Eisenhower sends troops into arkansas illegally
Executive summary
President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered federal troops and federalized the Arkansas National Guard in September 1957 to enforce a federal court order desegregating Little Rock Central High School; the action was carried out under Executive Order 10730 and presented by the administration as an enforcement of federal law, not a unilateral illegal seizure of state authority [1] [2]. Claims that Eisenhower sent troops "illegally" misread the record: the president used explicitly granted federal authority to uphold Supreme Court and district court mandates against state resistance, though contemporaries framed the move as politically fraught [1] [3].
1. What Eisenhower actually did: federalization and troop deployment
On September 23–24, 1957 President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10730, federalized the Arkansas National Guard and authorized use of the U.S. armed forces to enforce a U.S. district court order requiring integration at Little Rock Central High School, and subsequently ordered elements of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to restore order and protect the nine African American students known as the Little Rock Nine [1] [3] [4]. Contemporary records and the National Archives explicitly describe the executive order as directing the Secretary of Defense to use “such of the armed forces... as he may deem necessary” to carry out federal court orders in Arkansas [1].
2. The legal rationale offered by the administration
The administration framed the action as enforcement of federal judicial authority and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education mandate that schools be desegregated—federal law obligating compliance with court orders formed the explicit legal basis for using federal forces to overcome state defiance [1] [5]. Public remarks and presidential notes show Eisenhower portrayed the intervention as necessary to “restore order” and ensure the safety of students and the rule of law after Governor Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to block integration [4] [6].
3. The counterargument: claims of illegality and states’ rights rhetoric
Governor Faubus and segregationist opponents claimed the federal intervention was an overreach of presidential power and an improper intrusion on state authority—language that portrayed Eisenhower’s move as illegal or illegitimate in political rhetoric at the time [7] [3]. Those critics emphasized state sovereignty and argued the federal government should not use troops against its own state’s forces; some described incidents during the operation (including a bayonet wound in a scuffle) as evidence of federal brutality, which Faubus used to inflame opposition [7].
4. Why most legal-historical accounts treat Eisenhower’s action as lawful
Historians and primary records included in the National Archives describe the action as an exercise of lawful executive authority to enforce federal court orders: the executive order’s text explicitly delegates authority to the Defense Secretary and to federal service secretaries to use the armed forces to carry out federal judicial commands, and the sequence of events shows Faubus’s guard was federalized to place it under federal command rather than to be seized unlawfully [1] [3]. Contemporary reporting and subsequent historical treatments emphasize that Eisenhower’s intervention enforced the supremacy of federal law over state defiance, a constitutional principle underpinning such federal actions [8] [9].
5. Limits of the provided reporting and unresolved legal nuances
The supplied sources document the executive order, troop deployments, and the political debate, but they do not include a formal judicial ruling declaring Eisenhower’s action constitutionally tested and adjudicated as lawful or unlawful; while mainstream historical treatments treat it as enforcement of federal authority, a deeper constitutional-law analysis or Supreme Court opinion on the specific question of presidential power in this instance is not present in these sources [1] [9]. Therefore the judgment that Eisenhower acted legally rests on documentary evidence of federal orders and the accepted legal rationale of enforcing court decrees rather than a citation of a judicial pronouncement in these materials.