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Overview
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).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504045414 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 06/20/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 590 |
| Sales rank: | 368,705 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Date of Birth:
May 22, 1934Place of Birth:
Atlanta, GAEducation:
St. Louis University, B.A., 1957; Xavier University, M.A., 1958; Yale University, Ph.D., 1961Read an Excerpt
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).
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."
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." 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." 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. A year before that (1854), Jack Reagan's father, the President's grandfather, was born in Fairhaven, Illinois.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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."
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. Wheat, which had sold for $1.22 a bushel in 1881 was now going for $0.45. 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.
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). 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. 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." 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!
By 1901 the local paper (Tipton Advertiser) reported that he was in Bennett to visit relatives. 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. When Jack moved to Tampico in 1906, the paper there said he had been working at Broadhead's Store in Fulton for eight years. This seems to conflict with the Census Report that places him in Bennett as late as 1900. But he could well have worked seasonally in both towns as he shifted places with his brother or sisters from his aunts' to his grandmother's house. He was still in his teens for five of the eight years at issue. Just before he moved to Tampico, he and his wife had been living with his grandmother. This mode of life probably resembled Huck Finn's too literally, and the only other boy among the children — Jack's older brother Bill — may have been hurt by such a rootless adolescence, since he later led a life of hard drinking, depression, and commitment to institutions.
The skills needed to survive as the perennial guest or charitable boarder are those of adaptation and ingratiation. Jack seems to have been better at developing these arts than was Bill. Jack was a blarneyer, a josher, a cutup. Ronald Reagan, a connoisseur in the matter, calls him "the best raconteur I ever heard" (Hubler, p. 14). In Twain's novel, Huck is orphaned over and over, when his father is reported dead but lives, or is thought to be living but is not, or is finally identified with the "gashly" sight Jim saved Huck from seeing too close. Huck invents a new parentage for each new situation, remaking himself to find acceptance. Children who live dependent on others, not their parents, feel they must constantly renew their credentials. The frangibility of their situation, combined with the finality of the deaths that occasioned it, makes for an urgency toward "easiness" with others, sometimes to a self-defeating self-promotion.
Jack Reagan dreamed new selves out of his charming head, which was "burning with ambition," his son tells us (Hubler, p. 13). Jack had to please, impress, show he belonged. He developed a flamboyance displayed in little things, as in the large jaunty signature, "Jack," on his county wedding license. The priest more severely put him down as "John" (and misspelled his last name). At fifteen, he stands out from the other baseball players in the picture of Bennett's team because of his wavy hair parted in the middle — the "aesthetic" fashion Oscar Wilde, his fellow Irishman, had brought to America six years before the picture was taken. It was a style Jack's older son Neil would imitate. The showman appears, as well, in Jack's listing of residences in the Bennett Hotel register — sometimes "Dublin, Ireland," sometimes "Molasses Junction."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Reagan's America"
by .
Copyright © 1985 Garry Wills.
Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Praise for Garry Wills
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part One: Huck Finn’s World
- Chapter 1: Jack
- Chapter 2: Nelle
- Chapter 3: Lifeguard
- Chapter 4: Eureka
- Chapter 5: Strike
- Part Two: Pap Finn’s World
- Chapter 6: Depression
- Chapter 7: Gabriel
- Chapter 8: G-Men
- Chapter 9: “Govment”
- Chapter 10: Individualism
- Part Three: Radio
- Chapter 11: Davenport
- Chapter 12: Des Moines
- Chapter 13: Journalist
- Chapter 14: Sports
- Chapter 15: Announcer
- Part Four: Movies
- Chapter 16: The Charlie Skid
- Chapter 17: Chastity Symbols
- Chapter 18: War Movies
- Chapter 19: Could He Act?
- Chapter 20: Costarring
- Chapter 21: Being Up
- Chapter 22: Hollywood on the Potomac
- Part Five: Union Man
- Chapter 23: SAG: Actors and the New Deal
- Chapter 24: IATSE: Controlling Exhibitors
- Chapter 25: CSU: Hot Sets
- Chapter 26: HICCASP: G-Men II
- Chapter 27: MPIC: Rituals of Clearance
- Part Six: Company Man
- Chapter 28: MCA: The Deal
- Chapter 29: MCA: The Investigation
- Chapter 30: GE: The Speech
- Chapter 31: BASICO: Behavior Engineering
- Chapter 32: Citizen Governor
- Chapter 33: Government Man
- Chapter 34: Unique Selling Intelligence
- Part Seven: State of Grace
- Chapter 35: The Sears Interregnum
- Chapter 36: War Movies II
- Chapter 37: Home Base
- Chapter 38: Silver Bullet
- Chapter 39: Reaganomics
- Chapter 40: Greenfield Village on the Potomac
- Chapter 41: Original Sinlessness
- Notes
- Index
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Copyright Page
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