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"The Glory of America." Ike's faults are those that his countrymen can share and understand, and in his virtues he is more than anything else a repository of traditional U.S. values derived from his boyhood in Abilene, Kans., instilled in him by his fundamentalist parents, drilled into him at West Point, tempered by wartime command, applied to the awesome job of the presidency and expanded to meet the challenges of the cold war.
Returning to Abilene in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower spoke of his mother and father. "They were frugal," he said, "possibly of necessity, because I have found out in later years that we were very poor. But the glory of America is that we didn't know it then." In a 1959 speech, he again drew on his memories, going back to his days as an Army subaltern, newly married to Mamie Geneva Doud, when he scrimped to buy a tiny insurance policy. "Well," he said, "I gave up smoking readymade cigarettes and went to Bull Durham and the papers.* I had to make a great many sacrifices . . . Yet I still think of the fun we had in working for our own future."
Fiscal responsibility was more than a nostalgic, negative notion with Ike. He saw it as the basis of a positive philosophy of government. Against the background of the New and Fair Deals, with their momentum toward more Government spending and control, Ike's philosophy was as radical as it was conservative. He explained it best in a little-noticed 1959 speech to representatives of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, gathered in Washington to holler it up for continued Government subsidy of rural electrification.
"Government, at all levels, has certain clear obligations to you and me," said he to a hostile audience. "It owes us security from external attack, protection of our person and property, protection in the exercise of all the individual rights guaranteed by our Constitution." Government may also help out "particular groups" with special aid or subsidy. But the reason for help or subsidy "is not to give one group of citizens special privilege or undeserved advantage. Rather it is to see that equality of opportunity is not withheld from the citizen through no fault of his own." The groups for which the Government has made special provision must "use that help responsibly and constructively." The aim should be to rise as swiftly as possible above public aid and "re-establish speedily our own equality of opportunity, and so share proportionately in the productivity of our economy."
The Essential Cut. Taking his oath of office in 1953, Eisenhower moved swiftly to liberate the U.S. economy from the obsolete wartime controls that still hobbled it. Fair Deal economists issued dark warnings, but the economy whooshed off toward new highs. The doom criers were again out full force in the worrisome days of Recession Year 1958 when Eisenhower refused to use Government's heavy thumb for pushing the panacea buttons of subsidy and deficit spending.