The Working Class Republican

by Henry Olsen

  The Progressive Party platform is among the most left-wing documents ever produced by a significant American political party. It proclaimed that “the national wealth and natural resources of our country belong to the people who inhabit it.”64 Because “every effort to give effect . . . to Franklin Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights . . . has failed because Big Business dominates the key sectors of the economy . . . the people, through their democratically elected representatives, must take control of the main levers of the economic system.” Wallace’s Progressives proposed public ownership of “the largest banks, the railroads, the merchant marine, the electric power and gas industry, and industries primarily dependent on government funds or government purchases such as the aircraft, the synthetic rubber and synthetic oil industries.” The rest of the economy would be run indirectly by a council of economic planning that would “develop plans for assuring high production, full employment, and a rising standard of living.”

  Truman’s Democratic Party platform presented an entirely different interpretation of the New Deal. The party did not endorse national economic planning or public ownership. Instead, it proposed extensions or the creation of popular public programs such as Social Security and the GI Bill.65 It called for increasing the minimum wage, increasing old-age and survivors’ Social Security benefits by at least 50 percent, and creating a new benefit for disabled people under the Social Security Act. Instead of an America run from the top, Truman’s Democrats envisioned a more traditional America aided by the firm hand of government to ensure a broader distribution of wealth and opportunity than a fully free market ostensibly would bring.

  The two parties also differed on foreign policy. Truman’s Democrats were unabashedly anti-Communist and defended the president’s Marshall Plan, aid to Greece and Turkey to combat Communist guerrillas, and other anti-Soviet policies. The Progressives rejected all of this, arguing instead for “negotiation and discussion with the Soviet Union to find areas of agreement to win the peace.”

  Reagan was staunchly behind Truman in this campaign. He cochaired the organization Hollywood for Truman and campaigned actively for Truman and other Democratic candidates, such as the Senate nominee Hubert Humphrey.66 Reagan’s speeches focused on a major Democratic campaign theme, attacking “Republican inflation,” but from time to time he also endorsed other aspects of the Democratic platform.67 His attacks on inflation also stuck to the Democratic Party theme that it was the result of “big business” raising prices unnecessarily to fuel profits.68 This did not mean he was against the private sector, though. He told the Los Angeles Rotary Club that he was “for the free-enterprise system” and “against statism.”69 Reagan’s intense anti-communism, generated (as we shall see in the next chapter) because of his recent involvement in stopping the attempted Communist infiltration of the movie industry, did not preclude his support for Truman. Indeed, the Truman-inspired Democratic platform was itself a strongly anti-Communist document.

  By choosing to back Truman and the Democrats in the intraliberal war with Wallace and the Progressives, Reagan showed how he understood what the New Deal meant. In his mind, the New Deal was meant to reshuffle the classic American deck, not create a new America from an entirely different set of cards.

  Even long after his partisan switch, Reagan expressed fondness for Truman and his presidency. Calling him “an outstanding president,” he credited Truman with common sense that allowed him to stand “up to the bureaucrats” and make tough decisions.70 Revealingly, in 1989 Reagan said:

  He wasn’t a tax-and-spend Democrat; during the past sixty years there have been only eight scattered years when the federal budget was in balance and four of those years was under Truman. I think he and I were in tune on a lot of things about government and I think if he had lived longer he might have come over to the other side like I did. [Emphasis added.]71

  While Reagan rarely crusaded for expanded government programs, this glowing endorsement of a man whose biggest domestic priority was expanding those programs offers an important indication that Reagan’s conservatism was not as reflexively anti–New Deal as that of many other conservatives.

  Reagan’s later success in winning over loyal Democrats was presaged in these years. Reagan’s love of Roosevelt and choice of Truman over Wallace and Dewey mirrored exactly the political movements of the working-class Catholic voters who became known during his own presidency as “Reagan Democrats.” These voters had elected FDR four times, and they provided Truman’s margin of victory in his come-from-behind win over the Republican Tom Dewey. Wallace generated virtually no enthusiasm in working-class Catholic neighborhoods—he received a mere 2.4 percent nationwide and ran best in urban, Jewish neighborhoods and rural Scandinavian counties in the Upper Midwest.72 The intra–New Deal battle ended in a landslide victory for Truman’s reformist interpretation of FDR’s heritage.

  The 1940s ended with Reagan firmly in the ascendant Truman Democratic camp. He had begun to encounter many of the things he would later cite as reasons for his political move: Communist subversion, high marginal tax rates, and intransigent bureaucracies. He also had formed lasting friendships with many conservative Republicans with whom he regularly had good-natured but intense political discussions; some, like the businessman Justin Dart and the actor and future US senator George Murphy, would become his biggest backers when he came over to their side in the 1950s. But none of these experiences had so far moved Dutch Reagan one iota. He entered the 1950s as loyal a Democrat as he was in the 1930s. The story of why he split from the Democrats in that later decade explains how he remained a child of the New Deal even when he became the Democrats’ most potent adversary.

  Chapter 2

  Ronald Reagan, All-American

  To this day, Ronald Reagan is known among his conservative acolytes as “the Gipper.” This nickname comes from his portrayal of the Notre Dame football halfback George Gipp in the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All-American. Gipp, as portrayed by Reagan, is a talented, decent young man whose untimely death on the eve of a crucial game leads to Reagan’s most-remembered line as an actor: “Someday when the team’s up against it, breaks are beating the boys, ask them to go in there with all they’ve got, win just one for the Gipper.” In conservative circles, “win one for the Gipper” has come to mean fighting even harder to show loyalty to Reagan’s principles.

  The 1950s are when most conservatives think Reagan’s principles changed from those they abhor to those they love. Conservatives who genuinely want to win one for the Gipper, then, should be extremely interested in what Reagan said and did during this crucial period, as it is in these times that he formulated his ideas clearly and set the stage for his rapid emergence as conservatism’s last, best hope after Barry Goldwater’s electoral thrashing in 1964.

  Reagan’s wife Nancy echoed the idea that understanding this period is crucial if we want to understand Reagan. “All of his ideas or thoughts were formulated well before he became governor or certainly president,” she said in 2000.1 If we want to know what those ideas were, then, we must examine what he said while he was formulating them.

  Others before me have argued that Reagan changed political allegiance more than he changed political ideals. The author of the most widely praised biographies of Reagan, Lou Cannon, a journalist from California, wrote that Reagan was “an undoctrinaire conservative. The conventional wisdom ‘He had once been a Liberal. He now was a Conservative.’ is wrong.”2 Another early biographer, Bill Boyarsky, goes further, saying, “In 1947, when he was a Democrat, his ideas didn’t sound much different from his pronouncements as a conservative Republican twenty years later.”3

  Neither man, however, quite grasps what Reagan actually believed in either stage of his life. Boyarsky has a superficial understanding of Reagan’s views and proclaims he was as antigovernment in 1947 as he presumes him to have been in 1967, a man as wedded to voluntarism and opposed to government programs earlier as later. Cannon sees a bit deeper, noting that Reagan never rej
ected the primary programmatic legacies of the New Deal. But he fails to find a principled thread tying Reagan’s earlier and later selves into a complete whole, instead ascribing Reagan’s undoctrinaire conservatism to a pragmatic, deal-making nature that allowed him to recognize what could be changed and what was not up for discussion. Cannon leaves open the possibility that in Reagan’s heart of hearts, his transformation had been much more complete and thorough than Reagan himself ever said.

  The Reagan biographer Stephen Hayward comes much closer to the mark when, in his The Age of Reagan, he slyly notes that Reagan’s thought was much closer to Franklin Roosevelt’s than is commonly believed.4 That’s also what I discovered when I dove into this period with gusto. Reagan’s speeches, the ones that earned him conservative accolades, were always punctuated with clear endorsements of the public New Deal’s aims and many of its means. Even when decrying the loss of freedom that he believed was occurring, Reagan continued to argue that the basic Roosevelt-Truman public philosophy was sound.

  Instead of criticizing the programs the New Deal Democrats had enacted and that Dwight Eisenhower’s Republicans were protecting and slowly expanding, Reagan attacked waste and bureaucratic control. Reagan’s basic argument was that under the guise of helping people meet legitimate American aspirations, unelected men and women were slowly reducing the free republic of our inheritance to a planned, socialized state in which average people were no longer their own masters, and even their elected representatives were increasingly powerless to fight back. He never named Henry Wallace’s Progressives by name, but the principles he attacked were exactly those that were present in the Progressive Party’s platform: the drive for government planning, the end to large-scale, wholly private initiative, and the creation of an extensive redistributive state that was not premised on need or an inability to provide for oneself.

  Conservatives who overlook these nuances tend to argue that Reagan came over to their side through some combination of his extensive reading of political and economic tracts during this period, especially those penned by free-market authors. Others cite his sudden postwar encounter with 94 percent marginal income tax rates as a decisive element in his shift to the right.5 They also tend to say that Reagan’s conservatism arose after a vicious battle with Communists trying to infiltrate Hollywood during the late 1940s when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild, and that his personal friendships with the Republican family of his second wife, Nancy Davis, and the conservative General Electric executives who employed him after 1954 led him to see business in a different light.6 None of these was unimportant, but it’s noteworthy that Reagan himself either remained a liberal after these supposedly searing experiences (as was the case after his battle with the Communists and his exposure to the top income tax rate) or that he failed to mention these influences as decisive.

  Reagan’s own description of his change shows how much continuity remained in his views. In his personal experiences with governmental bureaucrats and in those he heard about traveling about the country, he came to realize that his core values were being threatened. Average, decent people were being told what to do; his own movie industry was being broken up because of governmental lawsuits. He also saw that business need not be exploitative of its workers, as too many businesses had been throughout his youth. None of these experiences shook him from his belief that government could be used for good; they merely convinced him that government in the wrong hands, and motivated by a faith in government power as good unto itself, could be a dangerous force for ill, or even evil.

  Reagan’s argument, as it congealed in the talks that became known as “the speech,” was that Americans could have the economic and physical security they craved and the freedom they deserved. Liberals would overlook his support of economic security as much as conservatives would in their appreciation (or deprecation) of his views, but the voters who would end up championing his cause were wiser. “He really isn’t like a Republican,” his biographer Lou Cannon quotes one worker as saying. “He’s more like an American, which is what we really need.”7 By the eve of his nationally televised coming-out party in 1964, he had become what he would remain for the rest of his life: Ronald Reagan, all-American.

  Reagan started the 1950s as much of a New Deal Democrat as he had always been. Actively supportive of the Democratic nominee for US Senate in California in 1950, he remained loyal to his party for many years thereafter. It’s true that he supported the Republican Dwight Eisenhower for president in 1952, but he had been part of a group that had asked the World War II hero to run as a Democrat in the campaign’s early stages. Eisenhower had encouraged such a call by not stating which party he supported throughout the early postwar period. When he told America that he was a Republican, Reagan—like millions of average, working-class Democrats across the country—stayed loyal to the general. As Reagan wrote in his autobiography, “I decided: If I considered him the best man for the job as a Democrat, he still ought to be my choice.”8

  Reagan’s support for Ike wasn’t blind. He said in a letter shortly after the election that he thought Eisenhower impressed less, and his Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson, impressed more, as the campaign went on.9 And he had nothing but contempt for Ike’s running mate, California senator Richard M. Nixon:

  Pray as I am praying for the health and long life of Eisenhower because the thought of Nixon in the White House is almost as bad as that of “Uncle Joe.” Let me as a Californian tell you that Nixon is a hand-picked errand boy with a pleasing facade and naught but emptiness behind. He has been subsidized by a small clique of oil and real estate pirates, he is less than honest and he is an ambitious opportunist completely undeserving of the high honor paid him.10

  But even if he wasn’t yet a Republican, Reagan did back Ike twice as a “Democrat for Eisenhower.”

  Ike’s own views show why a New Dealer like Reagan could back him. Unlike many Republicans, Eisenhower was not opposed to the core principles of the public New Deal. His views, which in his later autobiography, Mandate for Change, he would label as “Modern Republicanism,” acknowledged that the social peace and the sense of economic security the New Deal had provided were crucial elements of a modern state.11 Eisenhower would not merely preserve what had been enacted under Democratic presidents; he expanded Social Security benefits and coverage, created the first national disability insurance program, started the Interstate Highway System, and extended the first federal aid to K–12 education in the form of the National Defense Education Act. In effect, Eisenhower offered a conservative interpretation of New Deal principles.

  Liberal Democrats wanted more, but Americans were satisfied: they reelected Ike in 1956 with a landslide 57–42 percent victory over Adlai Stevenson, an improvement over his already hefty 55–44 percent defeat of Stevenson in 1952. To this day, Ike is one of only four presidents (Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR are the others) who won the popular vote by 10 percent or more in two consecutive elections.

  Eisenhower’s two victories were fueled by strong support from Democrats like Reagan. In the Northeast, Ike increased the Republican share of the vote in Catholic areas by as much as 30 percent in 1952, and he increased his share of the northeastern Catholic vote even more in 1956.12 Similar trends were found in Catholic areas in the midwestern industrial states bordering the Great Lakes and in French Catholic southern Louisiana. According to Kevin Phillips, a political analyst, “once Eisenhower had proved that a Republican administration did not jeopardize the economic gains of the middle class—most of whom had risen under the auspices of the New Deal and World War II—the party was able to profit enormously from Catholic preference for Republican anti-communism abroad and social conservatism at home.”13

  Eisenhower made even greater gains throughout the South, but the cause for that was more complex. White southern political loyalties had been set in stone for the most part since the Civil War. Areas that had wanted their states to remain in the Union supported Republicans while the rest
of the old Confederacy backed Democrats. The latter trend increased after blacks, who had supported Republicans because of their role in ending slavery, were largely disenfranchised (along with many poor whites in some states) after 1890 because of Jim Crow laws. By the early 1930s, the southern states with the largest share of African Americans in their populations gave Roosevelt between 75 and 98 percent of the vote. Democratic support in other southern states was only slightly less strong, averaging between 65 and 69 percent.

  This changed, however, after the Democratic Party endorsed a strong platform plank in favor of a federal civil rights act at its 1948 convention. Many southern Democrats were conservatives who favored a more restrictive interpretation of the New Deal. They had remained Democrats primarily because of the party’s opposition to using federal power to repeal Jim Crow and improve living conditions for African Americans. The passage of this plank meant they no longer felt they had a home in the Democratic Party.

  These Democrats chose to fight. They followed South Carolina Democratic governor Strom Thurmond, who ran for president on the States’ Rights Party ticket. He was on the ballot in fifteen states, including all eleven states from the former Confederacy. Thurmond won only four states in the Deep South with heavy black populations, but he pulled votes away from Harry Truman throughout the region.

  Eisenhower was no racist, but it was clear that he was less enthusiastic about moving quickly on civil rights legislation than the Democrats’ 1952 nominee, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson. Democratic strength dropped significantly throughout the South, allowing Ike to carry four southern states outside the Deep South, the first time any southern state had backed a Republican nominee since 1928. Ike improved his performance throughout the South in his 1956 rematch with Stevenson, adding another two southern states to his column, including Deep Southern Louisiana.