Yes, we liked Ike, the war hero, who came to define a particular time in our history. Eisenhower was hailed as the country’s greatest soldier following his masterful leadership of the Allied war effort and he went on to win the 1952 presidential contest by a landslide. But did he ultimately leave enough of an ideological and political legacy that would signify an “Age of Eisenhower”?
William Hitchcock, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, makes the case that between 1945 and 1961, no single person dominated American public life more than Dwight D. Eisenhower. Hitchcock examines the paradoxical legacy of the Eisenhower years. Though elected on a hawkish foreign policy, during the Cold War he acted with great restraint, ending the Korean War, avoiding war in Indochina, and carefully avoiding entanglements in the Middle East. His economic policy insisted on a smaller government that could live within its means. These policies were popular even as America was turning into a consumer society. He was a champion of states’ rights but it was during his presidency that the civil rights movement—backed by the power of the federal government—gained momentum. Most notably, Eisenhower sent Federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional. He also signed the 1957 Civil Rights Act—the first such legislations since the era of Reconstruction.
The Eisenhower era seems especially relevant today, when we are once again engaged in a fierce debate between those who want small government, fiscal restraint, and diminished federal power and those who call for bold government policy to stimulate the economy, create jobs, and address social inequalities. The debates that shaped the Age of Eisenhower, it seems, are still with us.
Hitchcock is a senior scholar at the Miller Center for Public Policy, University of Virginia.
