Why Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock in 1957

On the morning of September 4, 1957, a fifteen-year-old girl named Elizabeth Eckford got off a city bus in Little Rock, Arkansas, dressed in a new school outfit she had sewn herself, and walked toward Central High School alone. The other eight Black students who were supposed to start classes that day had gathered elsewhere and gone together. Elizabeth had no telephone at home, so the message about the change of plan never reached her. She walked past a line of Arkansas National Guardsmen, who had been ordered there by the governor of her state, and into a crowd that screamed at her for most of a city block. The guardsmen did not let her through the door.

Hold that picture in your mind, because it is the cleanest example in American history of the thing conservatives claim to care about most: the rule of law. A federal judge had ordered the school opened to those students. The governor of Arkansas had used armed state troops to stop it. And the man in the White House, a Republican and a career soldier who was in no hurry to pick this fight, had to decide whether the Constitution was a law or a suggestion. Let me tell you what Dwight Eisenhower did, why he did it, and why it belongs in the conservative canon rather than the embarrassing-uncle drawer where some people keep it.

The order that started it

Start in 1954. On May 17 of that year, in Brown v. Board of Education, a unanimous Supreme Court held that state-required racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868. A year later, in the follow-up decision usually called Brown II, the Court told local school boards to proceed "with all deliberate speed," a phrase that gave a great many officials an excuse to deliberate and very little reason to speed.

Little Rock's school board did not take that road. It adopted a plan of gradual integration, beginning with the high school in the fall of 1957, and the plan was approved by a federal court. Nine Black students were chosen to enter Central High: Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Minnijean Brown, Gloria Ray, Thelma Mothershed and Melba Pattillo. They have been called the Little Rock Nine ever since. Nobody sneaked them in. The school board, the superintendent and the courts had all signed off. That detail matters, because it is what makes the governor's next move a defiance of lawful process and not a quarrel over a policy.

The governor and the Guard

The governor of Arkansas was Orval Faubus, a Democrat. On the night of September 2, 1957, the eve of the school year, he announced that he was calling out the Arkansas National Guard to Central High. His stated reason was that he feared violence and was acting to keep order. The effect was that the Guard stood at the doors and kept the nine students out. Whatever the intention, a state official had used state armed force to stop the enforcement of a federal court order, and that is not a close constitutional question.

A federal district judge, Ronald Davies, who had been brought in from North Dakota to hear the case, ordered the integration plan to proceed and, on September 20, issued an injunction barring the governor from using the Guard to block it. Faubus withdrew the Guard. On Monday, September 23, the nine students entered the school through a side door while a mob gathered outside, and the local police, fearing they could not hold the crowd, removed the students before noon. The mayor of Little Rock, Woodrow Mann, sent a telegram to the White House asking for federal help.

Eisenhower had met with Faubus on September 14 at Newport, Rhode Island, hoping to settle the matter without force, and he had come away believing the governor would obey the court. So by the morning of September 24 the situation was this. A court order had been issued. The state had first obstructed it, then withdrawn, and then a mob had accomplished by force what the Guard had accomplished by order. If the President stood down, the lesson to every other governor and every other mob in the country would be that a federal judge's order lasts exactly as long as the crowd allows it.

Executive Order 10730

Eisenhower acted. On September 23 he issued a proclamation commanding those obstructing the court's orders to disperse, and on September 24 he signed Executive Order 10730. The order did two things. It authorized the Secretary of Defense to use the armed forces to enforce the court orders, and it brought the Arkansas National Guard, the very force Faubus had used at the schoolhouse door, into federal service under the President's command. The statutes he relied on are the ones now collected in the Insurrection Act, the laws that let a President use troops to enforce federal law when state authorities will not or cannot.

The troops sent from the 101st Airborne Division, the "Screaming Eagles" who had jumped into Normandy in 1944, numbered about 1,000 paratroopers. On September 25 soldiers escorted the nine students into Central High past the crowd, with bayonets fixed. The nine attended class under guard. Federalized guardsmen remained at the school through the rest of that year, and the active-duty paratroopers were pulled back within a few months.

That night Eisenhower had gone on television to explain himself, and the sentence from that address that carries the argument is this one: "Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts." He framed the decision as a duty that came with his oath, not as a verdict on how fast a community ought to change. He was enforcing a judgment.

This was the first time since Reconstruction that a President had sent federal troops into a Southern state to protect the rights of Black citizens. Ulysses Grant had done it in the 1870s against the Klan, as you can read in How Ulysses Grant used a brand-new Justice Department against the Klan. The party of Lincoln and Grant had, after eighty years, finally done it again.

The steelman: the objections from both directions

A fair post states the opposition at full strength, so let me do that. There are two serious objections, and they come from opposite ends of the room.

The federalism objection. Education was a state and local matter, the argument goes, and the Constitution never gave Washington a general power to run schools. A President sending paratroopers to a high school looks like the central government steamrolling a state. Conservatives who believe in the 10th Amendment should be uneasy about that, and plenty were at the time. Eisenhower himself did not like the idea of using force and had hoped to avoid it.

The not-enough objection. From the other side, critics have said Eisenhower was far too slow and too quiet. He never publicly endorsed Brown when it was decided, he said in effect that laws alone could not change hearts, and he tried to negotiate with Faubus rather than confront him. If the President had spoken clearly about the decision in 1954, the argument goes, the crisis might never have come.

Both objections have some truth. Neither changes the answer to the question Eisenhower was actually facing in September 1957.

The answer in four points

Here is the argument, the way I would lay it out for a skeptical friend.

1. The 10th Amendment protects the powers the states have, not the power to nullify a federal court. Article VI makes the Constitution and laws made under it "the supreme Law of the Land." The 14th Amendment, which the same Republican Party wrote and ratified, binds the states, and its fifth section gives Congress the power to enforce it. A state may run its schools, but it may not run them in a way the Constitution forbids, and a governor has no authority to decide for himself which court orders he will honor.
2. The President's duty is in the text. Article II tells the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." When the ordinary tools of enforcement fail, and a federal marshal cannot get a court order carried out against a mob and a governor's troops, the President has to be able to reach for more. Congress had long since written statutes for just that purpose, dating back to the 1790s and strengthened after the Civil War. Eisenhower did not invent a power. He used one that Congress had handed him.
3. The question was never integration. It was whether an order means anything. Imagine the precedent if the governor had prevailed. The next governor facing a different order, perhaps one that conservatives like, such as a ruling protecting a church's property or a farmer's land, would have the same playbook: call out the Guard, wait for a crowd, and claim you were only preserving order. The rule of law is a two-way street, and the road is only safe for you if it is safe for everybody.
4. The remedy was proportionate. He did not nationalize the school system, fire the school board or occupy Little Rock for a decade. He used the minimum force needed to enforce one order for nine students, and the paratroopers left.

That fourth point is the one I would hand to any friend who wants to argue about executive power. Conservatives are right to distrust a President who reaches for emergency authority to get a policy he cannot pass. They are also right to expect a President to use ordinary, lawful, narrow power to enforce a final judgment of a court. These are not the same thing. Little Rock was the second. If you want a test you can run on any presidential action, take a look at Justice Jackson's Three-Box Test for Presidential Power, Put to Work and ask which box the action falls into. Eisenhower's order lands in the first box, where the President acts with the authority of Congress behind him.

The law behind the Guard: where the executive order fits

It helps to be plain about what an executive order is. It is not a law. It is a written direction from the President to the executive branch about how to carry out laws that already exist or powers the Constitution already grants. An executive order that has no statute or constitutional power under it is worthless, and a court will say so. Number 10730 had both. It cited the statutes Congress had passed to let the President use the armed forces to enforce federal court orders, and it rested on the President's duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed.

This is why the story should interest anyone who reads about executive orders today. The test is never whether you like what the order does. The test is whether a statute or a clause of the Constitution stands underneath it. You can see that test applied from the other direction in the long fight over who may block whom, which I walk through in One Judge, One Injunction, One Country, and How Federal Courts Block Policy. In Little Rock, the court order came first and the executive order served it. The President was the enforcer, not the author, of the policy.

What came next: the law, the Court and the closed schools

The crisis did not end when the paratroopers arrived. It left three lasting results.

First, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which Eisenhower signed on September 9, 1957, just days after the standoff began. It was the first civil rights statute since Reconstruction, and it created the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice and a Commission on Civil Rights. It was a modest law, and the Senate softened it before it passed. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina spoke against it for more than twenty-four hours in one of the longest filibuster speeches on record. Modest or not, the law put a permanent office in the Justice Department whose entire job was civil rights enforcement. That office has been at work for nearly seventy years.

Second, Ernest Green graduated from Central High in May 1958, the first Black graduate in the school's history. The year was not easy for any of the nine. They were harassed in the halls by some students, and Minnijean Brown was expelled in February 1958 after an incident in the cafeteria. But the others stayed, and the order held.

Third, the Supreme Court weighed in again. In 1958 a district judge granted the Little Rock school board a delay of its integration plan, citing the unrest, and the court of appeals reversed him. The Supreme Court refused to allow the delay. In Cooper v. Aaron, decided in 1958, all nine justices signed the opinion individually, an unusual step meant to send a message that no member of the Court was wavering. The opinion stated that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution, leaning on Marbury v. Madison (1803), and that state officials are bound by the Court's rulings. If you want the background on how the Court got that power, read Marbury v. Madison and the Power the Supreme Court Gave Itself in 1803. There is a fair argument among conservatives about how far the statement in Cooper should be pushed. But the narrow holding, that a governor and a legislature cannot lawfully nullify a federal court's judgment, is the foundation of law and order.

And what of Governor Faubus? After Cooper v. Aaron, he used new powers from the Arkansas legislature to close Little Rock's high schools for the 1958-59 school year. The students in the city's high schools lost a year, which people there still call the Lost Year. In 1959 the city's voters ousted the segregationist members of the school board and the schools reopened. The episode is a perfect illustration of what defying a court order costs, and who pays: families, not governors.

What Republicans should take from it

I have heard it said that Little Rock proves Republicans are comfortable with a big, aggressive executive. I think it proves the opposite, and here is the distinction I would draw. A conservative objects to power used to make law. He does not object to power used to keep law, especially a final judgment of a court that the Constitution gives the final word. The first kind of power is why we have a Constitution that separates powers. The second kind is why we have a President at all.

Eisenhower had no taste for the job. He was a cautious man, and he had spent his life in the Army learning that you do not commit forces unless you are prepared to see it through. But he understood that a country in which a governor can set aside a federal court by posting troops at a school door is a country without a legal system, and everything the rest of us own, from a farm deed to a pension to a business contract, depends on the legal system. That is what makes the story conservative.

There is a modern echo for every administration, too. The same principle that made Eisenhower right to enforce a judgment against a hostile governor obliges a Republican White House to follow an unfavorable ruling from a federal judge while it appeals. If you cheer the first and then cheer the opposite when your side holds the office, you never believed in the principle. You believed in your side winning. Our movement can do better, and the record shows that it has.

The bottom line

• Little Rock was a case about whether a federal court order means anything. Eisenhower enforced it with the narrowest force that would work, and then withdrew.
• Executive power is legitimate when it enforces a statute or a final judgment and suspect when it invents policy. Use that test on every President, of either party.
• The 14th Amendment, the 1957 Civil Rights Act and Cooper v. Aaron are part of Republican and conservative history. Know them, and know who wrote them.
• When someone tells you the GOP has no record on civil rights, hand them the date: September 24, 1957. When someone tells you the rule of law is a liberal idea, hand them the same date.
• Read the text yourself. The orders, the Court's opinions and the Civil Rights Act are all online, and a half hour with the primary documents beats a week of arguing about them.