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When Republicans Last Ruled the EarthIke couldn't tame the '53-'55 GOP House and Senate. Will Dubya do any better?

By David GreenbergPosted Thursday, Jan. 4, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

George W. Bush In a few weeks, the presidency and both chambers of Congress will be under Republican control for the first time since 1953-55. The Republicans' slim majority in the 107^th Congress—221-212-2 in the House; 50-50 in the Senate (with the vice president casting the tiebreaker)—echoes the spread in the 83^rd Congress, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president and the GOP ran both the House (221-213-1) and Senate (48-47-1). The millennial hat trick has some Republicans eyeing a promised land of conservative redemption. "I've been waiting all my life to have a Republican president and a Republican Congress," gushed Texas Sen. Phil Gramm. If 1953-55 is any example, though, Gramm may not enjoy the salvation of his fantasies.

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Needless to say, it's not the '50s anymore—the Cold War is over, and the '60s revolutionized our social landscape—so comparisons to the 83^rd Congress go only so far. And yet in both cases, the GOP elected a conservative president who wavered between following the lead of his party's ideologues and trying to save them from their own excesses. In both cases the president used a seductive slogan (Ike's "Modern Republicanism" versus Bush's "Compassionate Conservatism") to mask tensions between the unreconstructed rank-and-file's reactionary agenda and the wider culture's wish to leave liberal attainments in place. In 1955, the Republicans relinquished control of Congress after a session marked by internecine fighting, a farrago of pro-business deals and anti-communist calamities, and an ultimately slender record of accomplishment. Bush and the 107^th Congress should beware.

Related in Slate

If you missed the links in this article, click here for more on the phrase "Modern Republicanism" and here for info on a brief period of GOP dominance. For a list of sources used for this article, click here. Earlier this year, David Greenberg wrote a "History Lesson" about Republicans and civil rights, including this sidebar about Eisenhower's extra-moderate approach. He also assessed Adlai Stevenson, who twice lost the presidency to Eisenhower. In 1998, Timothy Noah summed up the 105^th Congress, the most do-nothing Republican Congress since the 83^rd.

Related on the Web

For tons of information about President Eisenhower, visit his presidential library home page and the Eisenhower Center home page. Click here for a list of dozens of books about Joe McCarthy, the most troublesome Republican in the 83^rd Congress. This bio of Robert Taft, Eisenhower's isolationist rival in the Senate, is hardly unbiased, but it is thorough.

Entering the 1952 elections, Republicans held neither the White House nor the House nor the Senate, and just twice before (in 1800 and 1840) had a party totally shut out of power won the trifecta in a single year. But the GOP pulled off the feat that fall, returning to complete dominance for the first time since 1930. Like the Phil Gramms of today, those Republicans were thirsting to exercise power. Their only obstacle to doing so, it turned out, was their new leader.

On the issues dear to the Old Guard—questions of private versus public interest—Eisenhower did fall in line behind his party's stalwarts. President and Congress alike endorsed the dictum of Secretary of Defense Charlie Wilson: that what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Ike backed Congress' controversial decision to cede to the states (and effectively to business) the $300 billion worth of natural resources (mainly oil) that lay underwater along American shores. Ike also joined with his partymates to pass the Atomic Energy Act, which allowed private industry to produce atomic power, and the St. Lawrence Seaway Act, which green-lighted construction of the canal under terms favorable to private developers. On taxes, too, Ike and the Republicans (along with some Democrats) cut corporate and excise taxes and handed out a bevy of new deductions.

Dwight D. Eisenhower If Eisenhower supported Congress on economic issues because he shared their pro-business outlook, he followed them on questions of anti-communism because of the dicey politics of the issue. Ike's unwillingness to oppose Sen. Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism in general brought the nation some of its most shameful moments. In his first two years, Eisenhower tightened the federal "loyalty" program to weed out "security risks," allowed the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and agreed to revoke the security clearance of Manhattan Project physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. He also signed into law the Communist Control Act, which denied to the Communist Party "all rights, privileges and immunities attendant upon legal bodies." Of course, the bill's prime movers—enthusiasts of bipartisanship take note—were Sen. Hubert Humphrey and other liberal Democrats who feared being tarred as "soft on communism." Only in 1954 did Ike begin inching away from McCarthy, and when he did he incurred the wrath of the party's hard right (extreme anti-communists started calling Ike a pinko). Conveniently for Eisenhower, McCarthy soon self-destructed.

On other issues, however, Eisenhower often found his partymates more nettlesome than the opposition, not unlike recent presidents whose parties have controlled Congress (Jimmy Carter in 1977-1981; Bill Clinton in 1993-1995). The main area of trouble was foreign policy, where Eisenhower aggressively tried to reshape his party. A belief that the world's nations depended on one another for security had first emboldened Ike to seek the Republican nomination in 1952. (He feared that Sen. Robert Taft, an isolationist, would lead the nation into retreat and the party into ruin.) And once in office he sought to steer his party a new course rather than following Congress' lead.

But over foreign aid, trade, and immigration, Congress fought with the president. In each case, Ike favored a liberalized program, and in each case his party's isolationists forced him to scale back his plans. Nonetheless, in agreeing to compromises on these issues, Eisenhower ultimately won victories. In the process, he converted many isolationists into at least part-time internationalists and thus built the beginnings of a Republican consensus behind military and economic engagement with the world. Engineering this shift marked probably his greatest success as president.

The Republicans fought among themselves on other issues, too, particularly Social Security. Anti-New Dealers in Congress wanted to eliminate the program, which they saw as "creeping socialism." But Ike again led his party into the modern age, expanding benefits to cover farm workers and domestic laborers—thereby correcting the racial bias that had kept the large numbers of blacks in these jobs from receiving benefits. Ultimately, he got sizable majorities of his own party to sign on to his reforms. Finally, in one last area—perhaps the most important of all—Eisenhower overcame conservative resistance to appoint California Gov. Earl Warren as chief justice of the United States.

In the 1954 elections, the Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress, leaving the 83^rd Congress with few accomplishments to look back on. Whether the 107^th Congress can achieve more is impossible to predict. Like Ike, George W. Bush will face an ideological Congress that intends to offer advantages for business. He too will almost certainly come under pressure to place new constraints on civil rights and civil liberties, whether on abortion or religious freedom. And he too will confront a renewed isolationism within his own ranks that will demand farsighted leadership. Eisenhower, the record shows, pulled off only a passable job of resisting his party's extremism and guiding it toward a forward-looking agenda. In that sense, he set a relatively low bar for Bush to jump. Of course, Bush has gone lower before.

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David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998.

Photographs of: George W. Bush from Reuters/Corbis; Dwight D. Eisenhower from Bettmann/Corbis.

COMMENTS

Reader Comments From The Fray:

[Notes from the Fray Editor: There were three points many posters wanted to make: The Rosenbergs were guilty, and does Phil Gramm's "waiting all his life" for the Republican trifecta include the period he was actually a Democrat? And let's look again at that famous Charlie Wilson quote… ]

Instructive parallels between Bush and Eisenhower can be drawn in how each has structured his own Administration. Eisenhower's represented the closest we have ever gotten to Cabinet government. Eisenhower delegated extensively and preferred his Cabinet secretaries to work out differences among themselves, though he was careful to supervise closely those policy areas that mattered most to him, chiefly defense and foreign policy.

The structure of Eisenhower's Administration appeared to give more authority to Cabinet secretaries than it actually did, however. This is because an individual Cabinet department can be easily checked by other departments or by Congress if it strays too far outside areas of public consensus. The key for a Cabinet head is not his nominal autonomy but how closely the policies he promotes reflect the President's own preferences and the level of commitment the President chooses to give them. Thus, in the Eisenhower Administration the most influential Cabinet Secretary was probably Dulles, in whose policy area the President himself was most involved.

What does this mean for Bush's Administration? I suggest one key lesson for his Cabinet secretaries, at least where major issues are involved, is not to take too seriously the idea that President Bush has delegated them more authority their predecessors were given by earlier Presidents who more obviously sought to concentrate authority in the White House. Whether the secretary is Powell seeking to increase foreign assistance spending, Rumsfeld trying to rationalize the Pentagon's procurement wish list with its budget, or (especially) Thompson attempting to deal with prescription drugs, welfare and entitlement reform, he will succeed only if he can carry the President along with him.

--Joseph Britt

(To reply, click here.)

Not only did Ike fail to oppose Senator McCarthy in his witchhunt, he was also responsible for adding the words "under god" to our pledge of allegiance and putting "In God We Trust" on our currency, even though the elegant "E Pluribus Unum" was yet perfectly serviceable. Recall as well that when the Cold War really got going and we realized we had better trust a bit less in god and a bit more in science, the GOP dropped their passion for proclaiming the Christian character of our nation and started funding weapons research.

--Illoe

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One major achievement of the 83rd Congress that impacts every single American is the Internal Revenue Code of 1954. The tax laws had been codified 15 years earlier in the Internal Revenue Code of 1939, but the '54 code was a major revision. I don't know if tax reform was on Mr. Eisenhower's agenda, but there can be no doubt that it is at the top of Mr. Bush's list. I think that where Mr. Bush will fail in getting all that he wants in the way of tax legislation, Congress will succeed in a bipartisan way on most other issues.

--Tony Adragna

(To reply, click here.)

I have seen over and over again various Congresses rated on what they have done while in office. I believe this to be a mostly false indicator. I believe that by and large Government presently overreaches the bounds that should be ascribed to it in our society today. I am not looking for an activist Congress but rather hope for one in which particular care is taken before any action is taken. I would in fact rather that they remove a number of existing laws (historically tends not to be the case).

Congressmen, however, know that they are rated on what they have done and not by what they have not done. The result, I believe, is quite a bit of bad and even unconstitutional law meant more to display that they are doing something for their constituency (this happens on both the right and left). These feel-good laws often have unintended consequences which cost this nation dearly. The results of bad laws are most often addressed by future Congresses. The incentive structure is to pass something--anything. I would take a few well-written laws or none at all over many knee jerk reactions to today's news.

Gridlock is by and large OK with me. When real emergencies occur, we tend to get bipartisanship. I take my hat off to the Founders in that respect--I think they knew what they were doing.

--Michael Murray

(To reply, click here.)

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