Eisenhower believed that if the federal government preempted the local duty to care for neighbors, it would jeopardize the core American value of Americans giving back to their communities. “I regard this as one of the great real disasters that threatens to engulf us, when we are unready as a nation, as a people, to meet personal disaster by our own cheerful giving,” Ike said in 1957. “Part of the reason is this misunderstanding that government is taking the place even of rescuing the person, the individual, and the family from his natural disasters.”
