September 12, 2007
Eisenhower and Civil Rights Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:00 AM EST Apropos of the feature piece that I wrote week before last on Strom Thurmond’s historic filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, there is an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times by David Nichols arguing that President Dwight Eisenhower, whose administration gave strong backing to the bill, was a firm supporter of black civil rights. Nichols, a former dean and vice president of academic affairs at Southwestern College, and author of the recently released volume A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution, views Ike in a more sympathetic light than other scholars, who have described his performance on civil rights issues as laggard at best and harmfully negligent at worst. Certainly Nichols’s book is well-timed. This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Eisenhower’s decision to deploy federal troops to enforce the Brown decision in Little Rock, Arkansas. There is still something to be said for the standard argument. Having grown up in a primarily white community and attended an all-white university (the United States Military Academy), Eisenhower was naturally sympathetic to the concerns of white Southerners. He opposed Harry Truman’s desegregation of the military, fearing it would disrupt morale, and he once told Earl Warren that Southern whites were not “bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negro.” In his private diary, Eisenhower wrote that “the improvement of race relations is one of those things that will be healthy and sound only if it starts locally. I don’t believe that prejudices . . . will succumb to compulsion. Consequently, I believe that Federal law imposed on our States . . . would set back the cause of race relations a long, long time.” When the Supreme Court issued its famous decision in Brown v. Board, the President told one of his speechwriters, “I am convinced that the Supreme Court decision sets back progress in the South at least fifteen years. . . . It’s all very well to talk about school integration—if you remember that you may also be talking about social disintegration. Feelings are deep on this, especially where children are involved. We can’t demand perfection in these moral things. All we can do is keep working toward a goal and keep it high. And the fellow who tries to tell me that you can do these things by force is just plain nuts.” It was this sentiment that led Eisenhower to remain ominously silent on the subject of school desegregation in the weeks and months following the court’s ruling—silence that many historians believe encouraged many Southern whites to embrace “massive resistance” and defiance of federal law. I haven’t read Nichols’s new book but am looking forward to doing so. He’ll have a tough case to make in recasting Ike as a great civil rights proponent, though I doubt that’s exactly what the book attempts to do. More likely, he seeks to temper some of the popular but unwarranted enthusiasm for the Kennedy administration’s civil rights policies, which were far more equivocal and cautious than public memory would have us believe, and to locate the roots of a quiet revolution in law and politics in the 1950s, rather than the 1960s.
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