Episode 23: Ronald Reagan
Show Notes
Overview
Today’s episode is all about Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th President of the United States. It’s not too much a stretch to say we are living in the America Ronald Reagan envisioned, one in which market forces matter as much as morality in the formation of policy decisions, the American military is strong and taxes quite low by historical standards, and a Supreme Court with a noticeable conservative bent. The man who brought the conservative movement from its 1964 nadir until Barry Goldwater to triumph and the White House in 1980, remains to this day a hero to many in the Republican Party especially.
Until the age of Trump. Today’s Republican Party bears little resemblance to the core issues Reagan espoused in his life: smaller government, balanced budgets, gun control, free trade and an open welcome to immigrants, even those without proper visas or documentation. You don’t hear much of any of those at a Trump Rally. What you do hear is adulation. Take Texas Senator Ted Cruz for example, a man who loudly boasted throughout most of his career that he’d only had two heroes in his life: his father, and Ronald Reagan. Well, Cruz would be the first to tell you that today’s GOP is the party of Trump, a man who smeared both of Cruz’s heroes. There’s nothing like a little bit of selective memory, or well-timed amnesia, to keep politics running.
We digress, though only a little, because here in 2021 the meaning and legacy of the Reagan era is frankly up for grabs as at no time since the man they called the “gipper” left office in 1989. No single person left a greater impact on American politics during the last quarter of the 20th century. Will that impact last through the first quarter of the 21st? Time will tell. Which makes it a pretty good time for us to explore Reagan anew, his presidency, and the politics of race during his era.
So who was this man who was our oldest president—a distinction Joe Biden will pass by the close of his own term? Here’s your Reagan primer. Born in Illinois in 1910, he was raised by a religiously devout mother and an alcoholic father. They were both Democrats and Reagan proudly embraced the party for much of the first half of his life. It was a pretty Norman Rockwell kind of life, albeit in the Midwest. Reagan was tall, strong, well-spoken, and athletic. A life-guard in the summer and a football player in the fall, he averaged a Gentleman’s C at Eureka College before carving out a nice little career for himself in radio, especially as a gifted sports announcer, one who could recreate an entire ballgame for the fans at home armed with just a teletype play-by-play of the action taking place hundreds of miles away. Reagan was good at radio, but he had the good looks of a movie star, and dreamed of Hollywood. In 1937 he moved to California, took a movie screen test with Warner Brothers, and went on to appear in 52 films over the ensuing twenty years. He played the small but vital role of George Gipp in Knute Rockne—All American—hence the origin of his nickname the gipper, and starred in Army training films during World War II. He was solid, but not quite a star, best described by on reporter as “the Errol Flynn of the B movies.”
He also found a knack for politics. Proud to proclaim himself a Roosevelt New Dealer, Reagan rose in the ranks of the Hollywood Screen Actors Guild, eventually serving by 1947 as its president. Reagan therefore led the actor’s union during a difficult time in Hollywood, the era of red-baiting and blacklists for artists with suspected communist leanings, and Reagan led the charge to purge the movie business of such leftist threats. By the early 1950s he also worked as a secret informant to the FBI, reporting on suspicious characters he met on at the studio or on union business.
The starring roles started to dry up for Reagan in the 1950s, as he aged out of being the same heartthrob he’d been in his youth, but Reagan’s passion for politics flourished. Hired by General Electric to tour the country delivering uplifting and patriotic messages to factory workers and local chambers of commerce, he honed his increasingly conservative political ideology into a message, one most famously delivered on the eve of the 1964 election when he spoke on national television in support of Barry Goldwater. Man, did he knock it out of the park. The speech was so good it vaulted Reagan to the top of Republican politics in the wake of Goldwater’s defeat. Indeed, some wondered if they shouldn’t have picked Reagan instead of Goldwater in the first place, but then again, why would they have? Reagan had no real political experience or held public office.
That quickly changed. Sensing a political future, and enthralled by the crusade of resurrecting conservatism, Reagan won two terms as California’s governor before term limits forced him to leave office. He set his sights then on Gerald Ford, challenging the sitting president for the Republican nomination in 1976. He lost, but only barely, and was thus the frontrunner from the start in 1980. Curiously, Ford re-entered the picture here, when at the 1980 GOP convention the idea arose that Reagan, still considered a political neophyte especially in foreign affairs, could have Ford serve as his vice-president or his co-president! Cooler heads eventually realized such a relationship would never work in practice in a system in which there was only one elected Commander-in-Chief, but the incident reminds us that Reagan was considered, well, a radical in 1980, a firebrand of conservatism in a country still profoundly shaped by Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. “Make America Great Again,” his campaign slogan cried. It was time for “law and order” and to put “America First,” he said time and again from the stump.
Reagan’s supporters took over Washington as though it was a revolution, promising to dismantle government, lower taxes, and beat back the Soviet Union once and for all. He survived an assassination attempt in 1981, and a terrible recession, to win re-election in 1984 promising a new day for American spirit, a morning in America, where the loss of Vietnam, the stain of Watergate, and the pain of the previous decade’s stagflation all melted away in a sea of optimism, patriotism, and profit.
There’s a ton more to discuss here about Reagan—the end of the Cold War, Iran-Contra, the AIDS Crisis and more—but we want to get right to our conversations this week, because wow do we have a good line-up for you. Joining us this week were Daniel Lucks, author of Reconsidering Reagan, Racism, Republicans, and the Road to Trump. Next we spoke to Leah Wright-Rigueur, The Harry S. Truman Professor of American History at Brandeis University, and author of The Loneliness of the Black Republican. Finally we learned from Niki Hemmer from the Obama Oral History Project and author of Messenger on the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.
Together our conversations highlighted two themes:
That the politics of race is oftentimes really the politics of language.
How the best way to understand a policy’s design is often by exploring its impact.
Guests:
Daniel S. Lucks has a PhD in American history from UC Berkeley. He's the author of Reconsidering Reagan: Racism, Republicans, and the Road to Trump, and Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. He's an attorney and lives in Los Angeles.
Books and Articles:
Reconsidering Reagan: Racism, Republicans, and the Road to Trump
Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War
The GOP can’t escape Trump without letting go of Reagan
Op-Ed: Donald Trump, a true Reagan Republican
Originalism threatens to turn the clock back on race
Leah Wright Rigueur is the Harry S. Truman Associate Professor of American History at Brandeis University. Her research expertise includes 20th Century American political and social history, modern African American history, race, politics, civil rights, contemporary social movements, political ideologies and institutions, and the American presidency.
Leah is the author of the award-winning study, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power. Her new book, Mourning in America: Black Men and Women in a White House, documents critical transformations in American politics in the 1980s through an exploration of political scandal and corruption, as told through two contrasting perspectives: that of black women public housing activists and of black officials in the Ronald Reagan-helmed White House.
Leah’s writing, research and commentary has been featured in outlets including ABC News, MSNBC, CNN, CBS News, PBS, NPR, A&E Networks, The History Channel, MTV News, Showtime, SiriusXM, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Politico, The Root, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Fortune Magazine. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and a B.A. in History from Dartmouth College.
Follow Dr. Rigueur on Twitter.
Dr. Nicole Hemmer is an associate research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project at Columbia University. A political historian specializing in media, conservatism, and the far-right, she is the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. She co-hosts the podcasts Past Present and This Day in Esoteric Political History. Hemmer’s historical analysis has appeared in a number of national and international news outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Politico, U.S. News & World Report, New Republic, PBS NewsHour, CNN, NPR, and NBC News. She also co-founded the Made by History section of the Washington Post.
Hemmer earned her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in U.S. history from Columbia University, and has won fellowships from the Center for C-SPAN Scholarship and Engagement at Purdue University, the Hoover Institution, the Miller Center of Public Affairs, and the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.
Follow Dr. Hemmer on Twitter.