#Dwight Eisenhower

[coolthingsguyslike]

[barbossas-wench]

Saw this on TikTok

As someone who has special interests on US presidents and loves pop culture, these are on point!

Part 2

[gorillaxyz]

at first we sillied xD

but then we serioused.

[todaysdocument]

Letter from President Eisenhower to E. E. "Swede" Hazlett

Collection DDE-EPRES: Eisenhower, Dwight D.: Papers as President of the United StatesSeries: Dwight D. Eisenhower DiaryFile Unit: Dwight D. Eisenhower Diary October 1954 (1)

October 23, 1954 Dear Swede: Your judgement on the spinning reel coincides exactly with mine. Since 1944 when I first encountered these gadgets in France, I have been the recipient of various types of spinners -- I should say one arrives about every sixty days. I leave them to those who like them. For my own fishing, I keep half a dozen fly rods ranging from about 1 - 1/2 ounces to 4-1/2, and I keep three favorite casting rods. I think this combination ought to see me through the fishing seasons left to me. [[circular ink stamp "The Dwight D. Eisenhower Library"]] I skip over your comments on the election campaign. I have appeared before a number of audiences, but I strive to deal only with substantive matters -- with fact and logical deduction -- while staying out of political bickering. When you mention Adlai, I again find myself in complete agreement with you, except that I doubt that he is a very dangerous opponent. However, if he should slip into a position of real responsibility, he would represent a great risk for the country. As to "four-headed" foreign policy, the Democrats never succeeded in keeping people like McCarran from sounding off when they so chose. So if a Republican Senator lets go once in a while, I don't know what we can do about it, even though I deplore the misunderstandings they create. So far as Dulles is concerned, he has never made a serious pronouncement, agreement or proposal without complete and exhaustive consultation with me in advance and, of course, my approval. If your friend Senator Ervin would take the trouble to look up the record, he would see that Nixon belonged in the same school, although he admittedly tries to put his pronouncements into more colorful language. [complete transcription at link]

[bonnieura]

girl: u best not be dwight cuntenhower when I get there

[team-of-rivals]

i made a terrible discovery the other day

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

A rare view of the Statue of Liberty from the balcony on its torch. This point of view has been closed since 1916.

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 30, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 01, 2024

Cas Mudde, a political scientist who specializes in extremism and democracy, observed yesterday on Bluesky that “the fight against the far right is secondary to the fight to strengthen liberal democracy.” That’s a smart observation.

During World War II, when the United States led the defense of democracy against fascism, and after it, when the U.S. stood against communism, members of both major political parties celebrated American liberal democracy. Democratic presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower made it a point to emphasize the importance of the rule of law and people’s right to choose their government, as well as how much more effectively democracies managed their economies and how much fairer those economies were than those in which authoritarians and their cronies pocketed most of a country’s wealth.

Those mid-twentieth-century presidents helped to construct a “liberal consensus” in which Americans rallied behind a democratic government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. That government was so widely popular that political scientists in the 1960s posited that politicians should stop trying to court voters by defending its broadly accepted principles. Instead, they should put together coalitions of interest groups that could win elections.

As traditional Republicans and Democrats moved away from a defense of democracy, the power to define the U.S. government fell to a small faction of “Movement Conservatives” who were determined to undermine the liberal consensus. Big-business Republicans who hated regulations and taxes joined with racist former Democrats and patriarchal white evangelicals who wanted to reinforce traditional race and gender hierarchies to insist that the government had grown far too big and was crushing individual Americans.

In their telling, a government that prevented businessmen from abusing their workers, made sure widows and orphans didn’t have to eat from garbage cans, built the interstate highways, and enforced equal rights was destroying the individualism that made America great, and they argued that such a government was a small step from communism. They looked at government protection of equal rights for racial, ethnic, gender, and religious minorities, as well as women, and argued that those protections both cost tax dollars to pay for the bureaucrats who enforced equal rights and undermined a man’s ability to act as he wished in his place of business, in society, and in his home. The government of the liberal consensus was, they claimed, a redistribution of wealth from hardworking taxpayers—usually white and male—to undeserving marginalized Americans.

When voters elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Movement Conservatives’ image of the American government became more and more prevalent, although Americans never stopped liking the reality of the post–World War II government that served the needs of ordinary Americans. That image fed forty years of cuts to the post–World War II government, including sweeping cuts to regulations and to taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, always with the argument that a large government was destroying American individualism.

It was this image of government as a behemoth undermining individual Americans that Donald Trump rode to the presidency in 2016 with his promises to “drain the swamp” of Washington, D.C., and it is this image that is leading Trump voters to cheer on billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as they vow to cut services on which Americans depend in order to cut regulations and taxes once again for the very wealthy and corporations.

But that image of the American government is not the one on which the nation was founded.

Liberal democracy was the product of a moment in the 1600s in which European thinkers rethought old ideas about human society to emphasize the importance of the individual and his (it was almost always a “him” in those days) rights. Men like John Locke rejected the idea that God had appointed kings and noblemen to rule over subjects by virtue of their family lineage, and began to explore the idea that since government was a social compact to enable men to live together in peace, it should rest not on birth or wealth or religion, all of which were arbitrary, but on natural laws that men could figure out through their own experiences.

The Founders of what would become the United States rested their philosophy on an idea that came from Locke’s observations: that individuals had the right to freedom, or “liberty,” including the right to consent to the government under which they lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

In the early years of the American nation, defending the rights of individuals meant keeping the government small so that it could not crush a man through taxation or involuntary service to the government or arbitrary restrictions. The Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—explicitly prohibited the government from engaging in actions that would hamper individual freedom.

But in the middle of the nineteenth century, Republican president Abraham Lincoln began the process of adjusting American liberalism to the conditions of the modern world. While the Founders had focused on protecting individual rights from an overreaching government, Lincoln realized that maintaining the rights of individuals required government action.

To protect individual opportunity, Lincoln argued, the government must work to guarantee that all men—not just rich white men—were equal before the law and had equal access to resources, including education. To keep the rich from taking over the nation, he said, the government must keep the economic playing field between rich and poor level, dramatically expand opportunity, and develop the economy.

Under Lincoln, Republicans reenvisioned liberalism. They reworked the Founders’ initial stand against a strong government, memorialized by the Framers in the Bill of Rights, into an active government designed to protect individuals by guaranteeing equal access to resources and equality before the law for white men and Black men alike. They enlisted the power of the federal government to turn the ideas of the Declaration of Independence into reality.

Under Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, progressives at the turn of the twentieth century would continue this reworking of American liberalism to address the extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power made possible by industrialization. In that era, corrupt industrialists increased their profits by abusing their workers, adulterating milk with formaldehyde and painting candies with lead paint, dumping toxic waste into neighborhoods, and paying legislators to let them do whatever they wished.

Those concerned about the survival of liberal democracy worried that individuals were not actually free when their lives were controlled by the corporations that poisoned their food and water while making it impossible for individuals to get an education or make enough money ever to become independent.

To restore the rights of individuals, progressives of both parties reversed the idea that liberalism required a small government. They insisted that individuals needed a big government to protect them from the excesses and powerful industrialists of the modern world. Under the new governmental system that Theodore Roosevelt pioneered, the government cleaned up the sewage systems and tenements in cities, protected public lands, invested in public health and education, raised taxes, and called for universal health insurance, all to protect the ability of individuals to live freely without being crushed by outside influences.

Reformers sought, as Roosevelt said, to return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”

It is that system of government’s protection of the individual in the face of the stresses of the modern world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and the presidents who followed them until 1981 embraced. The post–World War II liberal consensus was the American recognition that protecting the rights of individuals in the modern era required not a weak government but a strong one.

When Movement Conservatives convinced followers to redefine “liberal” as an epithet rather than a reflection of the nation’s quest to defend the rights of individuals—which was quite deliberate—they undermined the central principle of the United States of America. In its place, they resurrected the ideology of the world the American Founders rejected, a world in which an impoverished majority suffers under the rule of a powerful few.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[ted-calling-orson]

i got bored and drew us presidents as warrior cats

also list of cat breeds they are bc why not

Kennedy(moonstar): Maine coon with a bobtail (requested by my friend Lee)

Nixon(waterstar): oriental longhair

Jefferson(Papyrusstar): American curl

Eisenhower(scarstar): sphinx cat (requested by @thisfellerdownathebowlingalley )

Teddy Roosevelt(Bearstar): Somali/norwegian forest cat

Washington(George/Georgestar): American shorthair

Coolidge(Silentstar): Siamese cat

Alt designs:

[thepresidentsblog]

[presidentialconfessions]

eisenhower looks likes beans from rango

[uspresidentyaoi]

i practiced drawing u.s presidents. why

[coolthingsguyslike]

[gorillaxyz]

wow

[todaysdocument]

Press Release, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Statement on the Signing of S. 50, the Act Providing for the Admission of Hawaii into the Union

Collection DDE-WHCF: White House Central Files (Eisenhower Administration)Series: Official FilesFile Unit: OF 147-E Hawaii (10)

Immediate Release March 18, 1959 James C. Hagerty, Press Secretary to the President The White House Statement on the Signing of S. 50 March 18, 1959 It has given me great satisfaction to sign the Act providing for the admission of Hawaii into the Union. Since my inauguration in 1953 I have consistently urged that this legislation be enacted, so the action of the Congress as early in this session is most gratifying. Under this legislation, the citizens of Hawaii will soon decide whether their Islands shall become our fiftieth State. In so doing, they will demonstrate anew to the world the vitality of the principles of freedom and self-determination -- the principles upon which this Nation was founded 172 years ago. # # # # # # #

[graceandfamily]

Washington, D.C., October 12, 1956: President Eisenhower is chatting with Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, when they called at the White House.

[deadpresidents]

what do you think the chances are of a 35 year old president some day?

It's not impossible, but probably unlikely. Unfortunately, it's always going to be difficult for a 35-year-old candidate to have built up the political organization and harvest enough political and financial connections to be ready for seeking a party's nomination at that age. I don't think a 35-year-old would necessarily be less ready than an older candidate as long as the quality of their experiences was strong enough to complete with the length of experience that their opponent might have.

I think the average age of Presidents at the time of their first inauguration is around 55 years old, but we've had nine Presidents who took office before they turned 50 years old: •Theodore Roosevelt: 42 years, 322 days •John F. Kennedy: 43 years, 236 days •Bill Clinton: 46 years, 154 days •Ulysses S. Grant: 46 years, 311 days •Barack Obama: 47 years, 169 days •Grover Cleveland: 47 years, 351 days •Franklin Pierce: 48 years, 101 days •James A. Garfield: 49 years, 105 days •James K. Polk: 49 years, 122 days And of those nine Presidents under 50 years old, eight of them were elected directly to the Presidency. Only Theodore Roosevelt succeeded to the office from the Vice Presidency, and when he was elected President in his own right in 1904 and inaugurated for his elected term, he was still younger (46 years, 128 days) than every other President in history other the JFK. So despite the age of the major party nominees in the last couple of elections, this country has elected quite a few relatively young Presidents.

We've also elected a lot of young Vice Presidents and the Vice Presidency, of course, is always just a heartbeat away from the main gig. There have been twelve (12) Vice Presidents inaugurated before they turned 50 years old, and three others took office before turning 51. The average age (on Inauguration Day) of the Vice Presidents is roughly the same as the average age of Presidents, but two Vice Presidents were elected in their 30s. John C. Breckinridge, who was Vice President under James Buchanan (1857-1861), was only 36 years, 42 days old when he was inaugurated, so he was barely old enough to meet the Constitutional age qualifications for the Presidency and Vice Presidency. And Richard Nixon was only 39 years old when he was first elected as Dwight D. Eisenhower's Vice President in 1952. Nixon celebrated his 40th birthday right before he was inaugurated as Vice President and was 40 years, 11 days old on Inauguration Day.

Part of the reason that both Breckinridge and Nixon were chosen as VP was to balance out the ticket due to the "advanced" age of their running mates. When Nixon was nominated alongside General Eisenhower in 1952, there were questions about whether or not Eisenhower might be too old for the Presidency. Eisenhower was 62 years, 98 days old when he was inaugurated -- nearly 20 years younger than President Biden and 17 years younger than Donald Trump. In fact, when he was first inaugurated, Dwight Eisenhower was younger than George Clooney currently is:

So that's a long way and a lot of information shared for me to come back to the point that it's not impossible, but pretty unlikely for a 35-year-old to be elected President. I think there's a better chance that someone that age would be elected Vice President.