by Henry Olsen
Reagan’s unique, New Deal–tinged conservatism dismayed many of his more doctrinaire contemporary antigovernment activists. Determined antigovernment types opposed Reagan in 1980, backing the Libertarian Party ticket of Ed Clark and David Koch (today better known as one of the famous Koch brothers). Other, more ideological conservatives rebelled or voiced frustration with Reagan throughout his presidency. More revealing was the ultimate disillusionment of his first director of the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman. Stockman penned a behind-the-scenes look at his time in the White House, a look that found Reagan wanting. He criticized Reagan for many things, but his strongest charge was that Reagan was not committed to the “revolution” to undo big government that many were waging in his name. We shall see that Stockman was wrong. As Reagan said many times, publicly and in his diaries, he never sought to “undo the New Deal.” He sought to undo only the Great Society, and even here that was true only insofar as the programs he targeted were excessively bureaucratic or inefficient.
If Reagan’s New Deal conservatism was so politically powerful, why do Republican presidential candidates lose so often today? The answer is simple: even as every candidate pledges allegiance to Reagan, none clearly conveys his or her genuine love for, and belief in, the average American in the way Ronald Reagan did.
Whether they are of the “establishment” variety (Paul Ryan, Rob Portman) or the Tea Party flavor (Ted Cruz), today’s conservatives fundamentally misunderstand Ronald Reagan’s legacy, because they remain unreconciled to the New Deal’s core principle: the primacy of human dignity sanctions government help for those who need it. Americans believe, and have believed for nearly a century, that a government committed to this allows all Americans to live lives of comfort, dignity, and respect, making the American promise of the pursuit of happiness real for all.
Ryan and Portman err by implicitly disregarding the primacy of human dignity when it comes to the economy. Their approach—cut taxes for the rich and cut entitlements for the rest of us—fails to treat the average American as worthy of recognition. Their view that America is great to the extent it frees the few (the entrepreneurs) to create a better life for the rest of us directly contradicts FDR’s and Reagan’s view of the relation between the people and the economy.
Cruz misunderstands Reagan differently. He views Reagan as someone who was essentially a libertarian, a person for whom freedom was the ultimate political value. As Reagan said once of liberals, “The problem is not that our liberal friends are ignorant; it’s that there’s so much they know that isn’t so.” Reagan loved human freedom and thought it essential to a good life, but he followed FDR in believing that government action was good when pure freedom would lead to some people living lives without dignity or hope.
Cruz’s faith in supply-side economics is central to his misunderstanding. This creed holds that low marginal tax rates on the wealthiest Americans is the most important engine for ensuring strong economic growth. Tax policy, then, should not be focused on lowering taxes on all working Americans; instead, it should be focused on lowering that top rate above all else. Indeed, David Stockman got into political hot water in 1981 by saying just that to a Washington Post reporter and claiming it was Reagan’s true agenda.
But, contrary to popular belief, Reagan was not a “supply-sider.” We shall see that Reagan never argued that fostering entrepreneurship and enacting low taxes on the rich were the primary reasons for his tax cuts; nor did he contend that freeing the rich was the best way to spur economic growth. He argued for a “humane economy,” one in which everyone’s taxes were lowered and one in which everyone’s contributions were valued. In doing this, Reagan easily avoided the classic Democratic Party charge that Republicans are the party of the rich and the boss. Today’s conservatives are sitting ducks for this charge.
Conservatives like these men and women fail to understand that conservative election victories since 1980 have not been rejections of the New Deal’s promises but rather representations of the public’s wish for their fulfillment. Correcting that error will give conservatives control of the moral high ground in American public life.
Many conservatives have argued that Donald Trump’s election, fueled as it was by blue-collar men and women from all backgrounds, is reminiscent of Reagan’s rise. Some contend that he is the new Reagan; others believe that Trump’s appeal to American greatness is a Reaganesque clarion call that will lead conservatism into a new century.
These people are wrong when it comes to Trump’s not-so-veiled racialism and white nationalism. Ronald Reagan was remarkably free of bigotry. He was raised by his parents to look beyond color or creed at a person’s worth, and he showed that he was his parents’ son time and time again. Reagan loved Americans from all racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. He would no sooner think that an immigrant was any less of an American than he would think communism represented mankind’s future.
Trump’s backers are right, however, that some of their man’s appeal overlaps with Reagan’s. Trump’s primary appeal was that he would squarely place government on the side of the “forgotten American,” the man or woman whose job was lost because of foreign competition, whose life was jeopardized by a feckless fight against terrorism, and whose contributions and beliefs were scorned by America’s self-appointed best and brightest. Trump’s policies are in many cases the antithesis of Reagan’s, but the core thrust of his argument regarding government’s ultimate purpose bears poignant similarities to Reagan’s New Deal conservatism. It is thus no surprise that the sons and daughters of the Reagan Democrats, the grandchildren of Roosevelt’s voters, find Trump appealing.
The public believes with good reason that government delivers too little and costs too much. It believes with good reason that the academic, business, media, and political elites who govern us have stopped caring about whether their dreams and whims benefit anyone other than themselves. Recovering the real Reagan allows today’s conservatives to address those beliefs precisely because it allows us to interpret, modernize, and reapply the cardinal principle enshrined in the New Deal, that government has a limited but strong role to play in helping the average person achieve his or her dreams. Recovering the real Reagan will give conservatives the moral legitimacy to complete our sixty-year journey from the margins of American public life to its center. In so doing, we will finally realize our dream to make America the shining city on a hill that we have wanted for so long.
Chapter 1
Reagan Enters, Stage Left
November 8, 1932, began as any other day, but it ended as a day like no other. Nearly twenty-three million Americans had given Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his Democratic Party one of America’s biggest landslides, ending over seventy years of Republican Party rule. Ronald Wilson Reagan was one of them.
One long-ago vote, cast in a time of crisis by a young man voting for his first time, might not matter. Reagan did much more than cast a vote. He was a devotee of FDR, impressing friends and casual acquaintances alike with his passion for the thirty-second president.1 The young Reagan was always talking about politics, to the point where an early girlfriend from Des Moines broke up with him in part because of his incessant pro–New Deal prattle.2 Early Hollywood friends and coworkers report that Reagan would easily fill the boring hours on a movie set between takes with political commentary and argument, all from a pro-FDR perspective.3 The man many label as the twentieth century’s most conservative president was more than a casual backer of FDR.
Nor did Reagan’s devotion to liberalism cease with FDR’s death in 1945. Immediately after World War II, Reagan—whose movie career had gone on hiatus while he spent the war in active service as a member of the army reserves—ramped up his political involvement. No longer content simply to talk, he began to act, joining many liberal causes such as the World Federalists, Americans for Democratic Action, and the American Veterans Committee.4 He was so articulate and active that he was even asked to run for Congress in 1946 as a
Democrat.5 He was also considered by Democratic Party leaders for a congressional bid in 1952. They decided against wooing him because he was considered too liberal.6
Reagan’s active liberalism continued for many years, even after he had encountered and successfully fought the Communist Party’s attempt to infiltrate the Hollywood film industry. He campaigned for the Democratic nominee, Harry Truman, in 1948 against the Republican Tom Dewey and the leftist Progressive candidate Henry Wallace. He backed the Democrat in California’s 1950 US Senate race, Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, even as she was accused by the Republican nominee, Congressman Richard Nixon, of being the “pink lady” who surreptitiously backed Communist aims.7 Reagan continued to argue on behalf of New Deal and Democratic policies even into the mid-1950s, when he was a “Democrat for Eisenhower” and became a paid spokesman for the behemoth corporation General Electric.8 What Reagan called his “hemophiliac liberal” phase lasted well over two decades and was an increasingly important part of his life during that time.
Most observers and Reagan analysts pass over this period of his life when trying to understand how Reagan rose to prominence and power. These men and women assume that the essence of Reagan’s philosophy changed in the 1950s as he moved from advocating more government action to pushing for less. They credit his rhetorical power, his pragmatism in governing, his determination, and his luck in explaining how he went from an actor in decline to the most important political figure of the late twentieth century. All these views have their merits and all are to some extent correct. But all are inadequate to explain both how Reagan rose and what Reagan did.
They are inadequate because they fail to take Reagan seriously as a thinker. These writers presume they know what Reagan believed after his political evolution and conservative rebirth. They know he was no different from Barry Goldwater and a host of other unsuccessful conservatives who called for a repudiation of FDR’s New Deal. In their hearts, they know he was right—far right.
This view presumes they understand Reagan better than he understood himself. From the beginning to the end of his conservative career, Reagan always said that he did not leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him.9 His political views remained, in his eyes, the same even as he changed his mind about such important things as the value of big business and the virtues of government.10 If we take him at face value—and we have no reason not to—we must conclude one of two things when evaluating his later success: either all his Republican friends and allies who opposed Roosevelt and his New Deal throughout their lives—and lost politically for decades—were simply less gifted politicians than he, or Reagan’s conservatism was different in some important way that allowed him to succeed where they had failed.
I started my studies as one of those who thought I knew Reagan’s thought, that he was as antigovernment as I had been told. Years of carefully reading his speeches and writings, however, have convinced me I was wrong. The Gipper’s ability to plant the tree of liberty in the garden of Roosevelt rested on the fact that the tree he intended to plant was of a different species from those nurtured by others. It was a tree that could draw nutrients from the New Deal’s soil because it was a sapling of the original planting.
To see this clearly, we must first revisit Reagan’s youth. Our aim is to uncover not just what he supported but what he believed. We must then recover the reasons why a man who held these beliefs would find Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal appealing in the first place. For that, we must turn not to intricate scholarly examinations of FDR’s presidency but to what Reagan, and the tens of millions of fellow Americans who shared Reagan’s devotion to FDR, would have turned to: the public words of the man himself.
When we do this, we will see why Reagan could both change his partisan outlook later in life and contend he never really changed at all. We will see that a young man with Reagan’s views could find FDR’s public vision intoxicating, and could also find the Democratic Party of the post-FDR years wanting.
Reagan, in his final autobiography, said he “had become a Democrat, by birth” owing to the advocacy of his father, Jack, “for the working man” and active involvement in local Democratic Party politics.11 This in itself was unusual: Reagan’s hometown of Dixon, Illinois, was so heavily Republican that the county it is located in, Lee County, voted against Roosevelt in every race he ever ran.12 But both of his parents were ardent and devoted Democrats even as they otherwise blended in with their midwestern, small-town neighbors.13
Reagan was born in 1911, so the first presidential election in which he could have voted was the Roosevelt-Hoover battle in 1932.14 That election was contested at the lowest point in the Great Depression. Republicans had run the country almost continuously since 1896. Their majority rested on the laborer, the person who built cars, made steel, mined coal, and otherwise created America’s industrial might. Aside from 1912, when Republicans split between the incumbent, President William Howard Taft, and the former president Theodore Roosevelt, who ran on the Progressive “Bull Moose” ticket, the GOP presidential nominee carried most of America’s large industrial cities in all or most presidential races.15
These voters supported a Republican Party that was unabashedly protectionist and pro–industrial development. Today’s Republican Party preached, pre-Trump, free trade and creating a level playing field among businesses. But the GOP of the early twentieth century was anything but that. It argued that high tariffs on imported goods and other support for industry allowed American business to flourish. This economic interventionism was said to be the cause of the jobs and rising wages that supported the nation’s workers, farmers, miners, and loggers. The Republican slogan in 1900 said it all: voting for the GOP gave workers “a full dinner pail.”
The Great Depression, however, changed everything. Three years of ineffectual and uninspired leadership from Republicans meant these workers were ready for a change. The Democratic nominee, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, promised them that and more. He promised them a “new deal.”16
One can easily understand the appeal such a promise had. Unemployment was over 20 percent. The GDP had dropped by nearly 25 percent. Millions were going hungry. The three years since the Depression started with the stock market crash of October 1929 had been bleak, and by 1932 the economy was getting worse, not better. Moreover, the nation faced this crisis without any of the social insurance programs we now take for granted.
Virtually nothing we now associate with the federal government existed before the New Deal. There was no unemployment insurance—if you lost your job and had no savings or friends to support you, you were broke. There were no entitlements: no Social Security or any other form of government pension given to people in retirement. There was no Medicare, Medicaid, or any other broad government-funded support of medical care. Labor unions were on their own—employers were not required to bargain with them and could fire people who joined them.
The same holds true for other things now commonplace. There were no federal antipoverty or job-training programs. Students looking to attend college had to pay for it themselves; there were no federal grants, scholarships, or guaranteed student loans. It was legal to discriminate against anyone in hiring or in anything else: if you didn’t want to hire blacks or women (or, in those days, Catholics or Jews) because you didn’t like “them,” you were free to do so. No federal agency or law tried to limit the amount of air or water pollution factories belched out.
As a consequence of this, government before the New Deal was small. The federal government spent less than 4 percent of the country’s GDP on the eve of the Great Depression, compared with over 21 percent today. State and local government didn’t do many of these things either, which meant their budgets were also comparatively tiny: together, they spent only about 8 percent of national GDP, compared with about 14 percent today. Americans were on the whole freer to do what they wanted with their lives and their money; they also had to deal with life’s consequences much more
on their own. The Great Depression meant those consequences were life changing, and even life threatening.
This had not changed much during the Great Depression. State and local governments had increased spending on “relief,” but the amounts paled in comparison to the need. The federal government primarily coordinated private and state action, but despite the record-breaking need, no major new social insurance or spending programs were created. Hoover opposed such efforts and argued that enacting them would essentially change the nature of American government and threaten freedom.
Roosevelt disagreed, arguing that the threat to freedom came from the experience of mass, undeserved poverty. The “New Deal” he promised during the campaign was short on specific programs but long on a diagnosis of the problem and its solution.
The problem, Roosevelt said, was that Republican economic policy had favored the rich few at the expense of the average many. “The forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid” had been abandoned by “the Republican leadership” in the years before the Depression by an economic policy that encouraged wasteful production and financial speculation.17 When the Depression came, that leadership refused to do everything in its power to mitigate the suffering.18 The New Deal would end this by both engaging the federal government to provide “immediate relief of the unemployed”19and “controlling by adequate planning the creation and distribution of those products which our vast economic machine is capable of producing.”20 Toward these ends he promised “bold, persistent experimentation”21 and the word Americans wanted to hear more than any other: “action.”22
Hoover argued that such federal government action was contrary to American principles. He told the Republican convention upon accepting their nomination that despite the economic calamity,
