the crowd and accompanying the nine black students into school on the morning of September 25, telegrams poured in from around the country. Black leaders praised Ike’s decision. Martin Luther King Jr. wired the president, thanking him for his support of “Christian traditions of fair play and brotherhood.” Jackie Robinson sent Ike a brief note of thanks. And down in Little Rock, Daisy Bates rose to speak on Sunday morning at the Methodist church, her voice shaking with emotion. Despite the rocks thrown through her windows and the crosses burned in her front yard, she kept up her fight to see that black children in her city were treated fairly. “What happens in Little Rock,” she declared, “transcends this city and has serious implications for democracy all over the world.”58
Eisenhower certainly did not look timid or weak in southern eyes. White southerners interpreted the intervention at Little Rock as a mortal threat to the Jim Crow order and reacted with venomous outrage. Senator Eastland described the intervention as “an attempt by armed force to destroy the social order of the South.” Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina called for armed insurrection against the federal troops. To Harry Byrd of Virginia the president’s action would only “intensify existing bitterness and strengthen the resistance of the South to enforced integration.” The Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger called September 24 “the South’s darkest day since Reconstruction.” A congressman from Arkansas, E. C. Gathings, denounced Eisenhower’s use of “inhuman, cruel, and savage brutality inflicted upon a helpless people.” A local politician from Georgia wrote to ask the president never to come to that state again for fear of an outburst of “violence and physical injury” against him. The Kentucky White Citizens’ Council held a mass meeting to place Eisenhower on trial for “high treason.”
The most egregious message came from that paragon of southern gentility, Senator Richard Russell himself, who likened the federal troops in Little Rock to “Hitler’s storm troopers.” Eisenhower’s actions, Russell asserted, would “crush by tank and bayonet the thousands of American citizens who are sincerely convinced that they have an inalienable right to send their children to schools attended by their own race and kind.” Later writers who would condemn Eisenhower for half-measures and timidity would do well to consider that to many in the South, Eisenhower’s actions amounted to a declaration of war.59
VIII
Eisenhower understood perfectly well how extreme his actions appeared to southerners, and it pained him greatly. He sought to defuse the crisis as soon as possible. The soldiers of the 101st Airborne effectively kept the rabble at bay and enabled the Little Rock Nine to enter the high school. Within two weeks half of the army troops were withdrawn, and at the end of November the rest of them departed. However, the federalized National Guard troops remained at Little Rock High School for the duration of the 1957–58 school year, standing watch as a handful of black students dutifully attended classes in an atmosphere of hostility, intimidation, constant scuffles, insults, and jeers. The troops had been assigned to allow the students to enter the school, but they rarely went beyond that narrow remit and were unable or unwilling to create an atmosphere of safety and tolerance within the school itself. And why would they? Eisenhower’s conception of the role of federal responsibility limited soldiers to the task of enforcing the court order. “The troops are not there as part of the segregation problem,” he told the press on October 3. “They are there to uphold the courts.”60
On October 23, a month after Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock, Herbert Brownell resigned. He would be replaced by his deputy, William Rogers. This move had been planned in advance, as Brownell wished to return to his law practice. But some saw the timing as linked to the events in Little Rock. Brownell had been an influential attorney general, much admired by Eisenhower. Yet he had taken risks. Starting with the masterminding of Earl Warren’s appointment, followed by the briefs he filed on behalf of the Brown case, and then the long struggle to get the Civil Rights Act passed, Brownell pushed the administration further than the president wanted to go. Having laid the groundwork for the intervention decision in Little Rock and helped to construct the rock-solid legal defense of Eisenhower’s use of troops, he nonetheless encountered resistance from his colleagues, notably Sherman Adams, who counseled much greater restraint. Governor Faubus publicly identified Brownell as the villain of the Little Rock affair and routinely denounced him as a zealot and latter-day abolitionist. Eisenhower liked and trusted him, but his departure sent a signal of reconciliation to the South.
Although black leaders continued to seek further support from the White House, Eisenhower was unreceptive. The Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite on October 4, 1957, soon dominated the concerns of the administration; interest in civil rights sagged. In November, Martin Luther King Jr. asked if the president would receive a delegation of black leaders to discuss race relations. The request was denied. In January 1958, Eisenhower devoted his entire State of the Union speech to defense matters and the cold war, completely ignoring the extraordinary events in Little Rock.
Yet black activists kept up the pressure, hoping to capture Eisenhower’s attention to their cause. In May they invited the president to speak at a national summit of black leaders hosted by the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Eisenhower agreed and accepted an award from the group honoring his commitment to civil rights
progress. He then rose to speak before 350 black journalists, church leaders, educators, and public figures, including Daisy Bates, whose hand he warmly shook. In his speech he dutifully invoked the American principles of equality before the law, and his audience responded with warm applause. But then he pivoted, uttering off-the-cuff comments about the “problems” of civil rights that shocked his audience into silence. “I do believe that as long as they are human problems—because they are buried in the human heart rather than ones merely to be solved by a sense of logic and right—we must have patience and forbearance. . . . We must make sure that enforcement will not in itself create injustice.” Fred Morrow, who had done so much to arrange Ike’s appearance at the event, wrote later, “I could feel life draining from me, and I wished I could escape.” A furious Roy Wilkins issued a bitter statement that very night: “We have been patient and we have been moderate and all we get for it is a kick in the teeth.” Numerous denunciations followed in the national black press.61
In the resulting furor King cabled the president, demanding a face-to-face meeting with black civil rights leaders. A somewhat contrite Eisenhower finally agreed to receive a delegation at the White House. On June 23 King, A. Philip Randolph, Wilkins, and Lester Granger spent 45 minutes with the president. Ike was subdued as these men asked for more federal support in the ongoing school crisis. He told them he was “extremely dismayed to hear that after five and a half years of effort and action in this field, these gentlemen were saying that bitterness on the part of Negro people was at its height.” He then said, to the astonishment of his listeners, that “further constructive action” might only “result in more bitterness.” Wilkins recalled, “It was a touchy moment.” The meeting broke up inconclusively.62
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