National Affairs: Birthday Week

Dwight Eisenhower had a happy birthday (62) and a lively week. He 1) made his fourth foray into the South, evoking a resounding echo of enthusiasm, 2) hit back hard at Harry Truman’s weird charges that Eisenhower is an isolationist and biased against minority groups.

Louisiana & Tidelands. In New Orleans 70,000 people cheered his arrival. It was a bigger crowd than Stevenson had drawn the week before. The Administration, said Eisenhower, thinks that “all that is necessary to keep [the South] in the bag is a paternalistic-pat on the head once every four years . . . [and] its low admonition that all the South’s blessings flow from Washington. You know and I know that is plain bunk.” Again & again he ridiculed the Administration’s picture of the “fairy godfather in Washington,” attacked “Washington powermongers” and “Administration arrogance toward the South.”

Then he went into a clear definition of his stand on tidelands: “I favor the recognition of clear legal title to these lands [as well as other submerged lands and resources] in each of the 48 states. This has been my position since 1948, long before I was persuaded to go into politics.” Twice Congress passed a bill giving tidelands control to the states and twice the President vetoed them. Said Ike: “I would approve such acts of Congress . . . [Stevenson] would have the Federal Government take over and dole out to the tin cups of the states whatever part of the revenue Washington decided might be good for them. This I would call the Shoddy Deal.”

Texas & Korea. Heading west, Eisenhower traveled across his native Texas, saluted by cheers and chants of “Happy Birthday.” At Waco he recalled a recent speech in which he had said that unless there is a change, the Government would be telling the housewife how to wash her dishes. Well, he had hit closer to home than he realized, because “look at what I found out: the Department of Agriculture . . . has already prepared a 32-page booklet on the subject of dishwashing. Now, someone whose salary is paid by the taxpayers’ money made a remarkable discovery . . He says dishes should be washed in a dishpan; not just any dishpan, either, [but one] large enough to accommodate your dishes. [The booklet] can be bought from the Superintendent of Documents in Washington for 10¢. If you are having any trouble with your dishwashing, ladies, why not take advantage of the bargain?” It was one of Ike’s rare tries at humor, and the crowd roared.

At San Antonio, Eisenhower had serious words on Korea: “It won’t bring comfort to any American house to fix Korea and have as bad or worse trouble break out in another place . . . Korea is part of the whole global problem.” He concluded with a solemn call to “every Godfearing, loyal American of every faith or party to offer tonight a prayer for peace in Korea. In my heart, as in yours, it cannot come too soon.”

After a long, hard day of campaigning, Eisenhower got to bed past midnight, was routed out again at 2 a.m. in Austin, where a crowd of 800 had gathered at the station. Most were students from the University of Texas, who came with Ike signs, cowbells and kerosene torches. Ike and Mamie appeared on the train’s platform in dressing gowns. Said he: “This is really something … I hope you get all A’s tomorrow.”

Later, on the way into Dallas, the Eisenhower party was badly shaken up when a coupling broke and the train came to a jarring halt, overturning furniture and smashing Mamie’s cosmetics.

After Texas, Eisenhower flew on to Tennessee. Fifty carloads of people from nearby Oak Ridge came to greet him at Knoxville. He denounced critics for saying that he was against TVA. Said Eisenhower: TVA “is a great experiment” which has done Tennessee much good, but that does not mean that its pattern would work everywhere else. In the Missouri Valley, for instance, a lot of people would prefer a legal arrangement in which the state and Federal Government would be true partners. It should be done, said Eisenhower, “the way people in the region want it done.”

Then Ike headed north.

New Jersey & Civil Rights. New Jersey outdid even Texas in its welcome. In the elevenmile drive from Hackensack to Paterson (a strongly unionized area), some 150,000 people turned out. Stopping in town after town, Eisenhower attacked Washington corruption, the Brannan Plan, and (somewhat surprisingly) the withholding tax—which, he said, fooled the people. At Newark he hit back hard at Harry Truman. Main points:

¶ The Administration makes great promises on civil rights, but it does not perform. Harry Truman himself, as a Senator, voted with the poll-taxers in 1942, the last time the matter came up for a “clear vote” in the Senate: “He voted against lifting the poll-tax restriction even for members of the armed services then fighting for his country.” A true friend of civil rights would not press “an all or nothing” program that is sure to be defeated by “uncompromising opposition”; he would, instead, try for “real progress . . . through the methods that can achieve and have achieved results,” e.g., the fair employment laws passed by eleven states, eight of them with Republican governors, including New Jersey and New York.

¶ The McCarran Immigration law is a bad law: “The whole world knows that to these shores came oppressed people from every land under the sun; that here they found homes, jobs, and a stake in a bright, unlimited future … In every town and village in Europe, from the Ural Mountains to the channel ports, that truth is known … to the Czech, the Pole, the Hungarian who takes his life in his hands and crosses the frontier tonight—or to the Italian who goes to some American consulate—this ideal that beckoned him can be a mirage because of the McCarran Act. With leadership . . . we should have had and we must get a better law.”

¶ Eisenhower said he had received advice from “many sources,” but his decisions “have been and will be mine alone. This crusade which I have taken to the American people represents what I myself believe. I have acted and I have spoken from my own deep, inner convictions … I have given no encouragement to the false notion that an isolated or isolationist America can continue to live either in peace or in security.”

After a Sunday in New York, Eisenhower headed into New England. Truman’s assault had got him fighting mad. At Providence he said: “The opposition, having no program of its own, finding no way to defend its despicable record, has had no recourse except to launch attacks that are as false as they are terrible in their nature. They have charged me only lately—when they overstepped themselves—with being anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic … I leave the answers to those two to my good friends, Cardinal Spellman, Rabbi Silver and Bernard Baruch (see above) . . . When I contemplate this series of completely false accusations against me, I get so angry I sort of choke …”

Then Ike headed for Massachusetts and points north, still swinging.