Dwight D. Eisenhower
Election of 1952
- Republican: Dwight D. Eisenhower
- Democrat: Adlai Stevenson
- Eisenhower won with 442 electoral votes and 33,314,992 popular vote
Election of 1956
- Republican: Dwight D. Eisenhower
- Democrat: Adlai Stevenson
- Eisenhower won with 457 electoral votes and 35,579,180 popular vote
Rise and Fall of Joseph McCarthy
- Senator Joseph McCarthy accused Secretary of State Dean Acheson of employing 205 communist party members.
- This gained him a major national recognition. Eisenhower disliked McCarthy but he didn't say anything publicly.
- McCarthy went too far when he attacked U.S. army. The army fought back and american's started to hate him. Few months later the senate condemned him for “conduct unbecoming a member.”
Desegregating the South
- December 1955, Rosa Parks, a college- educated black seamstress, refused to give up her seat.
- She was arrested for violating the Jim Crow laws,
- Sparked a year long ,Montgomery bus boycott, where the blacks boycotted the city buses.
- Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in May 1954. They ruled that segregation in the public schools were unequal and unconstitutional.
- The governor of Arkansas, sent out the National Guard to prevent 9 black students from enrolling in Little Rock's Central High School.
Civil Rights Act of 1957: Established a Civil Rights Commission, but had little real effect .
Vietnam War
- Ho Chi Minh tried it get help from a United States against French
- In March,1954 when French were trapped at Dienbienphu, Eisenhower's aids want to bomb Vietnam Minh
- Eisenhower held back, fearing there was going to be another war in Asia
- Vietnam was split at 17th parallel
- Vietnam was split into two parts, communist north and pro-Western south
- Secretary Dulles created Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO)
- It provided little help
Space Race
- Soviet scientists in October 4, 1957, launched a satellite named Sputnik and after that they send a larger satellite weighing 1,120 pounds and carrying a dog.
- This shattered American Self Confidence.
- "Rocket Fever" swept through the nation.
- Eisenhower established National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In February 1958 the United States managed to put a grapefruit-sized satellite into space.
Republicanism at home
- Decreased government spending by decreasing military spending, trying to
- His secretaries criticized free distribution of anti-polio vaccine
- Eisenhower cracked down illegal Mexican immigration
- Rounded up 1 million Mexicans and sent them back to their home country
- Kept many of the New Deal programs
- Built 42,000 miles of Interstate Freeways
- AFL merged with CIO to end 20 years of division in labor Unions
- Refused to issue of statement regarding Supreme Court's decision on integration, but he privately hated it
- Congress passed first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction.
- Martin Luther King, Jr. formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
- Aimed to mobilize the vast power of black