I Like Ike
Eisenhower Memorial, Washington, DC
The Way Back Machine took a trip back to the 1950s and came up with some memories and some questions. I’ve already posted a couple of episodes of my behavior during elementary school years and I’ve more of them but that’s not today’s journey. Today’s journey is about things that were going on in the 50s and what that meant to me way out in the Great Plains. I had to use a little AI to fill in some of the blanks.
I went to Lincoln Elementary through the fourth grade and then we moved to a new neighborhood and I started in a brand new school, Madison. Quite a difference between the two schools. Lincoln was an old brick building but each room had huge windows, I mean huge!! And there were several of those windows in each classroom. It was great, you could daydream by looking outside, see what people were doing when you had to stay inside at recess, etc., etc. Not so great in the winter because they were not double paned and there were no storm windows (as I remember) but the steam radiators clanked away and kept us warm.
Madison was a new school. Brand new. With one window per classroom. One. And it wasn’t very big. The small windows were designed to protect us from nuclear blasts and radiation. In that vein, every so often we’d have a nuclear attack drill. We’d get under our desks and put our hands over our heads. The huge siren in the park across the street would wail and wail. The siren, the nuke drills, satellites, rockets, the talk of nuclear bombs falling on our town…all of that was a little terrifying but we all just took it in, part of America in the 1950s. But that left me wondering…what were the other parts of America.
A quick look at the stuff Ike, President Eisenhower, did during his 8 years in office is one way to determine why we hid under our desks during the school year and just hoped for the best when we were not in class. Ike was a Republican, his first two years in office, congress was Republican. The last 6 years, congress was Democrat. They still got this stuff done.
Nuclear weapons became a thing for the Soviet Union and soon other countries. Ike began a New Look policy that acknowledged and promised the use of nukes in a conflict. We didn’t do it in Hungary, but we threatened it in Korea. Eventually this policy morphed into Mutually Assured Destruction. Except for us kids under our desks in Huron. I remember the stockpiles of rations and water in buildings with the Civil Defense signs. I kept track…how far was it to the nearest CD station.
Ike signed the first Civil Rights Act in 1957, the first since 1875 which was gutted when Hayes moved the troops out of the south and Jim Crow went into effect. The 1957 Act desegregated schools but it took federal troops to start enforcement. During the Jim Crow years, most black voters had been disenfranchised, only 20% of blacks were registered. In 1960, another Civil Rights Act established federal inspection of state and local processes to ensure access to voting.
Ike noticed during World War II that tanks and supply trucks moved easily on Germany’s autobahn system. He initiated the Interstate System, large “super” highways that would connect everyone in America. Interstates didn’t come to South Dakota until the 1970s, the new four lane SD Highway 14 out by The Plains was a wonder to the young me.
Alaska and Hawaii became states. Believe it or not, this was a big deal to me and I think many kids my age. These places, far, far away and beyond our ken, were now states. How had this happened? I think that inspired curiosity about the United States in many of us and showed us how the country grows.
Sputnik. I remember the adults talking about this “thing” that was flying around the world in outer space which had been launched by those evil Communists. Surely, the Sputnik Satellite was a threat to our national security. And so began the Space Race. Ike started NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Now the space program is a subsidiary of Tesla, I think.
As a kid, I was very aware of the nuclear threat. I looked at Sputnik as an extension of that threat. I’d heard of Interstates, when they started the four lane north of town, my grandpa said, “You should see those interstates in Minneapolis, now that’s a highway.” Or something like that. Civil Rights. No clue. I saw it on the news but it was like watching a different country.
“I Like Ike” was a sign often seen in the 50s and even in subsequent years. Of course, these were the beginning days of desegregation, increasing income (35%), increasing education level, low inflation, congressional cooperation…
The image above was taken at night at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C.