As a boy, Eisenhower had seen a tennis court, but he had never seen anyone play on it. He had never even heard of golf. Taxes were almost nonexistent. People took care of their own, as the saying went. Almost everyone voted Republican. The Midwest was isolated from the rest of America, as in a subsequent age of radio, television, automobiles, and highway systems it was not. “The isolation,” Milton Eisenhower once said “was political and economic as well as a prevailing state of mind.
