The fifth and final program in the Ike 125 lecture series commemorating the 125th anniversary of the birth of Dwight David Eisenhower will be presented by Tim Rives, Deputy Director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library. The title of the program is “The Significance of the Frontier in Eisenhower History.”

Rives will present the program in both Kansas City and Abilene. The Kansas City event will open with a reception at 6 p.m. and the program at 6:30 on Tuesday, Oct. 13 at the Plaza Branch – Kansas City Public Library. In Abilene Rives will speak on Wednesday, Oct. 14 at noon for a Brown Bag Lunch program at the Eisenhower Presidential Library Visitors Center Auditorium. Birthday cake will be served in honor of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 125th birthday.

2015 commemorates not only the 125th anniversary of Eisenower’s birth, but also the U.S. Census Bureau’s declaration that the American frontier had closed. Rives will explain that these two events are not unrelated.

Like other progressives of his generation, Eisenhower saw the extinction of the frontier as the end of the first phase of American history, and the beginning of a new age in which the federal government would replace the lost reservoir of free land and abundant resources with economic cooperation and individual security through social programs. More than any other single factor, Eisenhower’s interpretation of the vanished frontier is what distinguishes his “Middle Way” political philosophy from the conservative wing of the Republican Party he led through two terms as President.