The Fight for the Four Freedoms by Harvey J. Kaye

Author:Harvey J. Kaye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER TEN

* * *

“What has it been asked to do that it has not done?”

Dwight Eisenhower never cited the Four Freedoms as President. But he never lost sight of them. Knowing what they had meant to his troops, Ike surely figured that just because Democratic politicians were giving up FDR’s words didn’t mean Americans had given up the promise they pronounced. He said to his press secretary in 1954: “This party of ours . . . will not appeal to the American people unless the American people believe that we have a liberal program.” And fed up with rich far-right Republicans trying to tell him what he should do, he wrote to his brother Edgar: “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” 1

To the dismay of the Right, the struggles of the late 1940s engendered not a conservative political consensus, but a liberal one—subject to Cold War and corporate imperatives and led by a Republican, but liberal nonetheless.

Eisenhower was a conservative. He didn’t like the New Deal, labor unions, or civil rights activism. He filled his cabinet with corporate executives and lawyers, refused to challenge Senator McCarthy, and—though he ended the Korean War in a stalemate—pursued the Cold War aggressively, which included not only bolstering or propping up anti-Communist dictators from Central America to Southeast Asia, but also secretly using the CIA to overthrow reformist leaders in Iran and Guatemala. 2

But Eisenhower wanted a stable, prosperous, and strife-free America and he knew what that demanded. Calling himself a “Modern Republican,” he kept tax rates on corporations and the rich high, approved the largest public-works project in American history, the Interstate Highway System, signed bills making Social Security nearly universal and raising the minimum wage by 33 percent, established the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and even warned against the power of the “military-industrial complex” in his Farewell Address. Furthermore, he appointed a Chief Justice, Earl Warren, who would lead the Supreme Court in 1954 to unanimously declare in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in the nation’s public schools was unconstitutional—a historic decision that in 1957 would compel Eisenhower to federalize the Arkansas National Guard and send army troops into Little Rock to uphold the Constitution when Governor Orval Faubus tried to use the Guard to prevent the court-ordered desegregation of the city’s Central High School. 3

Ike had won in 1952 because he was a war hero. And though voters returned Congress to Democratic control in 1954, he defeated Adlai Stevenson again in 1956 because for most Americans things were going well and promised to get even better.

Millions of veterans had used the GI Bill to get a college education or become skilled in a trade and to buy homes in one of the thousands of burgeoning new suburban developments. Stella Suberman, the wife of a veteran Air Corps bombardier and “GI Bill Boy,”

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