…So, in the summer of 1952, when the Republicans nominated Dwight D. Eisenhower for President and he at once promised to end the war if elected, millions of Americans, crying, “I like Ike!”, swung onto the Eisenhower bandwagon. The country had grown tired of Democratic rule, and besides, the Democratic candidate, Illinois’s governor Adlai E. Stevenson, chanced to be an intellectual in an era of widespread distrust of intellectuals. In addition, too, many Americans were enrages at President Truman for having relieved General Douglas MacArthur of his command of the troops in Korea. Thus, with everything going for him, Eisenhower won the 1952 election in a landslide and swiftly ended the war by settling for a stalemate.
—Owen Lattimore, shown here with Senator McCarthy, was an American scholar versed in Asian culture. Ex-Communist Louis Budnez called Lattimore a member of a Communist spy cell in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington on April 20, 1950.(AFP/Getty Images)—click for image source…
More than anyone else, Dwight D. Eisenhower was the quintessential American figure of the 1950’s, and was in fact a kind of living symbol of the attitudes and style of the decade. Benevolent, paternal, though deemed by many to be rather unimaginative and something less than a brilliant thinker, Eisenhower radiated to the country from the White House a sense of old fashioned morality, honesty, and Protestant virtue, as well as a rosy optimism about the nation’s future.
—“Elvis and Liberace had two things in common, other than the fact that they were both musicians. They were both twins who lost their brothers at birth, and they both loved opulence.” | Lamar Fike in Elvis Aaron Presley: Revelations from the Memphis Mafia
On the surface, it seems unlikely that Elvis and Liberace would have had anything in common. They were born a generation apart. The latter catered to a conservative adult audience in the mid-fifties, while Elvis appealed to a youthful generation trying to escape the conformist world of their parents.—Read More:http://www.elvis-history-blog.com/elvis-liberace.html
In a way, especially during the time that Eisenhower was President, the fifties were a peculiarly naive and innocent decade, an anachronistivc throwback to pre-129 Great Crash America. Other than the problems of Russia and the spread of Communism, which Eisenhower, to his credit, appeared to have pretty well under his control, the average American seemed to think in 1955 that the nation’s only problems were to build more superhighways, to develop faster cars and planes, and to keep the Dow Jones average on a steady linear rise.
Once you could drive on eight-lane highways from New York to Los Angeles without encountering a stop light, many Americans simple-mindedly seemed to believe, the country would become all but a utopia in this land of manifest destiny. …( to be continued)…
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