Government and Education

GOVERNMENT AND EDUCATION

Government Takes a More Active Role

Public education once had been the sole domain of the state and local governments. Local school boards selected texts, hired teachers, and even determined where children of different colors could attend school. The 1950s, however, brought Uncle Sam into education as never before, dramatically shifting the balance of power between states and the national government and making equal access to education a civil right.

Midcentury White House Conference

An early indicator that the government planned to take a more active role in education came in December 1950, when the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth convened. Some six thousand delegates and observers attended meetings held to discuss how the American educational system might be improved. The conference recommended increased federal aid to states for education, government support for college tuition, abolition of racial segregation in schools, reserving of educational-television channels by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and government efforts to provide school lunches for poor children.

Department of Health, Education, and Welfare

In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW)—which absorbed the Office of Education, created in 1867 by Andrew Johnson—and named Oveta Culp Hobby the department's first secretary. Although the department spent most of its time and energy on the problem of polio, it coordinated various federal activities regarding the state of education, especially after desegregation in the schools emerged as a pressing issue.

Integration

On 17 May 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, ruling that "the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place" in public education and ordering that those U.S. public schools that were segregated—40 percent of the public schools—should be desegregated in a prompt and reasonable manner. Although after his retirement Eisenhower claimed that he had agreed in principal with the Court's decision on desegregation, as president he refused to make public his support of the ruling. He counted many wealthy southerners among his friends and shared their belief that institutionalized racial segregation in the South could not be changed overnight. At a White House party held prior to the Brown decision, Eisenhower took Chief Justice Earl Warren aside and voiced his sympathy with the southerners and their fight to maintain segregation in the schools: "These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit alongside some big overgrown Negroes." Furthermore, Ike feared that if the Court ordered integration in the schools then the executive office could do little to either distance itself from the ruling or enforce it—resulting in a political nightmare for an administration that wanted to stay out of state and local politics.

The Little Rock Crisis

In March 1956, 101 southern members of the House and Senate struck back at the Court and signed a pledge to overturn the Brown decision. The situation came to a head at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Integration was scheduled to proceed at the school, but, according to Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, the threat of violence and bloodshed was so great as to require a stay on the integration order. A chancery court agreed, but a federal court overruled the lower court, restoring the integration order. Faubus, under the auspices of keeping the peace, called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent any black students from enrolling. On 3 September nine black students attempted to enroll, and the guard turned them away.

Showdown between a Governor and a President

In a meeting with Eisenhower on 14 September, Faubus seemed willing to end the test of wills between him and the federal government and redirect the guard to escort the black students into the school. The guard's orders remained the same, however, after Faubus returned to Little Rock, and on 23 September the students made another attempt to enter the school, only to face an angry mob. An outraged Eisenhower, who thought he had a deal with the Arkansas governor and in no mood for vigilante tactics, nationalized the Arkansas Guard, supplementing them with 101st Airborne troops, and had the soldiers escort the students into Central High on 25 September. Federalized state militia continued as a presence in the school for the remainder of the year, when eight of the nine completed the term and one graduated. Faubus continued a rearguard action against desegregation by closing Central High in 1958, but the Supreme Court moved to end such "evasive schemes" used to perpetuate segregation. When Eisenhower was asked if his action in Little Rock meant executive support for the Brown decision, he continued to shy away from an endorsement of civil rights and instead spoke of his commitment to upholding the law.

White House Conference on Education

The White House sponsored the 1955 Conference on Education, which addressed the goals of schools, the construction and financing of schools, the operation of schools, and the productivity of education. The conference report, issued in April 1956, urged greater federal funding for education. Later that year, partly as a result of the conference report, Eisenhower created a thirty-three-member committee to study the problems of higher education. In 1956 the committee proposed that the federal government needed to develop a policy "on aid to education beyond the high-school level, and the states needed to undertake surveys of future enrollments, facilities, and staff needs. The final report, in 1957, called for an emphasis on teacher recruitment, incometax deductions for college expenses, and long-range planning for college facilities.

AN ATTEMPT ON TRUMAN'S LIFE

On 1 November 1950, days after a small group of Nationalists had taken to the streets of Puerto Rico, violently protesting U.S. rule, two men—later identified as Puerto Rican Nationalists Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola—took to the streets of Washington, D.C., with the intention of assassinating President Harry S Truman. Collazo and Torresola came surprisingly close to killing Truman, considering that they had no real plan of action and could not even be sure that the President was at home in the Blair House—Truman's residence while the White House was being renovated. A Secret Service agent's nightmare, the four-story Blair House sits fully exposed to Pennsylvania Avenue traffic and passers-by, who if so compelled could peak through the windows to catch a glimpse of presidential life. The two men easily made their way to the Blair House front door before pulling a pistol on a presidential guard. Having heard shots, Truman woke from a nap and stood in his underwear, watching the gun battle from a window. Torresola and one of the guards were killed in the exchange. Many political pundits commented on the irony of the assassination attempt, for Truman had been perceived as a strong advocate of Puerto Rican self-rule. Truman, however, seemed unphased by the attempt on his life, and the next morning he took his customary brisk stroll through the capital city. When asked to comment on the gunplay, the president responded in typically terse fashion: "A president has to expect those things." The surviving wouldbe assassin, Collazo, was handed a death sentence, which Truman commuted to life imprisonment in 1951. President Jimmy Carter freed Collazo in 1979.

Sources:

Time, (13 November 1950): 20;

New Republic, 123 (13 November 1950): 6.

Source:

Henry R. Nau, The Myth of America's Decline: Leading the World Economy into the 1990s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

HUCKSTERISM AND POLITICS: MADISON AVENUE GETS OUT THE VOTE

Helicopters and Baby Kissing.

By 1950 Madison Avenue copywriters and their pithy slogans were figuring prominently in the campaigns of vote-hungry politicians. But the 1950 elections in Connecticut soon captured the nation's attention: two ad men had teamed up to sell themselves as candidates. Democratic gov. Chester Bowles, up for reelection, and his choice for the vacant Senate seat, William Benton—the two being former partners in the New York advertising firm of Benton and Bowles—toured the state in a helicopter sporting a large placard that read Here's Bill Benton! A sound truck blaring campaign slogans would arrive ahead of the helicopter to attract a crowd, and Benton and Bowles would descend from the skies to pass out campaign buttons and kiss the babies of the dazzled citizenry.

Whiffenpoofers Get Out the Vote.

Not to be out-done, Benton's Republican opponent Prescott S. Bush—Yale class of 1917 and father of future president George Bush—took to the television waves with his former college quartet, the Whiffenpoofers, to serenade the traditionally conservative Connecticut voter with a rendition of "Shine On, Harvest Moon." Also taking on the Madison Avenue high-flying political machine was Congressman John Davis Lodge in his race against Bowles for the governor's seat. Lodge realized that if his campaign were to be successful it had better fall into step with the times, and he began spicing up his political rallies with high-kicking dances performed by his wife, Francesca Bragiotti, a former actress. At the very least, rationalized the Lodge campaign tacticians, the highly visible appearance of Italian-American Bragiotti would corner the much-sought-after Italian vote for their Waspish candidate. Lodge, however, eventually fired his wife from her role in the campaign, deciding that her leggy performances were a bit too distasteful, even in an election year.

Just the Issues.

It seemed that the only Connecticut candidate in the off-year election attempting to stay entirely clear of hucksterism was in the other Senate race: the staid Democratic senator Brien McMahon would make television appearances from behind his desk to discuss his record and his current work on the Atomic Energy Committee. Some political wags cynically predicted that McMahon's issue-centered campaign style would mean certain defeat for the candidate, but they were wrong. McMahon won. Lodge won the governor's race, and Bush lost to Benton.