THE EISENHOWER ERA ★^959minister of Great Britain at age seventy-seven, Charles DeGaulle, who assumed
the presidency of France at sixty-eight, and Konrad Adenauer, who served as
chancellor of West Germany from age seventy-three until well into his eight-
ies. In retrospect, Eisenhower’s presidency seems almost uneventful, at least in
domestic affairs—an interlude between the bitter party battles of the Truman
administration and the social upheavals of the 1960s.
Modern Republicanism
With a Republican serving as president for the first time in twenty years, the
tone in Washington changed. Wealthy businessmen dominated Eisenhower’s
cabinet. Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, the former president of General
Motors, made the widely publicized statement: “What is good for the coun-
try is good for General Motors, and vice versa.” A champion of the business
community and a fiscal conservative, Ike worked to scale back government
spending, including the military budget. But while right-wing Republicans
saw his victory as an invitation to roll back the New Deal, Eisenhower realized
that such a course would be disastrous. “Should any political party attempt to
abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws
and farm programs,” he declared, “you would not hear of that party again in
our political history.”
Eisenhower called his domestic agenda Modern Republicanism. It aimed to
sever his party’s identification in the minds of many Americans with Herbert
Hoover, the Great Depression, and indifference to the economic conditions of
ordinary citizens. The core New Deal programs not only remained in place, but
expanded. In 1955, millions of agricultural workers became eligible for the first
time for Social Security. Nor did Ike reduce the size and scope of government.
Despite the use of “free enterprise” as a weapon in the Cold War, the idea of a
“mixed economy” in which the government played a major role in planning
economic activity was widely accepted throughout the Western world. Amer-
ica’s European allies like Britain and France expanded their welfare states and
nationalized key industries like steel, shipbuilding, and transportation (that
is, the government bought them from private owners and operated and subsi-
dized them).
The United States had a more limited welfare state than western Europe
and left the main pillars of the economy in private hands. But it too used
government spending to promote productivity and boost employment.
Eisenhower presided over the largest public-works enterprise in American
history, the building of the 41,000-mile interstate highway system. As noted
in the previous chapter, Cold War arguments—especially the need to pro-
vide rapid exit routes from cities in the event of nuclear war—justified this
How were the 1950s a period of consensus in both domestic policies and foreign affairs?