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

by William I. Hitchcock

The president also shaped his acceptance speech, which he delivered to the GOP convention on August 23, to avoid any provocative language on civil rights. Speechwriter Arthur Larson, who worked with Eisenhower throughout July and August on this speech, tried to insert a “strong and unequivocal condemnation of racial discrimination,” but the president objected. In a number of conversations with Larson, Eisenhower repeated by-now familiar themes about the need to “understand the Southerners as well as the Negroes.” In Larson’s account of these discussions, Eisenhower stressed the point that “equality of political and economic opportunity did not mean necessarily that everyone has to mingle socially—‘or that a Negro should court my daughter.’ ” Larson reluctantly drafted a speech that omitted the charged terms race, racial, and Negro, downplayed any notion of a national civil rights crisis, and instead hailed a number of “quietly effective actions conceived in understanding and good will for all.” Larson drew a painful and damning conclusion after this experience: “President Eisenhower, during his presidential tenure, was neither emotionally nor intellectually in favor of combatting segregation in general.”