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Citizens for Eisenhower was an extra-party, candidate-centred organization associated with the Republican party during the 1950s and early 1960s. It emerged in support of Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1952 presidential candidacy; Eisenhower's personal popularity remained the foundation of the Citizens organization.1The activism that Eisenhower inspired achieved unique strength in twentieth-century US politics by bringing the organization a membership of some two million Americans at the height of the 1952 campaign, and in remaining a significant electoral force throughout Eisenhower's time in the White House; no other personally focused political organization had success at such a scale. The cause, furthermore, involved the party as well as a political personality; it first involved a desire to take Eisenhower to the White House, but subsequently extended to a larger goal: that to support the reshaping of the Republican party according to Eisenhower's image, though this extension proved problematic to pursue. In the words of Peter Clayton, a leader of Citizens for Eisenhower, the organization needed 'to translate the enthusiasm which the Eisenhower name has created into a bigger, richer, Republican Party with a Republican President and a Republican Congress in office long after Eisenhower leaves office'.2The Republican party still languished in minority status, as it had done since the arrival of the Great Depression two decades earlier; the mission that Citizens assumed was to challenge that minority status as well as to secure presidential victories for Eisenhower. This article investigates the organization's activities and its impact.
The novelty of Citizens for Eisenhower does not involve its institutional character as a candidate-centred political organization connected with but also separate from a political party. In the 1950s, this kind of organization was by no means unusual in the United States; indeed, limitations on an individual campaign committee's spending encouraged the existence of such entities.3What was unusual was, first, the extent of Eisenhower's popularity on which the organization was based, and, second, the degree of institutional permanence that Citizens for Eisenhower achieved, which was connected with the larger goal of party revitalization that Peter Clayton outlined.
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Despite the strength of its grassroots organization and despite the boldness of its goals, Citizens for Eisenhower has attracted little scholarly...