... (yes, that was Ike) also signed off on adding "under God" to the Pledge. You can't get everything right, and it's not his fault that idjits like Sarah Palin who have no concept of history now think we've had The Pledge since 1776 and that our money has included In God We Trust since the same time. Some of the same ones no doubt villify him for school integration.
Which is by way of saying thanks for a fairly comprehensive overview. I researched it back about 2002 after a friend sent out an email blast to her entire address book that began with a soppy picture of two golden-haired tots with prayerful hands and eyes raised to heaven, backed by a flowing US flag, and went on from there to equate patriotism with religion. My reply was well-researched, historical, and blistering, and of course I hit reply-all.
As for Eisenhower, I respect the man, now that I know more about him. I remember his administration from a child's-eye perspective, which is to say the parts I could see and I didn't necessarily connect them with him. My classmates and I had slogged through learning the Pledge back in first grade, and we all had to stumble every morning until we re-learned it with the addition.
Now I know it was related to the Cold War, which to the old general was serious in every way (it was), and he was open to persuasion that one more thing in the cultural part of the war would be to subtly emphasize that while the Commies were godless (they were officially atheist and brutally suppressed religious expression), the US was not godless.
I don't think for a minute he meant the US was supposed to be solely Christian -- post-WWII / post-Holocaust most public religious expressions on civic occasions in the US tended to be relatively generic and inoffensive to any of the three Abrahamic religious traditions. That is, God was referred to as "father" and not Jesus. Evangelicals called themselves Fundamentalists and were considered a fringe group, socially and politically, not a powerful and fearsome socio-political movement.
As for school integration using military troops -- I wonder how many people even remember that it was Eisenhower? We should. Brown vs Board of Education said "with all deliberate speed," and Ike speeded it up all right. The images coming in on our little B/W tv were absolutely searing, as were the ones in LIFE magazine. Little children like me in every way but color were being screamed at by mommies and daddies ... It was a couple of thousand miles away, yet in our living room.
Why integrate and why Eisenhower? If I had to guess, I'd have to say that to the General who liberated Europe and the concentration camps: because America was supposed to be infinitely better than that. If we were not Commies, we were also not Nazis.
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