The Civil Rights General Becomes the Civil Rights President: Eisenhower Desegregates Little Rock

Several things remained constant when General ‘Ike’ Eisenhower became President Eisenhower. One of them was his commitment, not to talk, but to act on behalf of civil rights.

Eisenhower spoke less, but did more, than his White House predecessors Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt. In fact, Eisenhower directly opposed President Roosevelt and Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. Roosevelt and Stimson imposed a policy of segregation onto the U.S. Army.

As Supreme Allied Commander, Eisenhower wouldn’t and didn’t accept Roosvelt’s segregationist edicts. In late 1944 and early 1945, Ike defied Roosevelt, and integrated various military units as he saw fit. Later, Eisenhower would use the word “justice” to explain such actions, as historian Kasey Pipes explains:

Eisenhower’s career intersected with the civil rights movement at several key points. The first was the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. General Eisenhower, needing more troops, essentially went against war-department policy (drafted by George Marshall) and offered African-American troops the chance to fight at the front. After the war, troops who volunteered to go to the front of the line at the Bulge weren’t eager to go to the back of the bus in Birmingham. This helped build the momentum of the civil-rights movement in the postwar era. As President, Eisenhower found himself again confronted with civil-rights challenges including the two Brown rulings, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Emmett Till murder, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and, of course, Little Rock. The story of the civil-rights movement in the 1940s and 1950s can’t be told without telling the story of Eisenhower.

On September 9, 1957, Ike signed into law the 1957 Civil Rights Act. He’d worked together with Martin Luther King and Vice President Richard Nixon to get Congressional approval for the bill.

Less than two weeks later, Ike ordered the 101st Airborne, a legendary infantry division, to Little Rock, Arkansas. Eisenhower was determined to overrule the Democrat Party there, which, in the person of Governor Orval Faubus, was preventing Black students from attending a public high school.

Ike’s victory in Little Rock was a continuation of the civil rights emphasis which he'd expressed as he was first running for president.

“During the 1952 presidential campaign,” historian William Hitchcock explains, Eisenhower spoke clearly about his support for the civil rights movement, “stating that he would eagerly abolish segregation in the nation’s capital and continue to expunge it from the armed services.”

Eisenhower saw the matter clearly: He’d appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court. Under Warren’s leadership, the famous Brown vs. Board of Education cases, two of them, were decided. As president, it was Ike’s duty to carry out the Supreme Court decisions, which he did in Little Rock, as Kasey Pipes reports:

Little Rock should be remembered as a seminal moment in the civil-rights struggle — perhaps the seminal moment. If integration had failed at Little Rock, it’s hard to imagine it succeeding anywhere. And it would be great if parents, teachers, and journalists would remember that the 101st Airborne soldiers did not arrive on their own orders. Dwight D. Eisenhower had something to do with that.

Little Rock wasn’t the beginning of Ike’s civil rights engagement, and it wasn’t the end, either. Eisenhower wanted to strengthen and solidify the gains made in 1957, and so he pushed for the 1960 Civil Rights Act, which he was able to sign into law before he left office.

Not Race, Not Income Levels, but Family Structures are Weakening the Nation: The Family’s Impact on Society, and Society’s Impact on the Family

Statisticians and social scientists are concluding, sometimes reluctantly, and often against their own ideologies, that the single most significant variable in the life of a child from before birth to the late teenage years is whether or not that child is a member of a functioning and functional family.

There is a set of variables which shapes the family: income level, religion, race, the presence or absence of substance abuse, gambling, etc. But the single most powerful variable is whether or not the family is headed by an intact married couple.

The divide between rich and poor, the divide between races, and divide between other demographic factors all pale in comparison to the massive influence which parents have on their children.

The biggest gap in society now is not between levels of income, and not between races, but between the single-parent family and the intact family. Citing the research of James Wilson, Mary Eberstadt writes:

It’s the family divide, Wilson argued in his book Two Nations (1998), that has become the best indicator for all kinds of problematic behaviors: dropping out of school, going to jail, delinquency, emotional problems, out-of-wedlock births, early sexual activity, and unemployment, to name just some. “These differences,” noted Wilson as he analyzed the piles of numbers, “are not explained by income. Children in one-parent families are much worse off than those in two-parent families even when both families have the same earnings.”

Statistically, the impact of different income levels is erased when the factor of family structure is included in the calculations.

This surprising result was not sought, and not even wanted, by those who found it. Both culture and policy have believed that race, ethnicity, and income were the variables which most influenced the nature of childhood.

It is an idea so potent that it still has the power to shock, even 14 years after its first appearance: Family structure has replaced poverty as the best predictor of youth problems.

Policies and programs designed to help children have instead merely enabled the underlying cause. With good intentions, society has created mechanisms which make it ever easier for parents to abdicate their responsibilities.

Think of all the institutions created to replace the family. What is the dawn-to-dusk school day, and the concomitant attempt to abolish summer vacation, if not a necessity mothered by the empty home? What is the tres chic anti-bullying movement, if not an elaborate, improvised response to the need to do something that capable fathers, especially, used to do — i.e., stick up for their kids?

Nothing will substitute for parents. The best and most ethical social workers, teachers, counselors, and coaches are excellent ancillaries for parents, but poor replacements for parents.

The search continues for substitute mothers, substitute fathers, and substitutes for all the others who once took care of their own.

An effective way to address education problems, to address recreational or illegal drug use, to address juvenile crime, and to address teen pregnancy is to explore, and then reduce, the underlying causes which create increasing numbers of single-parent families.

Few girls or women, in their late teen years, have it as an express goal to become a single mother. They do not, and did not, want this. Which factors have led to the rise in single-parent families, and how can they be curbed? Both the factors, and the actions which can reduce their impact on society, may be partly addressable by policy actions, but will certainly require interventions that no city, county, state, or federal government can orchestrate. Organic changes in culture and society, in families and lifestyles, cannot be legislated.

The occasional policy move might help, but it will be people, not governments, who begin to create better lives for children in American society.