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

by William I. Hitchcock

In confronting the greatest social and moral challenge of his times, the civil rights movement, Eisenhower—like many white Americans of the era—responded with caution and wariness. Crucially, though, he did not obstruct progress on civil rights. Instead he channeled it along a path that aligned with his own ideas about managing social change. Knowing that he was out of his depth on such matters, he accepted guidance from the most consequential cabinet officer of the decade, Attorney General Herbert Brownell. Together these two men worked quietly through the courts to weaken Jim Crow segregation. They appointed five moderately progressive jurists to the U.S. Supreme Court and ushered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through a skeptical Congress. The Act was a landmark only because it was so rare: the first civil rights law since Reconstruction. Eisenhower took an enormous risk, and one that was deeply uncharacteristic, when he ordered federal troops to surround Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, to ensure that court-ordered desegregation proceed despite the hostility of local authorities.