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Ida's Story

June, 1943. Ike visits his mother Ida Courtesy of the Eisenhower Library

Imagine for a moment a family consisting of a father, mother, and six children living in subsistence-level poverty in a tiny rented house on the wrong side of the tracks.  What would you expect the youngster’s prospects might be?   For the six Eisenhower boys who grew up in Abilene, Kansas the answer is that Roy became a successful pharmacist, Earl became a newspaper manager, Arthur became a bank vice president, Edgar became a millionaire lawyer, and Milton became a university president and statesman. Dwight became a five star general, a war hero and then president of the United States.  

Outcomes like that truly represent the American dream, but they don’t “just happen.”  In the case of the Eisenhower brothers one has to look to their mother, Ida Elizabeth Stover Eisenhower, for the upbringing that explains this astonishing record of accomplishment.

Ida was born during the Civil War in the small town of Mt. Sidney, about midway up Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Soldiers from both the North and South raged up and down the valley for three years destroying towns and farms alike.  Ida’s parents were members of a Christian sect dedicated to pacifism and it was not a time to be opposed to war.  Because they would not support either side they suffered continuously.  Ida, whose mother died shortly after hostilities ended grew up with people who believed war was the wickedest sin of mankind and were willing to take a stand for their beliefs.  On her 21st birthday when she received a small inheritance Ida moved from Virginia to Lane University in Lecompton, Kansas in order to be near Topeka where her brothers and elder sister then lived.  Ida was as dedicated to family as she was  to peace.

Attractive, energetic, and intelligent, Ida was popular with her fellow students and frequently surrounded by young men during social gatherings. Among the crowd of potential suitors, she became attracted to David Eisenhower.  A year younger than Ida, David was a quiet young man, introspective, and unsure of himself.  Within the year they decided that marriage was more important than a degree from Lane University.  After the wedding they left Lecompton and traveled to David’s family home in Hope, Kansas.

David’s father, Jacob, gave the newlyweds two thousand dollars and a 160-acre farm.  Ida, a music student during her formative years, used most of her remaining inheritance to purchase an ebony piano.  Through prolonged poverty and the many tribulations that would be part of her life, Ida kept the treasured piano and found in music and religion a bulwark against life’s material problems.

Her husband David was having trouble making a living.  The one career he decidedly did not want was that of a farmer.  He turned to retailing and, in partnership with a local business man, he opened a general store in Hope.  Leasing the store and stocking it took all of David’s ready cash and the maximum amount of money he could get by mortgaging their farm.  Within two years the business collapsed. Although many family myths would be made up later to obscure the truth, it was incompetence that bankrupted the enterprise.

Not long on self-confidence to begin with, David sank into a life of silent brooding. Never again would he take a big risk or even try to exercise his own talent.  David’s sense of indignity drove him out of town.  Leaving Ida, who was then pregnant with their second son, David fled to Denison, Texas where he heard that jobs were available at the terminus of the Cotton Belt Railroad. 

After giving birth to their second son, Edgar, Ida and the boys joined David in Denison where they shared part of a small house with other railroad workers. In 1890, David Dwight Eisenhower was born. Before long Ida reversed the name to Dwight David so there would not be two David’s in the growing family. 

Although the father’s railroad pay was as low as any job he could have found back in Kansas, he would not return to Hope where he had failed.  But once again his family would come to the rescue of David and his brood.  Their church, the River Brethren, had built a large dairy processing cooperative called the Belle Springs Creamery in Abilene, a town twenty miles north of Hope.  A family member arranged a job offer for David to work as a machine maintenance man in the new plant. Desperate to leave his dead-end job with the railroad, he brought his family back to Kansas.

Poverty followed them from Texas, however, and they were forced to squeeze the family into a tiny rented house with no yard. Three years later, David’s uncle Abraham decided to leave Abilene to become a religious missionary and arranged to sell his house to David for $1,000.  History is unclear on where the money came from, but it was probably David’s father who paid for the house.  In addition to being a much larger home, the property had a large barn and three acres of land.  Now the family would no longer have to pay rent. Moreover, the three acres of land permitted them to grow almost all of their vegetables and to keep chickens and a milk cow. This brought them from near destitution up to the level of what would be called today  “the working poor.” 

In his speeches and writings Dwight Eisenhower would later routinely gloss over his family’s struggles, claiming that if they were poor, he was never aware of it.  Of course he was aware of it.  The hand-me–down clothes, shoes that rarely fit, constant chores to produce food, school children who teased the boys, and the continuing odd jobs they found to bring in bits of money all point to hard times as an enduring part of growing up in the Eisenhower family.

What kept the family intact and in an atmosphere conducive to intellectual growth was Ida.  Having grown up with seven brothers and an ailing mother, she knew how to manage a household. Ida had a gift for budgeting the family’s meager funds. She  was a capable seamstress with both needle and sewing machine. She made most of the children’s clothes as well as bedspreads and tablecloths, made her own dresses and her husband’s shirts. Her spirit and strength sustained them. Always cheerful and wise, she tightly scheduled their chores, quietly demanded honesty and principled behavior in all things, and knew when to permit their boyhood adventures. 

Although the family did not routinely attend church services with the River Brethren -  a sect which would later become part of the Jehovah’s Witness - Ida established regular family gatherings for Bible reading and study.  She led them in hymn singing from her beloved piano and taught them two major Protestant ethics: that all people were sinners who could be saved and that life was work. Regardless of chores which seemed endless to the boys, her task scheduling led them to believe work was life. In those days, most boys did not finish high school because they dropped out to work on their family farms, but Ida saw to it that all of her boys stayed through graduation.

Unlike their silent father, Ida always talked to her sons.  Her only occasional diversion was to play a round or two of solitaire on a winter evening and even this minor activity became a lesson.  “The Lord deals the cards,” she earnestly told Ike. “And you must play them.”  Ida wasn’t worldly.  Little interested her beyond her family, religion, music, and home.  She devoted her life to them.  When young Ike exhibited a temper that would later become famous, she would calm him and quote the bible “He that conquers his own soul is greater than he who conquers a city.”  It was a lesson Ike would learn, but one that he had to relearn throughout his career.

His mother gave Dwight Eisenhower a full set of values that would serve him for the rest of his life. When you ask yourself how a poor boy from rural Kansas became a great leader and president, you can do no better then to look to his mother, Ida, a woman for all seasons.