ABSTRACT
For Dwight D. Eisenhower, reared in the rural Midwest during the first decade of the twentieth century, the American ideals portrayed in his textbooks were as sacred as the truths of the Bible. The collective portrait of a family on the poor side of town, south of the railroad tracks, after the hard times of David Eisenhower, hardly suggests that the children were accustomed to middle-class comforts. And Dwight, reared in pious and impecunious circumstances, worked as a youth at various odd jobs in Abilene, in addition to his period of time at the creamery, and had every reason to trust the Horatio Alger success stories that were a fulfillment of, as Herbert Croly called his 1909 book, “the promise of American life.” General Eisenhower would one day cite their varied opinions to Russian Army Marshal Zhukov as an example of the freedom of thought that was possible in America.
