Reagan's America

Innocents at Home

Garry Wills

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781504045414
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

New York Times Bestseller: A "remarkable and evenhanded study of Ronald Reagan" from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg ( The New York Times).

Updated with a new preface by the author, this captivating biography of America's fortieth president recounts Ronald Reagan's life—from his poverty-stricken Illinois childhood to his acting career to his California governorship to his role as commander in chief—and examines the powerful myths surrounding him, many of which he created himself.
 
Praised by some for his sunny optimism and old-fashioned rugged individualism, derided by others for being a politician out of touch with reality, Reagan was both a popular and polarizing figure in the 1980s United States, and continues to fascinate us as a symbol. In Reagan's America, Garry Wills reveals the realities behind Reagan's own descriptions of his idyllic boyhood, as well as the story behind his leadership of the Screen Actors Guild, the role religion played in his thinking, and the facts of his military service.
 
With a wide-ranging and balanced assessment of both the personal and political life of this outsize American icon, the author of such acclaimed works as What Jesus Meant and The Kennedy Imprisonment "elegantly dissects the first U.S. President to come out of Hollywood's dream factory [in] a fascinating biography whose impact is enhanced by techniques of psychological profile and social history" ( Los Angeles Times) .

 

PART ONE

HUCK FINN’S WORLD

CHAPTER 1

Jack

There warn’t no home like a raft, after all.

—Huckleberry Finn

Ann Sheridan writes in the snow, “Happy New Year.” Ronald Reagan, over her protests, whisks out the last word: “Happy New Century, Dummy!” It is 1900 in Kings Row, and Erich Korngold’s music confects a sugary future.

Mark Twain took a dourer view of the new century. He dated its inception from January of 1901 and realized, halfway through the year, that the nation’s lynching rate (eighty-eight so far) would surpass the preceding year’s (one hundred and fifteen for the whole twelve months).¹

Ronald Reagan calls his childhood “one of those rare Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer idylls” (Hubler, p. 18). The Twain novels he refers to are chronicles of superstition, racism, and crime. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in particular, takes place almost entirely at night, as a series of panicky escapes from one horror to another:

I ain’t agoing to tell all that happened—it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn’t ever come ashore that night, to see such things. I ain’t ever going to get shut of them—lots of times I dream about them … Jim warn’t on his island, so I tramped off in a hurry for the crick, and crowded through the willows, red-hot to jump aboard and get out of that awful country. [Ch. 18]

Huck mainly “lights out” in terror, not in joy. “One is bound to remember that at eight Samuel Clemens found a stabbed body on the floor of his father’s office one night, and at nine he witnessed a murder, of which the perpetrator was acquitted. Huck wants to get away from everything rather than into adventure.”²

Twain already suspected, in 1901, that the twentieth century offered no haven from nightmare. Ronald Reagan’s parents moved to his birthplace, Tampico, Illinois, in 1906, during a wave of revivals in the area, a matter of timing that would greatly influence their son’s life. But just a month after their arrival, the small village paper ran a lurid tale with three large headlines:

HANG AND BURN THREE NEGROES

MOB AT SPRINGFIELD, MO., REVENGES ATTACK MADE ON WHITE GIRL

Rope Breaks Precipitating Victim Into Burning

Embers of Pyre Where Two Others Had Preceded Him,

But Crowd Is Relentless

The man who fell into the fire was retrieved alive and hanged again. The account shows no sense of outrage, or of irony: “The victims were strung to the Goddess of Liberty statues on the electric light tower in the public square at the courthouse.”³ New century or old, the country was still living through Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer dreams, which were never as idyllic as Reagan remembers.

Reagan is not the only person, of course, who has filtered out the darker aspects of Mark Twain’s work; but there is a special poignancy in his superficial gesture toward Huck Finn, since there is much of Twain’s Mississippi in Reagan’s background. His father, Jack, was born, grew up, and married on the Mississippi; in fact, Twain first steamed up the northern Mississippi, past Fulton, Illinois, just one year before Jack Reagan was born there. Like Huck, Jack Reagan was orphaned, had to leave school, and led a drifting life. The Rock River, from whose current Ronald saved many lives, is a tributary of the Mississippi, and it became an important part of the big river’s canal system early in this century—a fact that explains Ronald’s birth in Tampico. The future President got his first job after college working on the Mississippi, and for a man more improbable than any character to be found in Twain. The Reagans were under the spell of the Mississippi, of all the muddy bright promises it meant to break.

Twain’s mood as he approached Fulton in 1882 was one of optimism, induced by a sense of release. He had just revisited his dear benighted South, the source of his life’s troubled dreams, home of a fictitious “chivalry” and a very real racism. Like his own Huck, he was “lighting out” from the horrors—but not to the Territory, not westward. Paradoxically, he traveled north to a “new frontier” of industrialism and reason. “In Burlington, as in all these upper-river towns, one breathes a go-ahead atmosphere, which tastes good in the nostrils.”⁴ Northward, it seemed, no more lynchings.

Twain had begun Life on the Mississippi with memories of a youth caught in the falling and the rising arcs of two technologies, when the rough era of keelsmen and large rafts was yielding to the tailored expertise of steamboat pilots. He expressed a nostalgia for the age of rafts, but felt an overriding excitement at the discoveries of his own time. The Mississippi book ends with a similar crisscrossing of old and new technologies: the steamboat is dying, the railroads are taking over. Twain’s sympathies are again divided; he regrets the lost splendor of the pilot, but hopes for enlightenment from the smokestacks of the rational north.

Hour by hour the boat plows deeper and deeper into the great and populous Northwest; and with each successive section of it which is revealed, one’s surprise and respect gather emphasis and increase. Such a people, and such achievements as theirs, compel homage. This is an independent race who think for themselves, and who are competent to do it, because they are educated and enlightened; they read, they keep abreast of the best and newest thought, they fortify every weak place in their land with a school, a college, a library, and a newspaper; and they live under law. [Ch. 58]

This is Huck in reverse, “lighting out” for “sivilization” and school-books and the law. Twain is able to keep some of the mythic value of the frontier, in the Eden he imagines along the upper river, by treating it as fresh and “virgin” in a chronological sense: “This region is new; so new that it may be said to be still in its boyhood. By what it has accomplished while still teething, one may forecast what marvels it will do in the strength of its maturity.”

Twain was reading Francis Parkman’s account of the early discoverers of the northern river, as part of his research for Life on the Mississippi, whose opening section draws on Parkman’s La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, that book of magical style which had appeared just thirteen years before. The rhythms of Parkman, in which terrifying encounters with Indians alternate with peaceful moments of camping or canoeing, are similar to those of the novel Twain was working on while he finished the Mississippi book. (He used each of his own tasks to prod the other forward). And there is remarkable similarity between the moods of release achieved on the river in Twain and in Parkman. In those moments, at least, it was a happy new world. In Parkman’s fifth chapter, the Jesuit Marquette (of all people) seems to prefigure Huck:

They had found what they sought, and “with a joy,” writes Marquette, “which I cannot express,” they steered forth their canoes on the eddies of the Mississippi …

Again they were on their way, slowly drifting down the great river …

They resumed their course, and floated down the interminable monotony of river, marsh, and forest. Day after day passed on in solitude …

In chapter 20, La Salle is the voyager “floating prosperously down between the leafless forests that flanked the river”:

They followed the writhings of the great river on its tortuous course through wastes of swamp and canebreak, till on the thirteenth of March they found themselves wrapped in a thick fog …

After pushing his canoe down the whole river’s length to the Gulf of Mexico, La Salle later tried to reach the river’s mouth from the Gulf, but could not distinguish its marshy outlets: “Now every eye on board was strained to detect in the monotonous lines of the low shore some token of the great river. In fact they had already passed it” (Ch. 24). La Salle, swept on to Texas and his murder, is in the plight of Nigger Jim when the raft drifts past Cairo. The river deceives even those who think they are initiated into its secrets.

But Twain let himself think, when he saw the upper river submit to railway bridges, that industrialism was bringing rationality to the Midwest. The spread of railroads pollinated towns. Fulton had not even been a village when, in 1852, it was marked for a railroad landing. By the time the first train pulled in, three years later, it was opening the largest hotel west of Chicago, the Dement House, and had incorporated itself as a village.⁵ A year before that (1854), Jack Reagan’s father, the President’s grandfather, was born in Fairhaven, Illinois.⁶

When Jack was orphaned in Fulton, at the age of six, he went to live part of his time with an aunt across the Mississippi, in a town that was actually younger than he was at the time. Bennett, Iowa, named for the railroad purchasing agent who dealt with local spokesmen, was called into existence in 1884. For a while, at least, the trains seemed to act like Hank Morgan in A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889), raising towns and schools and workshops across the countryside. But by the time Twain finished the Connecticut Yankee book, he had become as disillusioned with the “rational” North of Colt Factories as with the superstitious South.⁷ By the time Neil Reagan was born, in 1908, Twain was cursing the whole “damned human race.”

The farmers of the Northwest were quicker than Twain to resent the railroads they had bid for so eagerly.⁸ But they looked deceptively prosperous as Twain, in 1882, glimpsed Davenport (scene of Ronald Reagan’s first radio job), “another beautiful city, crowning a hill” (Ch. 58). Farther north, his boat swung with the river around “Cromwell’s nose” as Twain watched the Iowa side, the lumberyards at Lyons, instead of Fulton lying just across the river, quickly hidden by its channel island.

Twain talks about opera houses and other great works going up near the river, but he neglects the real cathedrals of the railway age in the Midwest—the tall grain elevators, self-painted continuously by the fine stuff they take up into conspicuous hiding. These perpendicular structures unite the flat lands stretching behind the river’s bluffs. In them the work of the seasons is slowly gathered and raised, to be released in quick showers when the train stops. Rural and urban rhythms are joined here, the rumble of the trains beneath, the quiet tower above.

John Michael Reagan, the President’s grandfather, worked in Fulton’s grain elevator; but the only year for which we have a record of his service, 1880, shows he was out of work for a third of the year.⁹ This might have been for health reasons—he died young—but there was a slow depression inching over the Northwest even while the trains gave a surface chatter of life. In fact, the rapider movement of foodstuffs went along with a sharp decline, in the 1870s, of farm prices.¹⁰ The new grain cathedrals were old already, but they did not know it. For farmers along the Mississippi, the great depression of the 1890s was already, insensibly, on its way. The same year Jack Reagan was born to the elevator worker in Fulton, Illinois, William Jennings Bryan, who would become the voice of farmers’ anguish, finished law school in Chicago. Bryan was better at articulating that anguish than at mitigating it: “His public life was devoted to translating a complicated world of public affairs he barely comprehended back into those values he never questioned.”¹¹

Ronald Reagan remembers his father as an organization Democrat during the Depression of the 1930s, given patronage jobs by the New Deal. But the formative years of Jack Reagan were also spent during a national depression, this one blamed on the Democrats. Jack was eleven in the depression year of 1894, the year of Coxey’s army, the Pullman strike, and Populist elections. Coxey’s army, which moved on Washington from all over the nation, used Chicago as its staging area. In Iowa, the Northwestern Railroad banned marchers from its line and threatened, if a train was seized, to speed a riderless engine down the track to meet it.¹² Wheat, which had sold for $1.22 a bushel in 1881 was now going for $0.45.¹³ Third parties were formed, to express discontent with past politics. Elements of the Prohibition Party went into the new Populist Party. When the “ritualistic” Democratic Party tried, against its ethos, to absorb the radicalism and pietism of this agrarian movement, it suffered a crushing defeat in 1896.¹⁴

Jack Reagan, an Irish Catholic, was one of the old Democrats, nonpietistic and “wet,” not an agrarian radical. His forebears had always been farmers, in Ireland and America, but he was a decidedly urban man, with no interest in owning land. When, in 1937, Ronald brought his parents to California and gave them the first home they had not rented, Jack’s wife wrote her friends in Dixon with surprise that Jack found he liked keeping the little garden in their yard. It was his first sign of interest in growing things. We have no record of his ever having worked but at urban white-collar jobs.

When John Michael and Jennie Cusack Reagan both died in 1889, they left four children, all of school age (Jack was the second youngest at six).¹⁵ John Michael had two, and possibly three, living sisters in the area, who must have shared the task of raising, educating, and finding work for their nieces and nephews. One of these sisters, Margaret, was married to Orson G. Baldwin, who kept a department store in the new town of Bennett, Iowa, fifty miles from Fulton. It is certain that Jack lived sometimes with them, but uncertain for how long at any one time. He was surely there in the summer of 1897, when he managed the first boys’ baseball team in Bennett, and in 1898, when he was photographed on the town baseball team.¹⁶ In 1900, he was playing for a neighbor team, and the Cedar County Census for 1900 lists him as a Bennett resident whose occupation (at sixteen) was “dry goods salesman.”¹⁷ On the other hand, he registered in the Bennett Hotel as a visitor from Fulton in 1898—and as a visitor from Bennett in 1898!¹⁸

By 1901 the local paper (Tipton Advertiser) reported that he was in Bennett to visit relatives.¹⁹ He must have moved around from one relative’s home to another, like his siblings, according to the school seasons and the presence of jobs for the parentless children. The family base throughout was Fulton, where Jack’s grandmother was still alive. It should be noticed that Jack retained his Catholicism, and there was no Catholic church in little Bennett.²⁰ When Jack moved to Tampico in 1906, the paper there said he had been working at Broadhead’s Store in Fulto...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise for Garry Wills
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: Huck Finn’s World
• Part Two: Pap Finn’s World
• Part Three: Radio
• Part Four: Movies
• Part Five: Union Man
• Part Six: Company Man
• Part Seven: State of Grace
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright Page