When I was in grade school, during the Eisenhower re-election campaign, I remember the teacher asking who we would vote for if we could. What I most vividly remember about that is the fact that I was the only person in the classroom who raised their hand for Adlai Stevenson. The only one.
In those days I was way too young to appreciate Eisenhower’s stance on corporate taxes, or much of anything else. And today I wonder what the young ones do understand about what’s going on in the world of politics.
My classroom at the time was not far from what would later become the Silicon Valley. It had been agricultural, part of Charles Weeks' demonstration project ( Egg Farming in California is his book about his dream.) He believed that a family could support itself on a relatively small property, raising chickens and growing vegetables. There were orchards— almonds, walnuts, pears, avocados, apples— and goats in the area too.
But after the war things were changing. We, the students in the elementary school, were pretty much all children of soldiers and sailors recently back from WWII. Subdivisions were the new thing, gradually replacing the egg farms. We, the kids, didn’t really understand much of anything I guess, including why one of the main streets in the neighborhood was named Runnymede, and another named Weeks.
But we had drills to make us ready for when an atomic bomb was dropped on San Francisco, something we were led to believe might well happen. Duck and cover under our desks, and then walk home afterwards. I used to think walking toward the dropped bomb would be the best option. That way you would almost certainly die.
My classmates were almost all white. I recall a couple of Japanese American girls. One Hispanic female. Later on I would come to understand that the Japanese American families were just back from interment camps and lucky to have their homes and businesses.
There was a tremendous effort to hustle us out of the area so the real estate guys could sell the properties to the Black population that was migrating to California for jobs in manufacturing and such. I remember a real estate agent actually coming to our home and telling my parents “they” were moving into the area and it would be in my parents’ best interest to sell our house and get out of there ASAP. And they did, as did hundreds, perhaps thousands of other white families. Subsequently, instead of chickens, the area became notorious for crime and violence.
But we didn’t know anything about what Eisenhower was doing, or wanted to do. In my household the only issue was his political party. It wasn’t Democratic, so that was that.
So I raised my hand for Adlai Stevenson, who didn’t make the cut with the national electorate of course. It would take me awhile to understand what it was all about, how politics really works. And that Eisenhower actually did have a couple of really good ideas.