When America Liked Ike

October 24, 2016
Donaldson (The Making of Modern America), chair of American history at Xavier University of Louisiana, reveals that though the election of 1952 may not have deeply altered American politics, it was a harbinger of things to come. Faced with his own declining political fortunes, Harry Truman declined to seek re-election. The Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson, headed for the first of his two defeats at the hands of popular military figure Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower. But it was Ike’s Republican Party that showed the first sign of the division that remains to this day. Its nominating convention was a brawl—the first covered on television—between Ike’s moderates and Robert Taft’s conservatives. Even though Ike won that battle and the subsequent general election in a landslide, his party’s fracture never healed. By 1964 the party’s rightist elements, under Barry Goldwater, had captured the GOP. Donaldson’s work is brisk and readable, though it breaks no new ground, and he accepts the consensus view that although Ike accepted much of the New Deal, that period of American history ended with his election. What’s more, as Donaldson shows, a new age of American politics—brittle, hyperpartisan, and played out on television—had opened.