The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s

by William I. Hitchcock

“Wherever federal funds are expended for anything, I do not see how any American can justify—legally, or logically, or morally—a discrimination in the expenditure of those funds among our citizens.” There was little ambiguity in this message.10 The next day Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens produced a memo for the president’s press secretary, James Hagerty, that confirmed Dunnigan’s assertion: there were indeed segregated schools being operated on military installations in Virginia, Oklahoma, and Texas. These schools, however, were funded by the states and supervised by local school boards. The only way to integrate these schools, Stevens believed, was to have base commanders negotiate with local authorities, and if they proved unwilling to comply, the Department of the Army would have to build and run new, integrated schools. If this happened, wrote Stevens, the administration would surely be attacked in Congress and the press “for needlessly spending public funds.” Eisenhower brushed aside this objection and directed the army and navy to conduct a survey of their installations and report on the progress toward desegregation of their facilities.11