The response of the Republican administrations of the 1950s and the Democrat administrations of the 1960s to the domestic problems they faced

Résumé du document

Burning bras, rebel "teenagers", rioting black Americans, burning cities, angry students and happy hippies are only a few amidst a veritable panoply of symbols of an exploding and ebullient young America struggling to find itself throughout the vibrant fifties and sixties, an era of unprecedented consumerist frenzy and economic prosperity. Both the decades of the fifties and of the sixties brought amazing, novel and revolutionary changes to the American domestic scene which, whether or not the President and his administration's passions lay in international affairs or in domestic policies, were sure to greatly mobilize the presidential position, and with the expansion of modern communication technologies these happenings infiltrated the eyes of the entire world. Precisely how and why American officials responded the way they did to the internal pressures pulsating in the hearts of the American people greatly determined the way the United States are shaped today.

Extraits

[...] Poignant hypocrisy and perversion was sensed by the Soviets and Maoists, the Bandung generation, the black populations and even by the United States' very allies in the way in which America exported and exalted the principles of freedom and democracy whilst blatantly ignoring these same principles in their very own country. The Brown court case brought the condemnation of the school board for deciding to prevent Brown's black daughter from attending a white school, and with this condemnation came a very important advance for civil rights as it pushed the Supreme Court to order all states to put an end to segregated education. [...]

[...] And millions of courageous individuals under the incredible power of the media and not the government can be felicitated for initiating novel societal changes in a still profoundly racist America during the fifties. In the southern states terrible segregation and intense discrimination imbued all aspects of life from education, employment, housing, healthcare, transport, civil rights and even voting through bogus literacy tests and other undemocratic means all deployed to prevent the black population from exercising their fundamental constitutional right to vote, which to the Southern governors was illusionary and unfounded. [...]

[...] Yet if Southern Democrats had shown themselves so hostile to any civil rights advances throughout Truman's presidency, was there any further hope of Eisenhower advocating such measures and achieving them? That is if we firstly consider that Eisenhower actually felt strongly on this domestic issue of capital importance. Because indeed for social equality to hatch throughout the United States of America one first needed a President who himself passionately believed in racial equality. But did Eisenhower? And in order to convince these fundamentally and profoundly racist politicians to approve the increase if not simply the giving of civil rights to Black Americans, the United States required a very strong and able president who would not flinch at the thought of losing certain votes in future elections. [...]

[...] Yet Kennedy had promised the American people a Frontier' in his acceptance speech as Democratic candidate, in which every American man or woman could see the promise of a bright future in a dangerous and unstable world dominated by the Cold War: stand at the edge of a New Frontier-the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils- a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and dreams”. But just how and what was he going to do in the field of internal affairs to cross this New Frontier? Under Kennedy the American economy continued to prosper, a rich and powerful economy inherited from Eisenhower's laissez-faire policies. Kennedy had set out in his New Frontier the goal of making the needier and poorer Americans also benefit from this period of economic wealth. [...]

[...] Only the analysis of his policies and political moves during his presidency will give us keys to a better comprehension of the Republican response to the domestic issues they were challenged with in the fifties. Eisenhower's appointment to the presidential position came at the core of the greatest of America's dim moments of exploding anti-communist hysteria, and Ike inherited the dark force of McCarthyism from Truman. It was an intriguing and inedited time for America with McCarthy launching a communist ‘witch-hunt' playing on the fears created by the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950. [...]