When America Liked Ike
How Moderates Won the 1952 Presidential Election and Reshaped American Politics
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- USD 52.99
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- USD 52.99
Descripción editorial
The 2016 election cycle put in sharp relief the rifts that divide, and threaten to destroy, the Republican Party. While some claim these divisions originated in Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” or in Newt Gingrich’s tenure as Minority Whip, Gary Donaldson argues that the conflict has its origins much earlier, at least as far back as the 1952 presidential election. That election pitted the conservative wing of the Republican Party (the Right Wing, the Old Guard, what is now the Tea Party) against the Republican moderates, represented by Dwight D. Eisenhower. Set against the backdrop of the Korean War and escalating cold war tensions, the 1952 presidential campaign culminated in Eisenhower’s landslide victory over Adlai Stevenson. The election exposed deep internal divisions on the left and the right, but especially within the Republican Party. This book will prove an invaluable resource to readers, students, and scholars interested in rooting out the origins of our contemporary political landscape, on the right and the left.
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Donaldson (The Making of Modern America), chair of American history at Xavier University of Louisiana, reveals that though the election of 1952 may not have deeply altered American politics, it was a harbinger of things to come. Faced with his own declining political fortunes, Harry Truman declined to seek re-election. The Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson, headed for the first of his two defeats at the hands of popular military figure Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower. But it was Ike's Republican Party that showed the first sign of the division that remains to this day. Its nominating convention was a brawl the first covered on television between Ike's moderates and Robert Taft's conservatives. Even though Ike won that battle and the subsequent general election in a landslide, his party's fracture never healed. By 1964 the party's rightist elements, under Barry Goldwater, had captured the GOP. Donaldson's work is brisk and readable, though it breaks no new ground, and he accepts the consensus view that although Ike accepted much of the New Deal, that period of American history ended with his election. What's more, as Donaldson shows, a new age of American politics brittle, hyperpartisan, and played out on television had opened.
