Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  Eisenhower recounted the events in Little Rock leading up to his decision to send troops to the scene. “The very basis of our individual rights and freedoms depends upon the certainty that the President will enforce the decisions of the courts,” said Ike. “Unless the President did so, anarchy would result.… Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.… A foundation of our American way of life is our national respect for the law.” Eisenhower emphasized that the Army was not in Little Rock to take over the school system or to supplant local authority. “The troops are there solely for the purpose of preventing interference with the orders of the Court.”

  Mindful of the need to tamp down the crisis, Ike reached out for southern support. The Supreme Court had decided that separate educational facilities based on race are inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional, said the president. “Our personal opinions about the decision have no bearing on the matter of enforcement; the responsibility and authority of the Supreme Court are very clear.” Eisenhower said he knew the South and had many friends there. “I know that the overwhelming majority of the people of the South—including those of Arkansas and of Little Rock—are of good will, united in their efforts to preserve and respect the law even when they disagree with it.” Liberal commentators have often criticized Eisenhower for these remarks, but the president was on firm ground. He wanted to defuse the crisis and pave the way for integration with as few side effects as possible. His conciliatory tone went a long way in doing so.

  Soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division escorting members of the Little Rock Nine into Central High School, September 24, 1957. (illustration credit 26.1)

  At Dulles’s suggestion, Eisenhower spoke about the pernicious impact of the situation in Little Rock on American foreign relations. “Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation.” The president made it clear that the law would be enforced and called upon the people of Arkansas to assist. “Thus will be restored the image of America and of all its parts as one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”51

  It was a powerful speech, powerfully delivered. The next morning in Little Rock the mob again tried to assemble at Central High only to find the way blocked by the soldiers of the 101st Airborne. The troops had established barriers a block away from the school, and systematically dispersed the crowd. When scattered bands of protestors persisted, the troops moved forward, elbow to elbow, bayonets fixed. A scuffle or two ensued, but by 9 a.m. the area had been cleared. The nine black children assembled, as they habitually did, at the home of Daisy Bates, the local head of the NAACP, waiting for instructions. An Army officer appeared at the door and saluted. “Mrs. Bates, we’re ready for the children,” he said. “We will return them to your home at three-thirty.” It was, said Minniejean Brown, one of the black students, an exhilarating experience. “For the first time in my life I felt like an American citizen.”52

  Eisenhower returned to Newport that same day. As he often did, he gave a ride on Columbine II to a member of the White House press pool, this time John L. Steele of Time magazine. Sitting next to the president, Steele coaxed Ike into a candid off-the-record discussion about his decision to intervene.l Sending in the troops, said Eisenhower, was the hardest decision he’d ever had to make, save possibly for D-Day. “But Goddamn it, it was the only thing I could do.” Eisenhower emphasized that the issue as he saw it was not segregation. “It isn’t even the maintenance of public order. It is a question of upholding the law—otherwise you have people shooting people.” Simply put, said Ike, it was to enforce the law of the land. “This thing is going to go on and on and on in other places. These damned hooligans … I was trying to speak last night to the reasonable people, the decent people of the South.” Eisenhower told Steele he thought his speech might have struck the right tone. But the ordeal had taken a toll. “It has been nagging me day and night.”53

  Public reaction to Eisenhower’s speech was overwhelmingly favorable. A Trendex poll published on September 26 indicated 68.4 percent of the country (77.5 percent outside the South) approved the president’s decision to send troops to Little Rock. The following week, the Gallup poll showed two-thirds of the public believed Ike had done the “right thing.”54

  A flood of responses rolled into the White House. “Thank you for your masterful statement,” wired Harry Ashmore, editor of The Arkansas Gazette.55 Jazz legend Louis Armstrong telegraphed the president, “Daddy, if and when you decide to take those little Negro children personally into Central High School along with your marvelous troops, take me along.… You have a good heart.”56

  “Please accept my congratulations,” Jackie Robinson wired. “I should have known you would do the right thing at the crucial time.”57 Texas oil barons Sid Richardson and Monty Moncrief telegraphed their support. “The overwhelming majority of the American people are in full accord with the determined action you have taken,” said Moncrief.58

  Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been critical of Eisenhower earlier, wrote, “The overwhelming majority of southerners, Negro and white, stand firmly behind your resolute action to restore law and order in Little Rock.”59 In Little Rock itself, the Reverend Robert Raymond Brown, the Episcopal bishop of Arkansas, telephoned to say that the church leaders of the city supported the president’s action and offered to do anything they could to ameliorate the crisis.60 Leading business and civic leaders in Little Rock signed a petition to urge their fellow citizens to remain calm and show respect for the tradition of law and order. “I think your action to be in the finest tradition of American citizenship,” Eisenhower replied. “I cannot help but believe that under this kind of leadership, the City of Little Rock may rapidly return to normal patterns of peaceful living.”61

  Southern officeholders, elected by an all-white electorate, were not so kind. Congressman Carl Elliott of Alabama called Eisenhower’s action illegal, unwarranted, and unwise. “There are not enough troops to occupy every high school campus in the South,” said Elliott.62 The hardest blow was delivered by Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, chairman of the Armed Forces Committee and normally a supporter of Ike’s policies. Russell protested what he called “the high-handed and illegal methods being employed by the armed forces of the United States under your command who are carrying out your orders to mix the races in the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas.” Russell described incidents of alleged brutality, and accused the Army of “disregarding and overriding the elementary rights of American citizens by applying tactics which must have been copied from the manual issued [to] the officers of Hitler’s storm troopers.”63

  According to Sherman Adams, Eisenhower hit the roof when he read Russell’s telegram. The fact that Russell released it to the press before the White House received it made Ike furious. He wrote out a reply in longhand. “I must say that I completely fail to comprehend your comparison of our troops to Hitler’s storm troopers,” said the president. “In one case military power was used to further the ambitious and purposes of a ruthless dictator, in the other to preserve the institutions of free government.” The action was necessary, Eisenhower told Russell, because the state of Arkansas had misused the National Guard, encouraged “mobs of extremists to flout the orders of a Federal Court,” and had failed to protect “persons who are peaceably exercising their right under the Constitution.” Eisenhower said that “failure to act in such a case would be tantamount to acquiescence in anarchy and the dissolution of the union.”64

  Elements of the 101st Airborne remained in Little Rock until Thanksgiving, and were gradually replaced by units from the Arkansas National Guard. On May 8, 1958, Eisenhower announced that he would release the Guard at the end of the school year. Of the original nine black students, eight went on to graduate from Central High and one, Ernest Green, became an assistant secretary of labor in the cabinet of Jimmy Carter. Orval Faubus gained what he wanted from the showdown in Little Rock. He portrayed himself as the champion o
f states’ rights, overwhelmed by massive federal power. For many white citizens of Arkansas, Faubus symbolized resistance to racial integration. His reelection to a third term in 1958—which had seemed unlikely before Little Rock—was guaranteed. Faubus won the Democratic primary (equivalent to election in Arkansas at the time) with twice as many votes as his opponents combined. Faubus easily won a fourth term, then a fifth, and finally a sixth. His twelve years as governor of Arkansas stands as a record in the Razorback State.

  Eisenhower’s moderation in the crisis has often been misunderstood. He was determined to enforce the court order, but with as little bluster as possible. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Ike preferred to walk softly and carry a big stick. Rather than emphasize integration, Eisenhower preferred to stress the rule of law. His deployment of the 101st Airborne Division—one of the legendary units in the United States Army—sent an unmistakable message to the South: The decision of the Supreme Court that segregation was unconstitutional was the law of the land. Desegregation would proceed at the local level with all deliberate speed, as determined by local school boards under the supervision of the United States District Courts. But it would proceed. And the full force of the federal government stood ready to enforce it.m Eisenhower took the most divisive issue to confront American society since the Civil War and moved it toward a solution with as little rancor as possible. At the time, that satisfied neither those who sought immediate integration everywhere, nor those rabid segregationists who opposed any change anywhere. In the long run, Ike’s course proved correct. His moderation carried the day. Had he not acted, had he not sent the 101st to Little Rock, every white racist from Manassas to Vicksburg would have understood: The way to block integration is to take to the streets. Appear in sufficient numbers, and be sufficiently menacing, and desegregation will not happen. It is thanks to Eisenhower that integration proceeded and the rule of law prevailed.

  Ike said it best in a letter to Swede Hazlett when the crisis in Little Rock began.

  The plan of the Supreme Court to accomplish integration gradually and sensibly seems to me to provide the only possible answer if we are to consider on the one hand the customs and fears of a great section of our population, and on the other the binding effect that Supreme Court decisions must have on all of us if our form of government is to survive and prosper.… 65

  There must be respect for the Constitution—which means the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution—or we shall have chaos. We cannot possibly imagine a successful form of government in which every individual citizen would have the right to interpret the Constitution according to his own convictions, beliefs, and prejudices. Chaos would develop. This I believe with all my heart—and shall always act accordingly.66 n

  * * *

  a The term “grandfather clause” arises out of the Black Codes enacted after Reconstruction. A would-be voter had to prove he could read and write, “unless his grandfather had voted.” Since the grandfathers of African Americans had been slaves, they had not voted and so the literacy requirement was applied to them. It was assumed that the grandfathers of white folks had voted and so they were exempt. Not until 1915 were grandfather clauses intended to keep blacks from voting declared unconstitutional. Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347 (1915).

  b The term “Jim Crow” derives from a pre–Civil War minstrel song sung by Thomas D. “Daddy” Rice, a white actor in blackface. Rice ended every performance with his trademark song and dance:

  Wheel about and turn about and do just so. Ev’vy time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.

  By the late 1830s, “Jim Crow” had become a pejorative term to describe African Americans.

  c The lone dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson was Justice John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky—who knew firsthand the pernicious effects of racial segregation and whose dissent is perhaps the most memorable in the long history of the Supreme Court. “But in the view of the Constitution, in the eyes of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here,” said Harlan. “Our Constitution is color blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.” Justice Harlan went on to predict that the court’s decision in Plessy would “prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case” just prior to the Civil War. 163 U.S. 537 (1896) at 544.

  d It may be difficult for a contemporary audience to realize that Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, was still a segregated city in the 1950s. Public transportation was not segregated in Washington, but schools, hotels, restaurants, and movie theaters were.

  e I attended an inner-city white high school in Washington, McKinley Tech, that was located adjacent to a large black community. Under the leadership of its principal, Dr. Charles E. Bish, McKinley became a model for desegregation. Within a year of the president’s order, McKinley was almost half black and half white, and integration proceeded without incident. It was the first white high school in Washington to enroll black students, and one of the first in the country. As a white high school, McKinley was always a contender for the city championship (white) in football and basketball. As an integrated high school, McKinley continued to be a contender for the city’s premier athletic championships. Today, McKinley Technological High School is still an inner-city school but with a largely black enrollment. As a charter school, it is ranked among the best in the nation and sends 94 percent of its graduates on to college.

  f The phrase “with all deliberate speed” originated with Eisenhower. While reviewing the government’s brief in Brown II, Ike penciled the phrase in the margin. It was incorporated into the brief, Solicitor General J. Lee Rankin used it in oral argument, and Chief Justice Warren carried it over into his decision of the court. Herbert Brownell interview, cited in David Eisenhower and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Going Home to Glory 104 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

  g “Those four judges, I think, have made as much of an imprint on American society and American law as any four judges below the Supreme Court have ever done on any court,” said Burke Marshall, assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Kennedy administration. “If it had not been for judges like that on the Fifth Circuit, I think Brown would have failed in the end.” David A. Nichols, A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution 84 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).

  h Governor Faubus’s order to General Sherman T. Clinger, the commander of the Arkansas National Guard, stated: “You are directed to place off limits to white students those schools for colored students and to place off limits to colored students those schools heretofore operated and recently set up for white students. This order will remain in effect until the demobilization of the Guard or until further orders.” Opinion of the Attorney General [Brownell] to the President on Little Rock School Desegregation, in Brownell, Advising Ike: The Memoirs of Herbert Brownell 368 [Appendix I] (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993).

  i Eisenhower also told Faubus, “There is no basis of fact to the statements you made in your telegram that Federal authorities have been considering taking you into custody or that telephone lines to your Executive Mansion have been tapped by any agency of the Federal Government.” DDE to Faubus, September 5, 1957, EL.

  j In upholding President Cleveland’s action, the Supreme Court stated, “The entire strength of the nation may be used to enforce in any part of the land the full and free exercise of all national powers and the security of all rights entrusted by the Constitution to its care.… If the emergency arises, the army of the Nation, and all its militia, are at the service of the Nation to compel obedience to its laws.” In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564 (1895).

  k At the insistence of the Department of Justice, Major General Thomas L. Sherburne, commanding the 101st Airborne, was instructed to prune the units going into Little Rock of all black soldiers. The division chain o
f command was surprised, but complied. Not until a month later were the black soldiers of the 101st integrated back into their units in Little Rock, and it occurred without incident.

  I am indebted to my classmate Martin Hoffmann, former secretary of the Army, for this information. In 1957, Hoffmann was an aide to General Sherburne, and in that capacity organized the division’s compliance.

  l Steele did not publish the interview, but prepared a confidential memorandum dated September 25, 1957, which is on file at the Eisenhower Library.

  m In 1958, General Alfred Gruenther, then head of the American Red Cross, informed Eisenhower of the Red Cross’s problem of supplying blood to the South. The state of Louisiana had a statute requiring that blood from black donors and white donors be segregated. Eisenhower told him to ignore it—that he should make no differentiation between blood. Ike told Gruenther that in early 1942 when he had been chief of operations in the War Department, Australia needed troops desperately and he assigned three divisions to go there. He was immediately visited by the Australian ambassador, who said there was a law in Australia prohibiting blacks from entering the country. Eisenhower said he told the ambassador, “All right. No troops.” The next morning Ike said he had a flood of cables from Australia saying everything would be all right. Ike told Gruenther to stand his ground in Louisiana. Ann Whitman diary, November 23, 1958, EL.