President Eisenhower
Anvita Devineni - Furnish-1
Election of Eisenhower
Election of 1952
- Date of Election: November 4th, 1952
- Eisenhower belonged to the Republican party
- Democratic Party candidate was Adlai Stevenson
- the election was not close; Eisenhower dominated with 442 electoral votes over Stevenson's 89 electoral votes
- Eisenhower had a 55.2% popular vote over Stevenson's 44.3%
Election of 1956
- Date of Election: November 6th, 1956
- Eisenhower belonged to the Republican party
- Democratic Party candidate was Adlai Stevenson
- replay of the 1952 contest
- election was not close; Eisenhower dominated even more with 35,000,000+ popular votes to Stevenson's 26,022,752
The Cold War
Events in Eisenhower's Administration:
1953- CIA-backed coup in Iran
1954- CIA-backed coup in Guatemala Dien Bien Phu falls to pro-Communist forces Geneva Conference; splits Vietnam into two countries; SEATO is founded
1955- Warsaw Pact is signed
1956- Suez crisis erupts USSR puts down Hungarian Revolution; Eisenhower is reelected
1957- Eisenhower Doctrine is announced USSR launches Sputnik I (ID) - first artificial earth satellite launched by Moscow in 1957; led to the creation of NASA (ID) and the space race
1958- Congress passes National Defense Education Act
1960- U-2 incident embarrasses U.S. government
Joseph McCarthy
- Senator Joseph McCarthy (ID) led the hunt for communists in Washington
- helped Nixon to lead a full scale investigation to uncover communists in America; he was a media darling
- Never had evidence against his targets; falsified everything
- Censured by the Senate for misconducting unbecoming a member
Eisenhower and Desegregation in the South
Little Rock Crisis
- a group of African American students were enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957
- initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school
- after Eisenhower's intervention, they were allowed
- very important in African-American Civil Rights Movement
Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (ID)
- declared that state laws that established separate public schools for black and white students denied blacks equal opportunities
- overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson
- racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause in 14th Amendment
Montgomery Bus Boycott (ID)
- after Rosa Parks (ID) is arrested
- MLK rallied black community to conduct this boycott
- seriously hurt bus companies and lasted more than a year
- ended in 1956 when South Carolina declared segregated buses unconstitutional
Civil Rights Act of 1957
- outlawed public segregation and discrimination
- forbade racial discrimination in the workplace
Eisenhower's Republicanism Policies
- "dyanamic conservatism" - be liberal with people, but conservative with the economy
- guarded the US from "creeping socialism"
- balancing federal budget
- supported the transfer of control over offshore oil fields from the federal government to the states
- encouraged private generating plants
- sought to cancel the tribal preservation policies of the "Indian New Deal"
- backed the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 ($27 million)
- thousands of illegal Mexican immigrants were forced back to Mexico in Ike's 1954 roundup operation
Beginning of the Vietnam War
- in early 1950's, nationalist movements wanted to throw the French out of Indochina
- Vietnam leader Ho Chi Minh, became increasingly communist
- May 1954, a French garrison was trapped in the fortress of Dienbienphu in northwestern Vietnam
- Eisenhower decided not to intervene; scared of war
- Dienbienphu fell to the nationalists and the conference at Geneva halted Vietnam at the 17th parallel.
- The pro-Western government in the south, led by Ngo Dinh Diem, was entrenched at Saigon as Vietnam-wide elections, which were promised by Ho Chi Minh, were never held
- Eisenhower promised economic and military aid to the Diem regime of the south.
Space Race with the Soviets
- October 4th, 1957 - Soviets launched the satellite Sputnik I
- November, they launched Sputnik II with a dog on board
- both satellites proved the Soviet's superior industrial production through communism
- Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)