A lot of people associate the 1950s with peace and prosperity, before everything went to hell in the 1960s. It would seem like the public shouldn’t have a reason to turn against the Republicans in that decade if times were so good. What do you think explains it? Perhaps the 1950s weren’t as peaceful as they are portrayed? How did Ike screw things up?
As an aside, I think it is the decade we reached our cultural zenith, perhaps even a couple years into the 1960s. But 1965 onwards, we’ve been in a rapid cultural decline.
But aside from that, the 1950s was really the eye of the hurricane. Look closely and you could see there were many serious problems that surrounded us. Truman’s failure to defeat Mao, which has caused us no end of problems ever since (a National China would never have unleashed bacteriological warfare on the world). Failure to take McCarthy’s warning seriously and rid the country and institutions of a deep-seated Communist infiltration. Ike found McCarthy to be more of a problem, which was a serious failure of leadership.
Also the failure to curtail the size and scope of the federal government, tax rates, et al. I think the country was doing well in spite of this, but our growth rates could’ve been off the charts if Ike had rolled things back to Harding-level governance.
The 1958 elections was the crash of the decade, the worst since the 1936 elections. It was one of the worst loss of seats, especially in the Senate where the GOP lost the most number of seats in a single election. This was due to the Recession of the same year, blamed on Ike (the GOP was already in the minority, but not by much). Another issue was the public’s perception we were falling behind the Soviets. Stronger leadership on Ike’s part could’ve prevented both, but he simply wasn’t a Conservative. He wasn’t raised as one (his father was a Socialist) and didn’t really believe in small government ideals.