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Election of 1952
Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower won a landslide victory over Democrat Adlai Stevenson, ending a string of Democratic Party wins that stretched back to 1932.
Modern Republicanism
Eisenhower's approach to politics was described by contemporaries as this; it found a middle ground between the liberalism of the New Deal and the conservatism of the Old Guard of the Republican Party.
Soil Bank Act
Part of the Agricultural Act of 1956 passed by the U.S. Congress. This created a program which removed farmland from production in an effort to reduce large crop surpluses after World War II. Land deposited was then converted into conservation use. Eventually, it was overturned by the Food and Agriculture Act of 1965.
Refugee Relief Act
At Eisenhower's urging, Congress passed this, which permitted the admission of 214,000 immigrants to the United States from European countries between 1953 and 1956, over and above existing immigration quotas.
Operation Wetback
Responding to public outcry, primarily from California, about the perceived costs of services for illegal immigrants from Mexico, the president charged Joseph Swing, Director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, with the task of regaining control of the border. On June 17, 1954, Swing launched the roundup and deportation of undocumented immigrants in selected areas of California, Arizona, and Texas.
Army-McCarthy Hearings
These hearings dominated national television from April to June 1954. A subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations was seeking to learn whether McCarthy had used improper influence to win preferential treatment for Pvt. G. David Schine, a former member of the senator’s staff who had been drafted. McCarthy countercharged that the army was trying to derail his embarrassing investigations of army security practices through blackmail and intimidation.
COINTELPRO
A series of covert, and at times illegal, projects conducted by the FBI aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. FBI records show that these resources targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed subversive.
Watkins v. United States
In 1954, a labor organizer was called upon to testify in hearings conducted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He agreed to describe his alleged connections with the Communist Party and to identify current members of the Party. He refused to give information concerning individuals who had left the Communist Party. He argued that such questions were beyond the authority of the Committee. Did the activities of the Un-American Activities Committee constitute an unconstitutional exercise of congressional power? In a 6-to-1 decision, the Court held that the activities of the House Committee were beyond the scope of congressional power.
Brown v. Board of Education
A landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. This was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement, and helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all.
Emmett Till
A 14-year old African-American boy was murdered in August 1955 in a racist attack that shocked the nation and provided a catalyst for the emerging civil rights movement. He was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, when he was accused of harassing a local white woman. Several days later, relatives of the woman abducted him, brutally beating and killing him before disposing of his body in a nearby river. His devastated mother insisted on a public, open-casket funeral for her son to shed light on the violence inflicted on blacks in the South. His murderers were acquitted, but his death galvanized civil rights activists nationwide.
Rosa Parks
By refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus in 1955, she helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States. The leaders of the local black community organized a bus boycott that began the day she was convicted of violating the segregation laws. Led by a young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the boycott lasted more than a year—during which she not coincidentally lost her job—and ended only when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Over the next half-century, she became a nationally recognized symbol of dignity and strength in the struggle to end entrenched racial segregation.
Martin Luther King Jr
Social activist and Baptist minister who played a key role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. He sought equality and human rights for African Americans, the economically disadvantaged and all victims of injustice through peaceful protest. He was the driving force behind watershed events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1963 March on Washington, which helped bring about such landmark legislation as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
Montgomery Bus Boycott
A civil-rights protest during which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Alabama to protest segregated seating. The boycott took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, and is regarded as the first large-scale U.S. demonstration against segregation. Four days before the boycott began, Rosa Parks, an African- American woman, was arrested and fined for refusing to yield her bus seat to a white man. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ordered the town to integrate its bus system, and one of the leaders of the boycott, a young pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged as a prominent leader of the American civil rights movement.
Civil Rights Act of 1957
Originally proposed by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, the Act marked the first occasion since Reconstruction that the federal government undertook significant legislative action to protect civil rights. Although influential southern congressman whittled down the bill's initial scope, it still included a number of important provisions for the protection of voting rights. It established the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department, and empowered federal officials to prosecute individuals that conspired to deny or abridge another citizen's right to vote. It signaled a growing federal commitment to the cause of civil rights.
Little Rock 9
A group of black students who enrolled at formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957. Their attendance at the school was a test of Brown v. Board of Education. Later that month, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in federal troops to escort the them into the school.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
Created on January 10-11, 1957, when sixty black ministers and civil rights leaders met in Atlanta, Georgia in an effort to replicate the successful strategy and tactics of the recently concluded Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was chosen as the first president of this new group dedicated to abolishing legalized segregation and ending the disfranchisement of black southerners in a non-violent manner. Later it would address the issues of war and poverty.
Sit-Ins
Civil rights protests that started in 1960, when young African-American students staged one at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave after being denied service. The movement soon spread to college towns throughout the South. Though many of the protesters were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace, their actions made an immediate and lasting impact, forcing Woolworth’s and other establishments to change their segregationist policies.
The Civil Rights Act of 1960
This act did not introduce a new law but was aimed at strengthening and covering loopholes in the Civil Rights Act of 1957. It established federal inspection of local voter registration polls by appointed referees to oversee southern elections and ensure that African Americans were permitted to vote; penalties for anyone who obstructed someone’s attempt to register to vote or vote; it extended the life of the Civil Rights Commission which was previously limited to two years; and prosecution for interfering with court orders regarding school desegregation. This piece of legislation mandated that local voter registration records be available for the Justice Department allowing rejected applications to be reviewed by appointed referees. However this Act was limited in its scope and effect because it failed to enforce the law. The Justice Department had to bring forth specific cases to prove qualified citizens had been denied the vote because of race or color. As the number of cases prepared and filed piled up southern district court judges were hesitant to process them. Although this Act failed to enforce the law it showed the federal government’s commitment to work with civil rights organizations to end discrimination and segregation.
Federal-Aid Highway Act
The bill created a 41,000-mile “National System of Interstate and Defense Highways” that would, according to Eisenhower, eliminate unsafe roads, inefficient routes, traffic jams and all of the other things that got in the way of “speedy, safe transcontinental travel.” At the same time, highway advocates argued, “in case of atomic attack on our key cities, the road net [would] permit quick evacuation of target areas.” For all of these reasons, the 1956 law declared that the construction of an elaborate expressway system was “essential to the national interest.”
Interstate Highway System
A network of controlled-access highways that forms part of the National Highway System in the United States. Eisenhower championed its formation. Construction was authorized by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956.
National Defense Education Act
Signed into law on September 2, 1958, providing funding to United States education institutions at all levels. It was among many science initiatives implemented by Eisenhower in 1958 to increase the technological sophistication and power of the United States. It followed a growing national sense that U.S. scientists were falling behind scientists in the Soviet Union. In total, over a billion dollars was directed towards improving American science curricula.
23rd Amendment
The proposed amendment was quickly ratified as part of the Constitution. The Amendment allows American citizens residing in the District of Columbia to vote for presidential electors, who in turn vote in the Electoral College for President and Vice President. In layperson’s terms, the Amendment means that residents of the District are able to vote for President and Vice President. Prior to the Amendment, citizens residing in the District could not vote for those offices unless they were validly registered to vote in one of the States.
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