When America Liked Ike
How Moderates Won the 1952 Presidential Election and Reshaped American Politics
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- 44,99 €
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- 44,99 €
Publisher Description
In this book, Gary Donaldson argues that the 1952 presidential election, which exposed deep internal divisions on the left and the right, set the stage for the current U.S. political landscape. 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
