To see how far along this dastardly path we have crawled, it is important to remember that Dwight David Eisenhower called himself "a militant liberal." On l6 November l953, he wrote to John Foster Dulles that his Administration was "committed to ... policies that will bring the greatest good to the greatest number. This means that there must be lifted from the minds of men the fears of disaster, poverty, and old age." He campaigned for national health care and appointed former Women's Army Corps commander, Oveta Culp Hobby to head his new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Together with Eleanor Roosevelt and her friend Esther Lape they fought for the kind of single-payer health plan to cover all Americans the US has been unable to achieve. Eisenhower was contemptuous of the powerful lobby that deboned his program, leaving the US with the Health Reinsurance Act of l957, and pursued more liberal policies: He increased the minimum wage, extended the excess-profits tax, expanded the public-housing program (there was no homelessness under IKE), and warned the nation of the dangers of the military- industrial-complex, which he originally called the congressional-industrial-military complex.
Eisenhower wrote his brother Edgar on 2 May l956: "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again.... There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H.L. Hunt... a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." Today, there is bipartisan silence about homelessness, and candidates ignore the suffering poor. Republicans talk about our "ownership society." People like it when they "own" their own cars, and houses, and insurance policies. That there are seven to l0 million homeless Americans, some of whom who go to work and to school from their cars and their vans, apparently does not diminish our "ownership" society * and nobbody insists on a revitalized federal housing program, brutally defunded by Ronald Reagan. Since then not one federal dollar has gone into new housing starts. [To understand the red and blue shifts on our political map, one must turn to l968 when LBJ expanded the Roosevelt-Eisenhower Wagner Housing Act, and promised to end segregation in housing. After that, Dixiecrats became Republicans.]