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also internal developments, only marginally influenced by events abroad,
that have been important in altering the political and the intellectual
climate: I think especially of the whole speed of change in the South,
including the fight over desegregation, of the increasing gap between
the generations produced by differential education and experience, and
of the consequences of electing an aggressive anti-clerical Irish Catholic
to the presidency.
To take the last of these first, the election has strengthened an al–
liance attempted but never consummated in the pre-War era: that be–
tween Protestant and Catholic fundamentalism. As a conservative, an at
least nominal Republican, a general, and a man of old-fashioned budget–
balancing morality, Eisenhower could for a time reassure various old–
guards in American life that they need not bother their heads about poli–
tics. Such people might crusade locally to prevent the fluoridation of
water (which some regarded as a Communist-capitalist plot and an inva–
sion of the "states' rights" inherent in every human body). And such
people might make sure that there were various subjects, such as the
recognition of Red China, that it was impolitic for school teachers,
librarians, or Congressmen to raise. However, public opinion pollers in
the 1956 presidential election campaign reported a wide-spread torpor,
even an incipient "era of good feeling ;" and in the early Eisenhower
era the call for national purpose trumpeted by a few intellectuals and
publicists seemed as out of place as an evangelist at a country club.
As Samuel Lubell has pointed out on the basis of his surveys, this
complacency was jarred, first by Sputnik, then by the dramatic rise of
Khrushchev, and most recently by Castro. President Kennedy fought his
campaign on the basis of an ascetic insistence on sacrifice, reminiscent
of Theodore Roosevelt's belief in strenuousness, in American destiny,
and in patrician and intellectual responsibility. His victory released the
Republican radical Right and the fundamentalist Democrats North
and South from many of the quite mild restraints that Eisenhower's
presence had imposed, while bringing into office and thereby more
or less "muzzling" a number of the most influential spokesmen for a
liberal politics. Thus while Kennedy's election antagonized some busi–
nessmen, evangelical Protestants, and others who had felt less threatened
under Eisenhower, it diminished the possibility of a liberal and radical
opposition.· For, a little like de Gaulle in France, Kennedy on the one
hand seemed a protection against pressures from the American Poujad–
ists and the other discontented classes, while at the same time he ap–
peared to embrace many of the hopes of the intellectuals.
Indeed some of the latter have even thought that the new Ad-
