ABSTRACT
To Americans at the time, the November 1952 presidential election was a momentous event. For the first time in 24 years the Republican Party won the White House, breaking a string of five straight Democratic successes. As U.S. political commentators debated the reasons for this stunning reversal, three issues stood out—Korea, communism, and corruption—but few doubted that the first of these, the ongoing bloody stalemated war in Korea, was by far the most crucial. Parents whose sons had been drafted “were bitterly resentful of the [Harry S. Truman] administration,” writer and pollster Samuel Lubell observed after talking to many of them during the campaign. For other Americans, even the bread-and-butter economic issues that so often dominate presidential campaigns seemed subordinate to the war. “Surprising numbers of voters came to resent the prevailing prosperity as being ‘bought by the lives of boys in Korea,’” Lubell explained. “The feeling was general that the Korean War was all that stood in the way of an economic recession,” he concluded. “From accepting that belief, many persons moved on emotionally to where they felt something immoral and guilt-laden in the ‘you’ve never had it better’ argument of the Democrats” (Lubell 1956: 39–40).
