Dwight D. Eisenhower's Lost Opportunity
to Advance the Cause of Justice

Edward J. Dodson

[A paper prepared in partial course requirements, U.S. Recent History, Temple University, May, 1985. Instructor: Prof. K. Kusmer]

Blanche Cook's The Declassified Eisenhower leads the reader on a journey that is sometimes anticipated and frequently troublesome.

The Second World War and its aftermath was characterized by intrigue and by events the world's political leaders knew were too sensitive for wide public discussion. What happened unfolds on the pages of her book as more than history but not quite a critical commentary. That Cook is disturbed by many of the revelations made is clear. Final judgment - both about Eisenhower and about American society -- is, however, left up to the reader. Our personal codes of ethics and sense of justice are uniquely challenged by her treatment of twentieth century political realities. Given those realities, the question arises as to whether the course of events could have been otherwise.

Since nuclear holocaust was unacceptable, [Eisenhower] pursued alternative means to ensure America's dominance in the race against the Soviet Union and in the race to secure access to the world's resources and markets … that was a commitment to a free-market economy. Others called it empire. Whatever it is called, to control the world's resources and defend them against nationalists and communists proved to be an ongoing and draining experience.[1]

This is as close as Cook comes to a moral judgment on the monopoly-capitalism practiced by our geopoliticains to "promote the American way of life throughout the world."[2]

Both Cook and Godfrey Hodgson identify the years of the Second World War as the birth of the American System and the "American Century." Judged on the basis of maximized individual freedoms and benign impact of the State, that system uniquely American had long disappeared. The global wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 were simply catalysts, advancing the expansion of centralized authority at the expense of individualism. In 1915, Britain's government was attacked by M.P. Francis Neilson for its anti-democratic positions that led the nation to war:

During a war it is no easy task to prevent your sympathy clouding your reason. The whole social system seems to be organized against any individual attempt to concentrate the attention dominantly upon the causes of war. Governments, churches, theatres, the press, and local authorities, direct their efforts, in the main, warwards; the whole thought of society and commerce seems to be occupied with war; and all desire to question the reasons given by statesmen for participating in the war must be suppressed. It has been ruled already by certain "leaders of thought" that it is unwise, unpatriotic, and un-English, to suspect the motives of Governments, or waver for a moment in swearing wholehearted allegiance to the authorities …[3]

INSTRUCTOR NOTE: Why use an English example when American ones are available?

Our entry into the global political economy should have provided sufficient. warning that our sovereignty in North America, not any significant difference in human nature, had secured for Americans a democratic experience in history. With the loss of true physical and political isolation from the older nation-states, American society changed quickly. "The crisis of war," says historian Robert Wiebe, "allowed Americans to translate assumptions into actions … and the beneficiaries were those few with simple, persuasive answers and the means at hand to implement them."[4] Wiebe was writing about the changes stimulated by the First World War; but the anti-communist sentiment generated by the "Red Scare" of the 1920s were solidified by our involvement in the next war - where we came face to face with Russia as the world's other emerging power. Despite whatever facts might be presented to the contrary, no attempt was made to distinguish between communism as a revolutionary alternative and the simple expansionist goals of the Russian empire. Thus, as Blanche Cook concludes:

The United States was … committed to a crusade against "communism" no matter how popular and broad-based or nationalist and democratic the independence movement might be, and no matter how repressive, cruel, or generally unsatisfactory the right-wing ally might be.[5]

INSTRUCTOR NOTE: You should make it clear she is referring to the Third World, not the Soviet Union.

Frederick Lewis Allen also traces the origins of the later "Liberal consensus" to the 1920s and a dominant anti-egalitarian mentality. He notes that "the typical American of the old stock had never had more than a half-hearted enthusiasm for the rights of the minority. …[H]e had been accustomed to set his community in order by the first means that came to hand - a sumptuary law, a vigilance committee, or if necessary a shotgun."[6] From shotgun to atomic bomb. From Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt. From Thomas Jefferson to Joe McCarthy. The ideology of individualism had been replaced by the ideology of opportunism.

INSTRUCTOR NOTE: I do not see the connection to war in this quotation. Also, the phrase "ideology of opportunism" is not clear.

"Declarations of Independence and Bills of Rights were all very well in the history books," Allen writes of his contemporaries, "but when running things himself [the typical American] had usually been open to the suggestion that liberty was another name for license and that the Bill of Rights was the last resort of scoundrels."[7] The editors of the New York Times Magazine asked the right question in 1963 in their article, "What Sort of Nation Are We?" Their own answer, that: "We are probably most democratic in feeling and action"[8} was (and perhaps still is) one of the great myths Hodgson points to.

INSTRUCTOR NOTE: I think you are getting off the track - the paper is supposed to deal with Eisenhower.

In the end, the motivations behind the actions and policies of those who wielded power in the United States were based on the greatest myth of all: that there is such a thing as "the American way of life." Hodgson unfortunately ends his own book by declaring the necessity for even greater concentration of power in the hands of the State

To adjust to a future of limited, though magnificent, resources will demand a historic shift in American values. …There will have to be less emphasis on equality of opportunity, and more on equality of condition. The traditional goals of absolute freedom and maximum economic abundance will have to be modified in the more intricate equilibrium of a society that accepts the limits of human possibility and strives for the greatest possible measure of justice and equality.[9]

I cannot accept the assumption that human possibilities are, in fact, limited. Hodgson concludes that we must recognize the realities of a global economy limited by "scarce resources" over which American control is greatly diminished. Cook also points out that Eisenhower "naively wondered why the world's resources could not be internationalized … since raw materials represented the world's basis needs, they should belong to and serve everybody."[10] At the time of that statement, Eisenhower was still guided by Jeffersonian ideology. In return for an opportunity to join the power elite, he abandoned those principles and adopted the "principles" of vested interest.

INSTRUCTOR NOTE: Your point here is not clear enough.

One can only wonder, with his international prestige, what he could have accomplished had he chose to champion those democratic ideals he expressed above.

Out of an innate sense of what was needed to produce widespread well-being and an end to poverty in the world, Eisenhower had "naively" threatened the status of what is normally called "monopoly-capitalism" but which I think is better termed "industrial landlordism." People must have access to nature in order to produce and survive; and this relationship is most readily apparent in agricultural societies - as was Guatemala when, in 1951, Jacobo Arbenz's government declared its intention "to give land to the agricultural workers who do not possess such or who possess very little, facilitate technical assistance, [and] expand agricultural credit for the benefit of all who work the land."[11] As Cook reports, the U.S. supported overthrow of Arbenz precipitated "the return of almost a million and a half acres that had been distributed among one hundred thousand families." Eisenhower had been fully re-educated by then from any appreciation for the principles of universal land ownership that guided Jefferson's vision of the yeoman farmer as backbone of democracy.

INSTRUCTOR NOTE: I do not think Eisenhower put it exactly this way.

While Jefferson recognized the dangers to democracy that were inherited in the form of England's system of landownership, private property in land was nearly universal in the America of the mid- and late-nineteenth century. Jefferson's concerns were tempered by the vast abundance of an untamed and largely unpopulated continent. It was Tom Paine, more than any other founding father, who saw the same truths and attempted to use his influence to secure the future of the new democracy. In Agrarian Justice, Paine wrote:

Man did not make the earth and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had not right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creater of the earth open a land office, from whence title deeds should issue … it is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself that is individual property. Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated land owes to the community a ground rent, for a I know no better term to express the idea by, for the land which he holds.[12]

This, I suggest was the truth Eisenhower cold feel as a product of an open system of political economy blessed, up until the mid-nineteenth century, by the combined benefit of a government with few powers and largely equal access to the frontier. The experience of freedom - beginning long before Jefferson - sparked the natural demand for individual participation in the process of governing and a distrust of centralized authority. The majority of Americans were propertied, and their "revolution" was conservative in its goals of protecting the political freedom and economic rights acquired as a frontier society.

After two hundred years, democracy is seriously threatened and is at risk. The days of the frontier and of free access to land are also gone. With the land of the earth carved into established political states and, within those states, controlled by private interests or state agencies, the conflict between those who are properties and those who are propertyless in reaching a stage of critical intensity around the world, including in the United States as well. Early in his own political career, Winston Churchill noted:

In no great country in the new world or the old have the working people yet secured the double advantage of Free Trade and Free Land together, by which I mean a commercial system and a land system from which, so far as possible, all forms of monopoly have been vigorously excluded.[13]

INSTRUCTOR NOTE: Churchill was later a vigorous supporter of empire - and opponent of Eisenhower.

The main problem with Hodgson's solution is that democracy cannot thrive where state control is called on to mitigate private monopoly. State control eventually becomes more dangerous and repressive because of the concentration of police power. Democracy is at risk and only the democratization of access to land and natural resources (the ultimate equality of opportunity) can tip the balance back in its favor. This political struggle is, more than any other, the determining factor in the conflict between man and man, and man and the State.

INSTRUCTOR NOTE: I think your effort to tie Eisenhower to a violation of agrarian democracy is forcing him into a mold that does not fit. At no time do you quote him to support this thesis. That is not to say that there isn't any value in your argument about him being weened away from a democratic vision. I just don't feel he would support all your points.

REFERENCES

[1] Blanche W. Cook. The Declassified Eisenhower (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), p.345.

[2] Ibid., p.293.

[3] Francis Neilson. How Diplomats Make War (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1915), p.369.

[4] Robert H. Wiebe. The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), p.287.

[5] Cook, p.100.

[6] Frederick Lewis Allen. Only Yesterday (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931), p.226.

[7] Ibid., p.226.

[8] Godfrey Hodgson. America In Our Time (New York: Random House, 1976), p.161.

[9] Ibid., pp.498-499.

[10] Cook, p.299.

[11] Ibid., p.224.

[12] Thomas Paine. Agrarian Justice. Cited in Single Tax Year Book (New York: Single Tax Review Publishing Co., 1917), pp.329-330.

[13] From the text of a speech made by Winston Churchill at King's Theatre in Edinburgh, May 17, 1909. At the end of that speech Churchill quoted Cobden (England's staunch free trader from an earlier era): "You who shall liberate the land will do more for your country than we have in the liberation of its commerce."

The above paper is, admittedly, not as well written as it might have been. Making the case that Eisenhower moved from a principles and enlightened position where rights to nature are concerned to one influenced by the interests of U.S. controlled multinational concerns needs to be much better researched and documented. Professor Kusmer's reference to Churchill raises the interesting question of whether Churchill ever publicly or even privately comments on Eisenhower's views as stated at the end of the Second World War. I post this paper with the thought that some enterprising researcher might find the subject worthy of expending some time and energy. -- Edward J. Dodson / September 2002