An Empire of Ideals

The Chimeric Imagination of Ronald Reagan

Justin D. Garrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415818483
• eBook ISBN: 9781136675751
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Justin D. Garrison provides an original and groundbreaking analysis of Ronald Reagan's imagination as it was expressed mainly in his presidential speeches. He argues that the predominant strain of Reagan's imagination is "chimeric," that is, imbued with a high degree of optimism, romantic dreaminess, naiveté, and illusion.

Reagan spoke often about religion, democracy, freedom, conservatism, progress, America's role in the world, the American people, the American Founding, and peace. These are for him important symbols, which together express his general vision of politics and human existence. These symbols have to be analyzed in depth in order to understand who Reagan really was and what he represented to his admirers. The book concludes that Reagan's vision contains many dubious elements that present dangers for practical politics and claims that the popularity of Reagan's imagination among Americans suggests a problematic self-understanding.

Surpassing, existing works on Reagan's ideas and speeches, this book systematically explains the general quality and major components of Reagan's vision, and it draws upon political theory, aesthetics, and American political thought to analyze his imagination.

1 Ronald Reagan

A Biographical Sketch

Ronald Reagan recognized reality not as a thing to bow to but a thing that could be changed and shaped…. He thought he could change reality in part because he had imagination—a rather robust imagination.¹

—Peggy Noonan

“DUTCH” REAGAN IN THE MIDWEST

Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, on February 6, 1911. As a child, Reagan did the same things as most other children his age. He fished, hunted, explored the woods, and got into his share of trouble. On one occasion, he and a friend blew a hole through the ceiling after pulling the trigger of what they thought was an unloaded shotgun. When his and his friend's parents ran into the room, the two boys were found sitting upon a couch reading a magazine as if nothing had happened.² Reagan also played sports, his favorite of which was football, and as a teenager he became a renowned lifeguard on the Rock River in Dixon, Illinois. Overall, he described his childhood as “one of those rare Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer idylls.”³ Though his family moved frequently within its borders, Reagan lived in Illinois until after graduating college, when he became a radio announcer in Iowa.

The personalities of Reagan's father and mother could not have been more different. Yet Reagan's character, ideas, and imagination were shaped by the best qualities in both of them. The ways in which each parent influenced him were observable throughout Reagan's entire life. John Edward “Jack” Reagan was a shoe salesman, a nominal Roman Catholic, and an alcoholic. In Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power, Lou Cannon describes Jack Reagan as “at once a drinker and a dreamer who, much like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, pursued the big sale or the unlikely deal with a shoeshine and a smile.”⁴ Reagan attributed his storytelling talents and sense of humor to having observed his father's ability to win over crowds of friends with these skills. Beyond acquiring his father's ability to tell amusing anecdotes, Reagan credited Jack for instilling in him beliefs in the natural equality of all human beings and in the evils of racism and other forms of bigotry. In his first autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me?, Reagan proudly recalls how his father forbade the family from seeing D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation because it portrayed the Ku Klux Klan in an admirable light.⁵ In his second autobiography, An American Life, Reagan describes an incident that happened on one of his father's business trips. While making arrangements for a hotel room, the clerk bragged to Jack that the hotel was a fine establishment because it did not rent out rooms to Jews. Jack, disgusted by this open display of anti-Semitism, and conscious of the discrimination he might encounter as a Roman Catholic, refused to take a room at the hotel.⁶ From his father, Reagan also claims to have inherited an allegiance to the Democratic Party, a belief in individual liberty, a desire to defend the rights of workers, and a belief that talent and a willingness to work hard are the only limits to what an individual can accomplish.⁷

Jack Reagan also gave his son a valuable lesson in taking care of other people, though not in the way one might think. Jack's alcoholism was of a peculiar variety. He did not drink alcohol constantly, nor did he drink when situations with family or work were stressful. On the contrary, his alcohol binges were often prompted by good news. In other words, Jack got drunk when he was winning. His drunkenness contributed to the family's need to move frequently from one home to another during Reagan's childhood. One winter evening, young Reagan was making his way to what he thought would be an empty house. As he approached the back porch, he saw his father passed out in the snow. In his own accounts of the event, Reagan admits that even though he was only eleven years old, he knew why his father lay motionless on the ground. A part of Reagan simply wanted to go into the house and ignore what he had seen. But he did not abandon his father. About the incident Reagan writes, “I felt myself fill with grief for my father at the same time I was feeling sorry for myself. Seeing his arms spread out as if he were crucified—as indeed he was—his hair soaked with melting snow, snoring as he breathed, I could feel no resentment against him.”⁸ Reagan bent down, grabbed Jack's coat, dragged him into the house, and put his father to bed. In meeting his father's alcoholism with patience and love as opposed to anger or avoidance, Reagan was also showing one of the many ways in which his mother helped shape his character and imagination.

Nelle Reagan wore many hats in her life. She was a mother, a wife, and a Christian. Although she and Jack were married in the Roman Catholic Church, Nelle joined the Disciples of Christ, or Christian Church, shortly before Ronald was born. Her conversion filled her with an unfailing religious zeal. She bore the trials of marriage to an alcoholic with patience and grace, and she refused to pass judgment upon Jack's character. Nelle took seriously the Christian commandment to love one's neighbor as one's self. She delivered food to the hungry, visited prisoners, and offered prayer and spiritual comfort to people in need.⁹ When Reagan was a young boy, a flu epidemic erupted in the Midwest that almost claimed his mother's life. This close encounter with death never led Nelle to despair or to question God. She believed that everything in a person's life happens for a reason and that all events are part of God's plan for each individual. In her mind, even the most difficult trials and tragedies that befell human beings ultimately worked toward a happy result. In An American Life, Reagan acknowledges how strongly these views shaped his own understanding of the world. The optimism and religious faith that were so important to Reagan and the vision he communicated in his presidential speeches were some of the many gifts he received from his mother.¹⁰

Nelle was also a poet and an actress, and her public recitations were well received in the region.¹¹ Reagan's first experiences with public speaking and acting occurred during performances arranged by his mother. At the age of nine, he recited “About Mother.” A month later he recited “The Sad Dollar and the Glad Dollar.”¹² Nelle's recitations were often devoted to spiritual topics, but she did not avoid offering her thoughts on politics to the public. In God and Ronald Reagan, Paul Kengor provides an excellent description of Nelle's formative influence upon young Reagan. In explaining the breadth of her religious and political interests during the 1920s, Kengor cites a poem she published eight years after the end of World War I. In “Armistice Day Poem,” Nelle lauded the American soldiers who “have won for the world democracy, and doomed forever and always the cruel autocracy.”¹³ She was not alone in her views of the broader significance of World War I.

A few years after publishing “Armistice Day Poem,” Nelle hosted a local meeting of the Woman's Missionary Society. As Kengor explains, the topic of the meeting was “The Large World—My Neighborhood.” The discussion expressed a concern held by many Americans, especially progressive Christians, that the rest of the world was too slow in applying the commandments of Christ to international relations. At the meeting, many of the women agreed that each nation was capable of undertaking this task and that the successful global adoption of applied Christianity would provide a “cure for war, crime, and sin of every kind.”¹⁴ The proposed remedy for seemingly permanent social and political problems was a synthesis of religion and politics. Christianity and democracy, working together, were perceived as the keys to raising the moral standards of nations and changing the world for the better. Reagan's understandings of both Christianity and democracy owe much to the influence of his mother. ¹⁵

REAGAN AND DICK FAULKNER

A little-known, or perhaps deliberately ignored, fact about Reagan is that he liked to read. Though he never read deeply in philosophy or literature, he read widely in newspapers, political magazines, American history, and light fiction. In his autobiographies, he indicates that as a child he frequently checked out books from the Dixon public library. He enjoyed reading Tarzan, Frank Merriwell at Yale, and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.¹⁶ As a young boy, he also read a novel that can be said, without hyperbole, to have changed his life. That Printer of Udell's, written in 1903 by former Christian preacher Harold Bell Wright, is a work of progressive Christian fiction. It devotes a great deal of attention to the ways in which “applied Christianity” could improve the morals and prosperity of society. A brief summary of the novel's main plot and characters will help explain some of the ways in which it made a substantial contribution to the development of Reagan's imagination.

“O God, take ker o' Dick!”¹⁷ As Dick Faulkner's mother is dying, she prays for God's forgiveness and asks him not to punish her son for his parents' transgressions. Shortly after she dies, Dick leaves the dirty one-room cabin in which he grew up. There is nothing left for him there—except his abusive alcoholic father—and he becomes a tramp traveling from town to town by rail and on foot.

Sixteen years later, Dick arrives in Boyd City. He previously received training as a printer in Kansas City but was fired as the result of a strike. He makes his way around town looking for decent work, but he finds no one in Boyd City is willing to employ him. Starving, with no job prospects, Dick happens upon a church where a service is about to start. He feels his worries melt away and says, “‘Christians won't let me starve—they'll help me earn something to eat. I'm not a beggar—not me’…‘All I want is a chance.’”¹⁸ But Dick's deliverance does not come. At the end of the service, he asks various parishioners for help, but many of them ignore him. Even the clergy are uncomfortable with his beggarly presence. They are unsympathetic to his plight. If Dick is going to find a way to survive, it is clear that these Christians will not be the ones to help him.

However, all hope is not lost. Overwhelmed at his printing shop, George Udell, a decent man, though not a member of a Christian church, desperately needs an additional employee to get all his orders ready for the morning. Into his store walks Dick. Initially suspicious of the tramp, Udell quickly learns that Dick is a hard-working, talented, efficient printer who simply needs a chance to get himself out of poverty. Through his work at Udell's, Dick is able to make money, to sleep at night in a safe and warm place, and, most important, to earn the dignity that has been denied him so long by indifferent and hypocritical individuals.

At this point in the novel, another important character, the Reverend James Cameron, is introduced. Reverend Cameron is working on a sermon that will be delivered at the Sunday service of the same church that refused to help Dick. In “The Church of the Future,” Cameron argues that the church has become Christian in name only and is more concerned with form and ceremony than with applying the teachings of Christ to problems such as poverty, immorality, and the suffering of mankind. The narrator explains that Cameron was prompted to write the sermon because he “simply desired to see a more practical working of Christianity. In other words, he wished to see Christians doing the things that Christ did, and using in matters of the church, the same business sense which they brought to bear upon their own affairs.”¹⁹ It is not surprising that the sermon, with its bold vision of business Christianity and its call to social service, falls flat with the same audience that refused to help Dick. Cameron's sermon is nothing short of a scandal in Boyd City.

The older members of the church are completely uninterested in, and often actively opposed to, any organized efforts to alleviate the suffering of Boyd City's poor. Many of the older members of the clergy prefer to engage in unending and superfluous doctrinal disputes rather than help those in need; the older laity tends to view the church as a social club rather than an institution of service and salvation. The older generation consists mainly of counterfeit Christians. Cameron's message did find strong support among many of the younger members of the parish and even among some of Boyd City's non-Christians such as Dick and George. The younger generation embraces Cameron's view of Christianity with its emphasis on social justice and practical action rather than dogmatic purity. This dichotomy between the older and younger members of the church and citizens of Boyd City runs throughout the novel.

For the youth of Boyd City, a belief in a difference between Christianity, which is good, and the church, which, while not evil, tends to corrupt and desensitize its members to the real message of Christ, begins to emerge. Energy and enthusiasm for real Christianity grows in their hearts, but they have no clear plan to realize the world Reverend Cameron held before them in his sermon. They need a leader to capture their imaginations and show them the way to translate into action their desires to improve society with business-like, practical Christianity. Boyd City needs Dick Faulkner.

Dick's stature in the community has grown since his arrival, and his plain-spoken, commonsense approach to reforming Boyd City further raises his standing. He comes up with a plan that will provide the truly deserving poor—i.e., people who through no fault of their own have fallen on hard times—with the opportunity to work for food and lodging while excluding idlers seeking merely to abuse the charity of others. Though he does not belong to any church, Dick is doing what he believes a real Christian ought to do. Both he and his plan encounter a number of challenges, but he is eventually victorious. The city's various criminals find respectable jobs, bars are replaced by wholesome businesses, and churches and schools grow in their memberships. Boyd City becomes a symbol of everything that is possible when applied Christianity is given a chance to change society.²⁰

After this success, Dick becomes a member of the church that turned away...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Enduring Appeal and Importance of Ronald Reagan's Imagination
• 1 Ronald Reagan: A Biographical Sketch
• 2 The Imagination: A Philosophical Elucidation
• 3 “A Talent for Happiness”: Ronald Reagan, Optimism, and Politics
• 4 “I Hear America Singing”: Ronald Reagan and the American People
• 5 “The Mystic Chords of Memory”: Ronald Reagan and the American Revolution
• 6 “Puzzle Palaces on the Potomac”: Ronald Reagan and Contemporary American Government
• 7 “A Crusade for Freedom”: Ronald Reagan and America's Role in the World
• 8 “A Cathedral of Peace”: Ronald Reagan and Peace among Nations
• 9 “The Land of Limitless Possibilities”: Ronald Reagan, Progress, Technology, and America
• 10 “A Shining City upon a Hill”: Ronald Reagan, Religion, and America
• Conclusion: An Empire of Illusions? The Chimeric Imagination of Ronald Reagan
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index