1950s Politics Sentimentalized
Current baby-boomer nostalgia has, for the most part, washed over—and sanitized—the political history of the 1950s. When compared to the turbulent decades that would follow and the world war that had preceded in the 1940s, the 1950s would appear from the present, popular perspective to represent a peaceful interlude in twentieth-century power politics—a kind of return to innocence from which the American people would emerge the "children of Eisenhower." Indeed, two-term president Dwight D. Eisenhower, the decade's dominant political presence, was a paternal figure. Running on the 1952 Republican platform at the age of sixty-two, he was an international hero who had organized the Allied victory over the Nazis and briefly served as president of Columbia University. He had a kind face and a smile that beamed confidence and optimism. A high handicapper, he spent a good deal of time at the golf course—more time there, contended some political wags, than in the Oval Office. But if he had a weakness for play, it was something the American people were more than willing to forgive in him as a fatherly indulgence; for, as a young Jack Kerouac and an equally drunk fellow Beat poet once sarcastically phrased it in an obscene letter meant for the White House, Eisenhower was the "Great White Father."
Politics of Fear
But Eisenhower was much more than a golf-playing figurehead: he was a shrewd and savvy politician, as his more current biographers and many historians convincingly argue. A state of relative peace and prosperity likewise camouflaged a highly charged, rough-and-tumble political landscape. Politics in the 1950s were driven by immediate fears that the American way of life was being threatened by a philosophy that ran counter to, and called for the destruction of, democracy. American's fear of communism during the 1950s is often looked back on as having been fueled by naive generalization and paranoia. When understood in the context of the times, however, American fears were hardly naive. After World War II the Soviets had acted quickly to annex most of Eastern Europe. In 1949 China had fallen to the Communists. In June 1950 the United Nations intervened in the Korean border conflict, and the United States once again sent troops to war—this time to contain Communist aggression.
Korean War
American military presence in Korea provided one of the most dramatic examples of emerging U.S. cold-war policy. At the end of World War II the Allied leaders had reached an agreement in which the Japanese occupying North Korea would surrender to the Soviets, the Japanese in the south to the Americans. Both the Soviet Union and the United States came to regard the Korean peninsula with increasing importance: each of the two superpowers sought a firm foothold in Asia from which it could wield influence over the region or at the very least contain the influence of its rival. At first Americans praised President Harry S Truman for committing U.S. troops to Korea to halt Communist aggression. But when UN forces led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur approached the Chinese border in pursuit of North Korean forces, the Chinese intervened. MacArthur's aggressive strategy of bringing the war to China was in direct conflict with Truman's policy of containment. Truman fired his general, touching off one of the fiercest debates on American international conduct the country had ever experienced. From then on the question of Communist intentions regarding American interests—and how America ought to respond—dominated an increasingly frightening political discourse.
McCarthyism
In 1950 an obscure senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, used a women's Republican club meeting in Wheeling, West Virginia, to make public the stunning claim that 205 Communist-party members worked in the State Department. His charges could not easily be dismissed by an American public already made suspicious by claims that the State Department had not done enough to support anticommunist forces in China. Charges of fellow traveling—"Red-baiting"—became a potent part of campaign strategy in elections taking place at all levels of American government. Richard Nixon, a junior Republican senator from California who had used such campaign tactics to gain political office, saw his political clout skyrocket at the beginning of the decade due to his key role in exposing Alger Hiss, a midlevel government official with ties to the State Department, as a Communist spy. McCarthy's allegations would lead further Senate hearings and more accusations, capturing the public's attention and further increasing the Wisconsin senator's power. Indeed, two presidential administrations were powerless to put a halt to McCarthyism, despite both Truman's and Eisenhower's deep dislike for the senator's bullying tactics.
A New Era in Government
Tired of New Deal bureaucracy and war and scared of the Communist presence that had engulfed Eastern Europe and China—and that had supposedly infiltrated their government—Americans entered the 1950s a beleaguered people yet politicized as they had never been before in the twentieth century. They voted in record numbers in the 1952 elections, and, in proclaiming an electoral majority for Eisenhower over Democratic opponent Adlai Stevenson, they ushered in a watershed moment in American politics. Out were twenty years of Democratic control of the White House. Out was Truman—the last American president without a college degree—whom the Republicans had portrayed as the last vestige of New Deal, partisan policy making and final reminder of Franklin D. Roosevelt's alleged appeasement of the Soviets at the 1945 Yalta Conference. It was an era of governing that was to appeal to Middle America's political sensibilities. Eisenhower Republicans pledged to cut defense spending while simultaneously engaging Communist aggression both abroad and at home; limit the federal government's role in the business and private sectors; and invigorate a maturing sense of America's role as a superpower.
The Politics of Image
Policy makers at even the highest levels of government, however, were placed under ever-increasing public scrutiny as more Americans were buying television sets for their living rooms and dens. The 1950s, to be sure, ushered in the era of political image making—an art that in its infancy was used by McCarthy both effectively, to bring popularity to him and his anticommunist crusade at the beginning of the decade, and ineptly, in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 in which he appeared as a mean-spirited political buffoon. The widely watched television appearances of Richard Nixon were key to his political successes and failures during the period: Nixon's effectively maudlin Checkers speech, in which he defended himself against charges that he had misused campaign funds, went out to approximately fifty-eight million Americans, whose sympathies saved his vice-presidential spot on the 1952 Republican ticket; an even larger television audience watched as a pale and heavily perspiring Nixon debated his opponent in the 1960 presidential election—a young, handsome, and tanned John F. Kennedy. By the end of the decade the images of politics had become enmeshed in American popular culture and hadarguably become a more important political tool than the ability to articulate the issues themselves.
Thomson Gale Document Number: EJ2104240270