The Eisenhower Era

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Chapter 37

• The Eisenhower Era
• 1952-1960

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1952 Election

• Democrats Adalai Stevenson, Republicans Dwight
  D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon (VP)
• I Like Ike!
• TV campaign/advertising
• Nixons Checkers Speech
• Somewhat a return to normalcy
• 442 EV for Ike, 89 for Stevenson

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The Republicans Choice, 1952
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Presidential Election of 1952 (with electoral
vote by state)A Democrat quipped that if the
voters liked the Republicans the way they liked
Ike, the two-party system would be in bad shape.
Fortunately for Democrats, Eisenhower scored a
personal, not a party, victory. Republicans won
minuscule majorities in Congress, which
disappeared in the congressional elections two
years later.
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McCarthyism

• Joseph McCarthy 205 Communists in state
  department? witch hunt
• Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 on TV
• Hearings combined with Edward R. Murrows attack
  on McCarthy change in public opinion
• McCarthyism often refers to entire hysteria

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Senator McCarthy Extinguishes the Torch of
LibertyWhile preaching patriotism, McCarthy
irresponsibly menaced American traditions of
civil liberties.
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Call for Civil Rights

• Jim Crow laws in South, denied voting
• 1955 murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi
• December 1955 Rosa Parks? Montgomery Bus Boycott
  led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• 1948 Truman desegregated military
• Warren Court- Chief Justice Earl Warren judicial
  activism

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The Face of SegregationThese women in the
segregated South of the 1950s were compelled to
enterthe movie theater through the Colored
Entrance. Once inside, they were restricted to a
separate seating section, usually in the rear of
the theater.
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Call for Civil Rights

• 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education litigated by
  Thurgood Marshall
• separate but equal is inherently unequal
• Desegregation of schools with all deliberate
  speed- Southern opposition
• 1964 less than 2 in Deep South abided
• 1957 Little Rock Nine at Central High School?
  barred by Orval Faubus

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Integration at Little Rock, 1957While white mobs
jeered at the first black students entering
Central High School, federal troops, with
bayonets fixed, enforced the law.
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Call for Civil Rights

• Civil Rights Act of 1957 mild voting rights and
  Civil Rights Commission
• 24 hour filibuster by Strom Thurmond
• 1957 Southern Christian Leadership Conference
  (SCLC) with King nonviolent
• February 1960 Greensboro sit in movement at
  Woolworths lunch counters
• April 1960 Student Non-Violent Coordinating
  Committee (SNCC)

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Martin Luther King, Jr., and His Wife, Coretta,
ArrestedKing and his wife were arrested for the
first time in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 while
organizing the bus boycott.
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Brinkmanship

• John Foster Dulles Mutually Assured Destruction
• Geneva Summit 1955 with new Premier Nikita
  Khrushchev
• Open Skies, arms reduction, free trade
• Crisis in Hungary 1956

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Hungarian Uprising, October 26, 1956Soviet tanks
rolled through the streets of Budapest to crush
an anticommunist uprising against the Soviets,
who had controlled Hungary since World War II.
This demonstration of brute force against a
grassroots democratic movement turned many
communist sympathizers in the West definitively
against the Soviet Union.
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Start of Vietnam

• Indochina controlled by French (then Japanese)
  then French after war
• Ho Chi Minh leader of communist party and the
  Vietminh
• Split of Vietnam after fall of Dien Bien Phu May
  1954 split at 17th parallel
• US assistance Domino Theory
• US backed government in South Vietnam with Ngo
  Dihn Diem cancel free elections!

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East and Southeast Asia, 19551956
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Middle East

• 1953 CIA coup detat in Iran? replace Mohammad
  Mossadegh with shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi
• Egyptian President Nasser wanted a dam and arms
  from USSR
• Suez Crisis
• Eisenhower Doctrine 1957
• Tested in 1958 with Lebanon

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Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, 1954Shown
here greeting exuberant supporters after his
election as the first president of the new
Egyptian republic, Nasser was long a thorn in the
flesh of American and Europeanpolicymakers
anxious to protect the precious oil resources of
the Middle East. Nassarism, his version of
pan-Arabism, won a great following in the Arab
world during the 1950s and 1960s.
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Space Race

• Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (1957) by
  Soviets and Sputnik
• US Space Race!
• Educational focus on math and science
• Creation of NASA
• 1959 US achieved ICBMs

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U-2 Program

• Ease Cold War tensions Paris Peace Summit
• U-2 Program started after Geneva
• May 1, 1960 U-2 shot down (Francis Gary Powers)
• Khrushchev walked out of Summit

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Castro

• Resentment in Latin America
• US backed dictator in Cuba Batista overthrown in
  1959
• Fidel Castro land distribution and communism?
  embargo by US
• 10 of Cuba left in exile

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1960 Election

• GOP Nixon vs. Democrats JFK
• Kennedy Catholic
• September 1960 1st televised debate looked
  good
• 303 EV for JFK, 219 for Nixon but popular vote
  within 118,574

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John F. Kennedy Campaigning for the Presidency,
1960At right is his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy.
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The Shopping Mall as New Town Square, 1960
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Presidential Election of 1960 (with electoral
vote by state)Kennedy owed his hairbreadth
triumph to his victories in twenty-six of the
forty largest citiesand to Lyndon Johnsons
strenuous campaigning in the South, where
Kennedys Catholicism may have been a hotter
issue than his stand on civil rights.
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Society

• Changing nature of work (blue collar? white
  collar)
• Cult of Domesticity juxtaposed with women working
  (pink collar) psychological strain
• The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan 1960
• Reactionary The Lonely Crowd and The Man in the
  Gray Flannel Suit
• Commercialization media
• Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe