Ronald Reagan

Champion of Conservative America

James H. Broussard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136174520
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Few politicians in recent American history are as well-known as Ronald Reagan, the 40th U.S. president. An iconic leader, Reagan shifted the direction of American politics toward a newly vigorous conservatism. Though he began his career as a New Deal liberal, by the end of the 1950s, Reagan had embraced conservative views. His presidency saw the longest peacetime prosperity in American history, as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, but also skyrocketing deficits and the Iran-Contra scandal. In the twenty-first century, Reagan's legacy is both pervasive and contested, with supporters and detractors often divided along partisan lines. Yet Reagan's own actions did not always fit into partisan boxes.

In a clear-eyed and insightful narrative, James H. Broussard cuts through the mythology of both sides to produce a nuanced portrait of Reagan in his historical context. Supported by primary sources and a robust companion website, this concise biography is an ideal intoduction to this fascinating president and the issues that shaped America in the late 20th century.

Routledge Historical Americans is a series of short, vibrant biographies that illuminate the lives of Americans who have had an impact on the world. Each book includes a short overview of the person's life and puts that person into historical context through essential primary documents, written both by the subjects and about them. A series website supports the books, containing extra images and documents, links to further research, and where possible, multi-media sources on the subjects. Perfect for including in any course on American History, the books in the Routledge Historical Americans series show the impact everyday people can have on the course of history.

Part I
RONALD REAGAN

CHAPTER 1
A PLACE TO GO BACK TO

Dixon, Illinois, is the only town in America with a statue of Abraham Lincoln as a young soldier. It was here at Fort Dixon that Lincoln and other volunteers assembled in 1832 to fight the Black Hawk War. A quarter-century later, Lincoln was back in Dixon, speaking for the infant Republican Party and its first presidential candidate, John Fremont. Just four years later Dixon gave its votes to Lincoln himself, sending him to Washington to save the Union.

It was only fitting, then, that Ronald Reagan, whom Republicans rank with Lincoln as the two great names in their party’s history, should grow up in this town so closely identified with the first Republican president. Like many adults, he later said that “everyone needs a place to go back to.”¹ For him, Dixon would be that place.

But Reagan’s history, like that of almost all Americans, begins not here but across the water. His father’s ancestors came from County Tipperary, where, like many Irish Catholic families, they toiled for generations in extreme poverty, working the land of wealthy barons. After the great Potato Famine of the 1840s that killed a million Irish, the president’s great-grandfather, Michael, took his family across the ocean and settled in northern Illinois as a farmer of modest means.

Michael’s son John eventually left farming to work in the little town of Fulton, where Ronald Reagan’s father, Jack, was born in 1883. Leaving school after sixth grade, Jack went to work in a dry goods store. Shoes were his specialty in the store and alcohol outside it, and when he met and courted a fellow employee, Nelle Wilson, her father did not approve. Nevertheless, the two were married in 1904 in the local Catholic church.

Like Jack Reagan’s grandfather, Nelle’s had come to the New World in the mid-1800s. A Scottish Protestant, he too wound up in Illinois, married a local woman, and settled down as a farmer. His son Thomas married an immigrant Englishwoman and in 1883 produced a daughter, Nelle Wilson. The family was strictly and enthusiastically religious and frowned on alcohol, hence Thomas Wilson’s dislike of Jack Reagan as a suitable match for his daughter—but marry they did.

The new couple moved from Fulton to Tampico in 1906, both aged 23. Tampico was a town of barely 1,000 people and a single block of paved streets, an isolated oasis of houses in a vast desert of cornfields. Both Jack and Nelle had spent their early lives on farms and felt comfortably at home here for eight years, although their first apartment, like most in town, had no running water or indoor plumbing.

Jack, ambitious and optimistic, worked at the biggest place in town, Pitney’s General Store. He also served on the town council and was an officer in his church and the local fire company. When his wife was not making the family’s clothes or carrying water and coal up three flights of stairs to cook their meals, she found time to write poetry. She liked drama, he liked to dance, and as the historian Edmund Morris put it, they were “Tampico’s reigning theatrical couple.”²

Here Ronald Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, in the apartment above his father’s store, two and a half years after his older brother Neil. Jack Reagan thought the new baby looked like a “fat little Dutchman,” and the child grew up wanting to be called “Dutch” because “Ronald” seemed too sissified. A few months after his birth the family moved up, renting a house with a view of the park with its Civil War cannon and little pyramid of cannon balls.

It was a nice house, and in 1913 Jack even bought a Model T car, but this was only a temporary taste of prosperity and the beginning of a peripatetic existence that continued through Dutch Reagan’s entire childhood. Tampico soon proved too confining to encompass Jack’s dreams of shoe-salesman stardom, and when the boy was only two, the family moved to Chicago. It took his father nearly two years of poor sales and an arrest for public drunkenness to realize that working in a huge department store in a huge city was not to his liking.

This was the first of the Reagans’ low points. They lived in a cold-water apartment with coin-operated gas and were so poor that they literally ate cat food. Unable to afford a standard cut of meat, Nelle sent the boys to the butcher’s on weekends for a soupbone and a pound of liver for a nonexistent “family cat.” People thought liver was good only for pet food, but the Reagans would cook it as their Sunday dinner and then live off the soupbone, with a few vegetables added, for the rest of the week.

After Jack’s arrest and firing, it was off to Galesburg and another department store for a few years until he lost that job, again for drinking. Then the family moved down the road to Monmouth for a year, where Dutch showed early promise in school, being promoted ahead of his class. His mother’s love for acting echoed in him as well, and the youngster began to join her in recitations at church. But his father, always imagining more success in the next town, took the family back to Tampico when Dutch was eight. Mr. Pitney needed help at the old store.

Tampico at least was familiar, and Dutch continued to prosper as an “A” student in the fifth grade and led the “West Side Gang” in childhood tussles. The Reagans were still poor, but so were many others in the little town. Dutch’s best friend said that “when our shoes wore out we put cardboard in the bottoms and when we got holes in our stockings we painted in shoe polish to cover ’em up.”³ The bicycle the Reagan boys shared was one of the few in town and even it was secondhand.

The full measure of Tampico’s isolation from the outside world can be seen in the excitement of nine-year-old Dutch and his friends on first hearing Pittsburgh’s radio station KDKA on a primitive crystal set. “We passed the headphones around,” he remembered, “and heard this orchestra playing, coming out of the air! … That was a miracle.”⁴

Shortly before Dutch Reagan’s tenth birthday, the opportunity for success that his father had always sought finally arrived. Mr. Pitney was opening a fancy new store, the Fashion Boot Shop, in nearby Dixon, Illinois, and offered Jack a partnership, to be paid for out of his sales commissions. The wandering family had finally come to rest, and Dixon was Dutch’s home until he left for college.

A century before the Reagans arrived, this area had been the raw frontier, but by the 1850s the Rock River was dammed to provide power for local mills. In the following decades, growth was slow but steady as farms filled up the countryside and the town became both their market and their source of supply. A hundred miles west of Chicago, Dixon had about 8,000 people in 1920. Although the town sat amid a circle of dairy farms, nearly half of its people worked in manufacturing. Served by two railroad lines, Dixon’s factories turned out shoes, cement, tractors, wire, and animal feed for the agricultural Midwest.

It was a typical small city of medium-sized frame houses, and the modest downtown had a single movie theater, the standard drugstore with obligatory soda fountain, and a memorial to the honored dead of World War I. Like many rural places, it hosted Chautauqua lectures in the summer with their mixture of education, inspiration, and entertainment. For those more interested in outdoor recreation there was Lowell Park.

There were few African-American families in Dixon, and as usual in 1920s America they were not allowed on the golf course, at the hotel, or in the local barber and beauty shops. Still, this was not the rigid and ruthless segregation of the South; churches, schools, and the movie theater were integrated, and the Reagans were not the only white family whose children thought it perfectly normal to play with black friends and bring them home for meals.

Throughout his life, Ronald Reagan always spoke with pride of his father’s opposition to any form of bigotry. As a Catholic himself, Jack Reagan had no use for the Ku Klux Klan, which targeted both blacks and Catholics in the 1920s. When one of the most famous early movies, Birth of a Nation, came to Dixon, he refused to let the boys attend because it glorified the Klan “against the colored folks and I’m damned if anyone in this family will go see it.”⁵ On another occasion when he stopped at a hotel on a sales trip, the desk clerk assured him that no Jews were allowed in. Jack walked right outside and slept in his car instead.

As an adult, Ronald Reagan displayed not the slightest shred of racial prejudice. His father’s example and his formative years in a place where the few black families seemed to fit naturally into the life of the town, helped to shape this aspect of Reagan’s character. At the same time, the almost invisible black presence in Dixon kept him from fully realizing what it meant to live everyday life as a second-class citizen.

Like most northern whites in nearly all-white communities, Reagan presumably never thought, for instance, of the hurdles a black family would experience when traveling. Unwelcome at nearly all motels and restaurants on their route, black travelers were constantly reminded that they were the bottom rail of American society. Reagan never commented in his adult life about the exclusion of African Americans even in Dixon itself from such places as the barber shop and the hotel. Probably it never entered his mind while he was growing up. Even in college, a classmate believed that Dutch was “not conscious of race at all.”⁶ His biographer Edmund Morris concluded that “a youth unaware of evil must also be unaware of evil’s effects.”⁷

So while he came to manhood without prejudice, he was also without a full emotional realization of the simply ordinary, taken-for-granted, casual racism that made its constant impact on the daily life of blacks even in the North, not to speak of the much cruder, more powerful, and more brutal discrimination in the South, where most African Americans lived. In this, Reagan was perfectly typical of most white people in the nearly all-white rural areas of the North.

Arriving in Dixon in December 1920, the Reagans rented a two-story house on South Hennepin Avenue, preserved today as “Ronald Reagan’s Boyhood Home.” But Jack’s hope of prosperity at the Fashion Boot Shop soon began to fade, and in 1923 the family had to relocate to a smaller house where the boys slept on an enclosed porch. Even this was not the end of the line; there were three more moves before 1928. Dutch always had to wear Neil’s hand-me-down clothes and shoes and only got his “own” clothes when he left for college.

As a normal young boy of the 1920s, he loved movies, especially westerns. Like Granny of the Beverly Hillbillies, his favorite actors were Tom Mix and William S. Hart. Dutch also liked to read, and soon after the move to Dixon, ten-year-old Dutch got his own card at the town library and quickly put it to good use, averaging two books a week. Probably few boys that age ever go through 100 books a year.

Thus began a lifelong habit; his son Ron said decades later that the adult Reagan never felt right without something to read. Most of young Dutch’s books were the usual preteen selections: adventure stories, science fiction, westerns, tales of the Indians and of medieval knights. He later said that his avid reading “left an abiding belief in the triumph of good over evil.”⁸

One book in particular made a deep impression. Just as he turned eleven, he happened upon That Printer of Udell’s, now an obscure title but then part of the widely read juvenile novels of Christian author Harold Bell Wright. It is the story of Dick Falkner, a son of poverty whose father had been an alcoholic. Penniless but ambitious, Dick arrives a stranger in a new town. He hires on with the local printer, finds that he has a talent for eloquence, joins the Disciples of Christ church, and resolves to help the city’s deserving poor.

Scorning the idea of a bureaucratic “poverty program,” he convinces a group of the benevolent rich to fund a shelter-for-work plan. Private citizens, not government, meet the need. Soon Dick’s likeability and power as a speaker get him elected to Congress, and as the book ends he is just stepping out into that wider world. When Dutch finished the story he told his mother, “I want to be like that man.”⁹

What a temptation for the psychohistorians, especially as Dick, like the adult Reagan, was partial to brown suits. Yet one must recognize that of the thousands of boys who read the same book, only one became Ronald Reagan. Still, the story made a powerful impression, and he remembered it well many decades later. Rather than shaping who he would become, it probably simply reflected who he already was—or wished he were.

One other event at age eleven made an even stronger impression. There is no better way to describe it than in his own words: “I came home to find my father flat on his back on the front porch…. He was drunk, dead to the world…. I wanted to let myself in the house and go to bed and pretend he wasn’t there…. I felt myself fill with grief for my father at the same time I was feeling sorry for myself.”¹⁰ The boy reached down, grabbed his father’s overcoat, and “managed to drag him inside and get him to bed.” Another time some years later, Jack staggered home without the family car and could not remember where he had left it. Dutch, then a young man, had to roam the streets of Dixon until he found the automobile in an intersection, the motor still running.

Jack Reagan struggled with alcohol all of his adult life. He was not an abusive man, and his drunkenness came in sporadic binges rather than an ongoing daily haze, but it had cost him at least two jobs and produced many a nighttime argument with Nelle. Like many wives of alcoholics, she taught her sons not to blame their father, that his behavior was a sickness. Dutch apparently never talked about Jack’s drunken episodes until he revealed them in his 1960s autobiography, Where’s The Rest of Me?

The constant uprootings of his first ten years and the impact of his father’s condition may have shaped one of the most pronounced features of Reagan’s personality. From childhood on, he was a very private person. This might seem odd in one so gregarious and so fond of the spotlight—the lifeguard, the radio personality, the actor, and the avid politician. It is a common trait in those who have to move often as children—those whose parents are in the military, for instance—and in the children of alcoholics. Both of these circumstances were present in Reagan’s early years.

Growing up in the time before Dixon, he made friends easily but then had to leave them behind in the family’s next move—a pattern repeated five times in nine years. Even when the Reagans settled down in Dixon, the growing boy seemed quieter than most. While his brother played with other boys, Dutch played with lead Civil War soldiers and read his two books a week. Later, Neil hung around the pool hall; Dutch took elocution lessons from his mother. He also took up competitive swimming and was good at it. One biographer has commented that swimming is even l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Note on Reagan's Public Speeches
• Acknowledgments
• Ronald Reagan
• A Place to Go Back To
• Hollywood Liberal
• The Liberal becomes Conservative
• Governor Reagan
• Running for President, 1976–1980
• President Reagan, 1981: Learning a New Role
• President Reagan, 1982–1984: Recession to Reelection
• President Reagan, 1985–1989: “We Win, They Lose”
• Ronald Reagan's Legacy
• Documents
• DOCUMENT 1: “A Time for Choosing” October 27, 1964
• DOCUMENT 2: Accepting Republican Presidential Nomination July 17, 1980
• DOCUMENT 3: Reagan's First Inaugural Address January 20, 1981
• DOCUMENT 4: “Westminster Address” to British Parliament June 8, 1982
• DOCUMENT 5: The “Evil Empire” Speech March 8, 1983
• DOCUMENT 6: Remarks on The 40th Anniversary of D-Day June 6, 1984
• DOCUMENT 7: Speech on The Iran-Contra Controversy March 4, 1987
• DOCUMENT 8: Speech at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin June 12, 1987
• DOCUMENT 9: Remarks at Moscow State University May 31, 1988
• DOCUMENT 10: Farewell Address to the American People January 11, 1989
• Note on Sources
• Index