Reagan

American Icon

Iwan Morgan

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781838606671
• eBook ISBN: 9781838607630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

Ronald Reagan is arguably the most successful post-war American president. A transformational leader, he is broadly credited with renewing American prosperity after the stagflation-hit 1970s, laying the foundations for Cold War victory and bringing about the shift to the right in late-twentieth century politics. In this new biography, Iwan Morgan shrewdly assesses Reagan's considerable achievements whilst also highlighting the shortcomings that were an indisputable part of his record. Based on extensive research, this book plots a chronological path through Reagan's life covering his upbringing; his rise and fall as a Hollywood star; his time as California governor; and his pursuit of the presidency. Morgan offers a detailed evaluation of the pragmatic conservatism that was the hallmark of Reagan's presidential leadership in domestic affairs. In the international sphere, he explains Reagan's metamorphosis from Cold War hawk to negotiator for nuclear-arms reduction, while also examining his role in the Iran-Contra scandal.
This book ultimately shows that what made Reagan an American icon above all else was his optimism regarding his country and his ability to articulate its best values - even if he himself did not always live up to these. Today, as the Republican Party grapples with its new direction and identity, understanding the legacy of Ronald Reagan and Reaganism is more relevant than ever.

One

Young Dutch

Ronald Wilson Reagan, America’s 40th president, spent his youth in the small-town milieu of early twentieth-century Illinois. The second son of Jack and Nelle Reagan, he was born on 6 February 1911 in their rented first-floor apartment on Main Street in Tampico (population 849), located some 110 miles west of Chicago. With the new arrival weighing in at ten pounds, the delivery proved difficult and could have been life-threatening for mother and child but for the belated arrival of the local physician, who promptly advised the parents not to have further children. On first sight of the screaming baby, his father remarked, ‘For such a little bit of a fat Dutchman, he makes a hell of a lot of noise, doesn’t he?’ These words were the basis for Ronald’s nickname in youth. Thinking his actual name – and the diminutive ‘Ronnie’ that his mother favoured – insufficiently masculine, the boy wanted everyone to call him ‘Dutch’ as he grew up.¹

The formative influences of family, Church, and community provided the lodestar for Ronald Reagan’s odyssey from the small-town Midwest to the White House. His paternal forebears were the O’Regans, an impoverished potato-farming family in Doolis, County Tipperary, Ireland. He knew very little of this ancestry until the Irish government provided a family tree to mark his presidential visit in 1984. Among the highlights of that trip was seeing the handwritten record of great-grandfather Michael’s baptism at age three days in 1829.² The bright and ambitious Michael eloped to London with Catherine Mulcahy in October 1852. At the nuptials, he signed the marriage register as Reagan, its anglicized form forever more. Michael emigrated with his wife and three children to the United States via Canada in 1856. Taking advantage of the Homestead Act, he settled on undeveloped acreage in Carroll County, Illinois, working the land for four years to make it his own. His second son, John Michael (born 1854), helped on the farm before branching out to work in a grain elevator in nearby Fulton in 1873 and then claiming his own homestead four years later. Marriage to Jenny Cusick in 1878 produced three children. The youngest, born in 1883, was Jack (formally John Edward), Dutch’s father. The American Dream did not work out for John Sr. Unable to make a go of the farm after a decade of toil, he resumed employment at the grain elevator, but a hard life took its toll. Jack’s parents died of tuberculosis within six days of each other in 1889. He would keep this sad history from his own sons. Not until he was president did Ronald Reagan learn that some of his forebears were buried in a Fulton cemetery. When a local citizen finally informed him of this in 1986, he funded repairs to their dilapidated graves and family marker.³

Too young to work on his uncle’s nearby farm like his siblings, the orphaned Jack was packed off to live with his aunt and her husband, a childless couple residing just over the Iowa border in Bennett. Growing up in a strict household and shown little affection, he became a dreamer, a prankster, and a tearaway who quit school at 12. In 1899, he fled back to Fulton, where charm, good looks, and the gift of the gab made him a success as a shoe salesman in a local emporium.⁴ After marrying Nelle Clyde Wilson on 8 November 1904, Jack moved up in the world to become senior salesman in the clothing and shoe department of H. C. Pitney’s General Store in nearby Tampico in early 1906. This would be the Reagans’ home town for over eight years. Their first son, Neil – nicknamed ‘Moon’ because he was bulky and full-faced – was born in September 1908. When Dutch was not yet four, Jack’s yearning to make something of himself launched the family into a series of job-related relocations that would take in five different places in northern Illinois within the space of six years. According to his younger son, his singular ambition was ‘to own a shoe store… not an ordinary shoe shop, but the best, with the largest inventory in Illinois, outside Chicago’.⁵

Jack’s primary motivation was to get people to look up to him rather than to become rich. Despite outward bravado, what likely drove him was a need for a sense of self-worth that reflected an unsettled and ultimately loveless upbringing. He first moved his family to Chicago in January 1915 to take a position as shoe salesman in the giant uptown Fair Store. Just over a year later, he headed for a new post in Galesburg that lasted till March 1918, when he moved on to nearby Monmouth. H. C. Pitney’s offer of the manager’s position in his general store brought Jack back to Tampico in August 1919, but the opportunity was short-lived. Pitney sold up a year later when the postwar collapse of farm commodity prices dented Corn Belt prosperity. As compensation, Jack was made manager of Pitney’s new Fashion Boot shop in Dixon and promised a half-share of the business funded from sales commissions.⁶

Located on the Rock River, Dixon was larger (population 8,191) and more prosperous than Tampico. It was where Jack seemingly found his footwear Shangri-La. Talking up a Dr. Scholl’s correspondence-course diploma, he advertised himself as ‘a graduate practipedist [who] understands all foot troubles’ and the possessor of X-ray equipment to match shoes with bone structure. Unfortunately for Jack, most Dixonites did not spend lavishly on footwear, preferring to rely on a cobbler to effect multiple repairs on the two pairs they habitually owned – one for work, one for dress. The Reagans had initially rented a roomy house on Hennepin Avenue (the restored version can now be visited as the future president’s boyhood home), a middle-class south-side street. With his shop not the expected success, Jack moved the family to a smaller place on the north side in 1923, the first of four downward moves on the rental ladder. Heading in the same direction even faster, Fashion Boot ceased operations because of poor sales before the decade ended. By mid-1929 Jack was working for another Dixon shoe store; the next year he was a travelling shoe salesman, and in 1931 he was managing what his younger son called a ‘hole-in-the-wall’ shoe store in Springfield, Illinois, from which he received his notice on Christmas Eve.⁷

Jack’s unsuccessful efforts to make something of himself meant that his family was almost perpetually hard up. Criticized for hostility to the poor as president, the adult Reagan would respond in self-defence, ‘I was raised in poverty.’⁸ The Reagans never owned their home, frequently found it difficult to make ends meet, and could afford only the cheapest cuts of meat. Until well into his teens, Dutch wore hand-me-down clothes that his older brother had outgrown. He later claimed never to have thought of his family as poor, not least because plenty of other townspeople were no better off. Such paeans to the fortitude of common folk in a pre-welfare age revealed a lack of understanding of what real poverty was in the 1920s. In its grip were southern sharecroppers – black and white – migrant workers, many female-headed families, sweatshop workers, and low-income senior citizens trying to get by without pensions and health-care protection. However tight money was for the Reagans, they were far from being impoverished in the manner of these groups.

Jack’s history of falling short of his career ambitions owed much to alcohol dependency. His boozing may have had roots in his genes – his Irish forebears were prodigious drinkers and older brother William was certified insane with delirium tremens in 1919. Neither an abusive alcoholic nor a daily drunk, Jack was hard-working in dry periods but went on week-long benders once or twice a year. The bottle cost him his job in Chicago (where he was also arrested for public drunkenness), in Galesburg, and in Monmouth. In Dutch’s recollection, his father’s tendency to fall off the wagon at holiday time meant ‘I was always torn between looking forward to Christmas and dreading it.’⁹

As soon as they were old enough to understand, Nelle explained to the children that Jack’s drinking was a sickness rather than a moral failing. Dutch did not have to confront it directly until aged 11. One night in early 1922 he came home to find Jack passed out drunk on the front porch, ‘arms spread out as if he were crucified – as indeed he was’. With no one else around, the still scrawny boy dragged his father indoors and put him to bed. The vivid memory of this episode stayed with him into old age. The adult Dutch would recall the experience as the ‘first moment of accepting responsibility’ that was an essential part of growing up.¹⁰ The teenage Dutch always dreaded the social embarrassment of his father’s next bout of public drunkenness, which would be widely known in Prohibition-era Dixon, but Nelle’s teaching about the disease helped him endure the stigma. ‘I always loved and always managed to maintain respect for Jack,’ he would later write.¹¹ However, the self-absorption characteristic of alcoholics meant that the Reagan boys could not rely on Jack to take much interest in their youthful development. As compensation, Dutch found surrogate fathers to advise him about life’s journey. The habit of relying on the counsel of older men whom he admired stayed with him far into adult life.

Some analysts regard Jack’s alcoholism as the predominant source of the behaviour that his son reputedly displayed in adulthood – notably emotional reserve, retreat into a comforting world of make-believe, avoidance of conflict with those in his orbit, and craving for applause. One political psychologist went so far as to claim that it ‘was a powerful and defining reality that Ronald Reagan was never fully able to surmount, not even as president of the United States’.¹² Contrary to such claims, Reagan displayed a pragmatic understanding of political reality as both governor and president, was resilient in pursuit of his core goals, and was prepared to risk unpopularity for doing what he considered right. Arguably, the negative influence of an alcoholic parent was most apparent in the adult Reagan’s wariness about forming close relationships: ‘I’ve been inclined to hold back a little of myself, reserving it for myself,’ he admitted.¹³ This caused pain for his children and disappointed friends wanting greater intimacy. ‘There’s a wall around him,’ second wife Nancy commented. ‘He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there are times when even I feel that barrier.’¹⁴ It is also likely that the self-discipline, strong sense of responsibility, and competitiveness that Dutch manifested in his youth and adulthood reflected a determination to be different from Jack.

There were positive elements in Jack’s influence, however. Reagan’s trademark use of anecdotes as a politician owed much to his father, ‘the best raconteur I ever heard’.¹⁵ His celebrated humour, both in public and private, was another paternal legacy. Without doubt, he inherited silver-tongued skills to make bigger sales than his father ever dreamed of. Jack’s detestation of bigotry, resulting from experience of anti-Catholicism, also rubbed off on his son. ‘Among the things he passed on to me,’ Reagan later wrote, ‘was the belief that all men and […] women are created equal and that individuals determine their own destiny […] largely [through] their own ambition and hard work.’¹⁶ Both his memoirs recounted (albeit with some differences of detail) one particular incident as evidence of his family’s progressive racial views. During his undergraduate days at Eureka College, Reagan was part of a football squad that included two African Americans, who were refused hotel accommodation on one occasion when the team was playing away to another Illinois college in Elmhurst. In a gesture of solidarity, Reagan took the pair back to Dixon, where they were made welcome guests at his home. Believing himself free from racial prejudice, accusations to the contrary during his political career were guaranteed to raise his hackles more than anything else.¹⁷

Dutch grew up without bigotry but his awareness of racism was confined to the few examples he encountered rather than the everyday reality of it. Dixon’s 12 African American families had to endure discrimination that was an unspoken and therefore unacknowledged part of life in virtually all-white Midwestern communities. Dutch was blithely unaware of what was all around him because he did not personally see African Americans as inferior. This was why he substituted the nation’s ignorance for his own in remarking during the 1980 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter that America ‘didn’t even know it had a racial problem’ when he was young. As one biographer concluded, ‘[A] youth unaware of evil must also be unaware of evil’s effects.’¹⁸ Significantly, the adult Dutch was much more willing to take a stand against anti-Semitism than to speak out about discrimination against African Americans. During World War II, he resigned from Lakeside Country Club in North Hollywood over its refusal to admit Jews and later joined the Hillcrest Club, the favoured haunt of Hollywood’s Jews. The fact that African Americans were denied membership of both establishments did not register with him.¹⁹

Whatever Jack’s contrary influences, far more important in the making of Dutch was his mother, born Nelle Clyde Wilson on a farm in North Clyde, Illinois, on 24 July 1883. Her paternal forebears, the Wilsons and the Blues, had left Scotland for Canada in the 1830s but fled to the United States following involvement in an abortive rebellion against Ontario’s governing oligarchy. In 1839 the two families staked land claims in Whiteside County, northern Illinois, adjacent to Carroll, where the Reagans later settled. They were united by the marriage of John Wilson and Jane Blue in November 1841. Nelle was the youngest of seven children born to the Wilsons’ youngest son Thomas and Mary Anne Elsey, an Englishwoman who had come to America as a 16-year-old orphan to work as a domestic. The marriage was not a happy one. Thomas absconded to Chicago in 1890, returning only at the behest of his dying mother four years later.²⁰

Despite this, Nelle grew up in a loving extended family that practised temperance, found its primary satisfaction in weekly church attendance and regular Scripture reading, and allowed her to enjoy simple pleasures. A child of the farm who yearned for the small city, she found work as a seamstress in Fulton at age 19. In reaction to the unhappiness of her own parents, she was determined to marry for love. The beguiling Jack Reagan, with his dark Irish good looks, would fulfil this need for the small-statured, auburn-haired, blue-eyed Nelle, who set her cap at him despite parental concern about his drinking. Her romantic side also found expression in naming her second son after William Ronald Wilson, an ancestor she mistakenly believed to have won the hand of a high-born lady who was consequently disowned by her family.²¹

Passionate about her sons getting the good education she never had, Nelle taught Dutch to read at the remarkably early age of five, thereby developing his capacity to memorize words quickly – to his later benefit in broadcasting, acting, and politics. Blessed with an engaging voice, she also trained her sons in the art of elocution, and her related enthusiasm for amateur dramatics implanted the performing bug in both of them. A competitive desire to keep up with Moon overcame Dutch’s initial shyness about appearing on stage. In May 1920, he made his debut as a nine-year-old with a reading, ‘About Mother’, earning hearty applause that was music to his ears. ‘I didn’t know it then,’ he later remarked, ‘but, in a way, when I walked off the stage that night, my life had changed.’²²

Nelle’s most important influence was instilling in Dutch his characteristic optimism. From her he learned ‘how to have dreams and believe I could make them come true’. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to this Edition
• 1 Young Dutch
• 2 Rising Star
• 3 Falling Star
• 4 Right Star
• 5 California Governor
• 6 Right Man
• 7 Mr President
• 8 Pragmatic Conservative
• 9 Cold Warrior
• 10 Morning Man
• 11 Imperial President
• 12 Summit Negotiator
• Epilogue: History Man
• List of Abbreviations
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Notes
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright