From Little Rock Liberation to Educational Destruction

The Little Rock result had a lasting effect. As Pipes says, "Little Rock guaranteed that integration would prevail. No one could doubt that the federal government had the power to enforce it . . . . the greatest impact was on the civil rights movement itself. Little Rock proved that integration would be enforced by the federal government even at the point of a gun. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., though outraged by the mob violence, called Little Rock a 'blessing in disguise.'"

That blessing also brought a curse: the expansion of federal government power that led to the not-so-Great Society of the 1960s and to forced busing that, sadly, led many families to leave urban school systems: The federal government (and some federal judges in particular) went from fostering integration to requiring it, so that what initially enabled free movement soon turned into court-mandated overrides.

Nevertheless, Eisenhower deserves credit for working to advance the American experiment of e pluribus unum, an impossible mission according to most cultures in world history. He also deserves credit for understanding that he was creating a troublesome precedent -- but since man' s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, mixed results have been our lot.