On page 510 of Nixon: The Education of a Politician, Stephen
Ambrose states that President Dwight Eisenhower focused on the gains
the United States had made, whereas Vice-President Richard Nixon tended
to look at the losses. Ambrose attributes this to the different
background of the two men: Eisenhower was born in the nineteenth century
and was "the son of a laborer in rural Kansas", whereas Nixon was "born
in the second decade of the twentieth century" and was "the son of a
grocery-store owner" (page 510). Ambrose's point is probably that
Eisenhower saw a lot of advancement over the course of his lifetime, and
so he tended to be more optimistic than Richard Nixon, who lived after
some of the advancements had already taken place.
An example of
where Eisenhower was optimistic whereas Nixon was pessimistic could be
seen at a meeting of Republican leaders, where Nixon was talking about
"tax exemption for tuition payments to private schools" (Ambrose on page
510). Nixon was lamenting the "whole erosion of the middle
class", as "the very wealthy do very well, but the middle class is
sinking" (Nixon's words). According to Ambrose, Nixon was speaking for
his professional and small-businessmen constituency, who did not care
for the advancement of labor unions, the increase in federal
regulations, and taxes they were having to pay.
But
Eisenhower cut off Nixon, saying that the middle-class was not
declining, for working people were becoming part of the middle-class and
were sending their sons off to college.
But, when
Nixon was debating with Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, Nixon had
a more favorable opinion of the distribution of wealth in the U.S.
Nixon said: "...the United States...has from the standpoint of
distribution of wealth come closest to the idea of prosperity for all in
a classless society...The caricature of capitalism as a predatory,
monopolist-dominated society is as hopelessly out of date, as far as the
United States is concerned, as a wooden plow."
Did Nixon
contradict himself? Perhaps, in the sense that at one point he
presented a picture in which the wealthy were well-off even as the
middle-class was eroding, while at another point he was arguing that the
middle-class was prospering under the American system. But I think
that the same ideology was underneath both sentiments. Nixon believed
that capitalism benefited the middle-class because it allowed for
greater productivity of goods that elevated people's standard of living,
while creating more opportunities to earn money. But Nixon, like his
political base, probably thought that certain labor policies and acts of
government intervention into the economy were chipping away at the
middle-class.
The reason that Ambrose's discussion on page 510
stood out to me was because of the rhetoric today about the decline of
the middle-class. Many on the Left who use that rhetoric
actually point to the Eisenhower years as a time when the middle class
was at its strongest. Moreover, they wouldn't attribute the decline of
the middle-class to certain labor policies or acts of government
intervention into the economy. Rather, they'd say that strong labor
unions were a significant contributor to the existence of a large and
robust middle-class during the 1950's, and so they'd probably appreciate
Eisenhower's insight that the working people were becoming the
middle-class. Moreover, they'd attribute the decline of the
middle-class to President Ronald Reagan's attempts to roll back
government intervention into the economy. They might overlap
with Nixon on the issue of taxes, however, particularly the importance
of lessening the tax burden on small businesspeople.