by Henry Olsen
It is difficult to know how much of Eisenhower’s support was due to his embrace of the New Deal consensus and how much was a negative expression of opposition to Democratic civil rights policies. Intense debate still rages as to what the shift of southern white loyalties to the GOP means. Liberals and progressives tend to argue that race was behind much if not all of the shift, while conservatives and Republicans tend to argue that race had been the only glue that held southern conservatives to the Democrats for decades. Once that glue was dissolved, this argument runs, ideology reasserted itself and conservatives stopped being a house divided between two parties.
The truth probably lies somewhere in between both views, but it is hard to argue that Ike’s lack of opposition to the FDR legacy wasn’t a significant part of his appeal. Barry Goldwater twelve years later would be much more opposed to federal civil rights legislation than Ike, but he was also much more opposed to FDR’s legacy. Outside the five Deep Southern states where blacks were most numerous, Goldwater received well less than Eisenhower’s 1952 share of the vote.
Ike’s conservative-tinged New Deal sympathies may have thrilled a popular majority, but they angered a small but intellectually rigorous minority. Disaffected anti–New Dealers began to coalesce in Ike’s first term around a small, seemingly quixotic magazine founded by a young, pugnacious Yalie whose prior claims to fame had been authoring books attacking his alma mater and defending the Communist-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy. National Review would become Ronald Reagan’s favorite periodical, and its founder, William F. Buckley Jr., one of his best friends, but the man and his magazine started as loud critics of Eisenhower’s “dime store New Deal.”
Buckley’s view then, and that of the many anti–New Dealers who called themselves conservatives, was that the very edifice of the New Deal was contrary to constitutional and traditional principles. His famous mission statement for National Review identified conservatives as opponents of the New Deal and said:
It is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens’ lives, liberty and property. All other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress. The growth of government (the dominant social feature of this century) must be fought relentlessly. In this great social conflict of the era, we are, without reservations, on the libertarian side.14 [Emphasis added.]
The New Deal’s acceptance of state power was intrinsically threatening, and cooperation with it meant following the rest of the world down the long, dark road to a centralized planned society.
At the end of this road lay not the New Jerusalem of a socialist utopia but the hell on earth of a Communist state. “A boot stamping on a human face—forever” was how the author of 1984, George Orwell, described communism;15 Buckley in National Review’s mission statement called it “the most blatant force of satanic utopianism.”16 Buckley and his followers often felt they were fighting a doomed battle to save humanity from this scourge, but believed it was their obligation to “stand athwart the tide of history, yelling ‘Stop!’”17 This stand included fighting the extremely popular president and war hero. The “Eisenhower program,” Buckley wrote, is “an attitude, which goes by the name of a program, undirected by principle, unchained to any coherent idea as to the nature of man and society.”18 National Review refused to endorse Ike for reelection in 1956 even though there was never any thought he might lose.
Barry Goldwater followed Buckley in this critique of Ike. He starts his bestselling 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, with explicit attacks on Eisenhower and Nixon for their acceptance of the New Deal.19 He marks the Eisenhower-sponsored National Defense Education Act for extensive and specific criticism, arguing that it was unconstitutional despite the apparent need for improved science education after the Soviet launch of the first human-built earth satellite, Sputnik, in 1957.20 Conservatism in the mid-to late 1950s was defined by a staunch opposition to expanding federal power at home, regardless of the justification, the need, or popular support. Backing Eisenhower may have been a sign Reagan wasn’t fully of the Left, but it was no early indication that he had fully embraced the Right.
There is little indication Reagan was embracing much of anything in the mid-1950s. His political involvement dropped off markedly after 1952. He headed the campaign for the reelection of Fletcher Bowron as the mayor of Los Angeles in 1953, but otherwise didn’t do much politically until he emerged in the later part of the decade as a speaker before conservative groups.21 This may be attributable to his marriage to Nancy Davis in March 1952 and the birth of their daughter, Patricia, later that year. His movie career was also in terminal decline during this period, and he had to take to the road to support his new family, first as emcee of a stage show in Las Vegas in 1953, and more permanently when he joined General Electric in 1954 as the host of a television drama anthology, General Electric Theatre. Part of his GE responsibilities involved traveling across the country to GE’s many plants to talk about his Hollywood experiences and to represent the company. Since Reagan was afraid to fly, this meant he spent long stretches of the year away from home on trains. He would have had little time to be active in politics even if he had been so inclined.
More important, however, this is the time when he stopped thinking of himself as a Democrat and started to entertain the notion that he was a conservative and a Republican. Since he reappeared at the end of the decade as an active conservative commentator, even though Nancy had given birth to a son, Ron Jr., in 1958 and he had two young children at home, we should presume that Reagan’s lack of political involvement had more to do with his ongoing change of heart and less to do with constraints on his time. What he thought during the time between 1953 and 1958, then, is of crucial import to understanding him.
Despite this, there is virtually no contemporaneous information about his thinking and what changed his mind. He gave a speech in 1952 and another in 1957 that show portions of what would become his worldview, but for the most part there are no letters, no speeches, and no newspaper or magazine articles from this time by him or anyone who knew him that touch on his change of heart. Thus, we must rely on after-the-fact explanations, his two extant speeches, and the speeches and interviews he gave after 1956 to understand the essence of Reagan’s conservatism.
Writing decades later, Reagan took great pains in his autobiography to paint his 1950s conversion in as rosy as terms as possible. He wrote that he first started having doubts about liberalism in the early 1950s, citing his experiences with wartime bureaucrats, a four-month stay filming a movie in Labor-governed London, and his exposure to Communist infiltration of Hollywood as forces that started to wean him from his belief in government intervention.22 Since these experiences loom so large in the Reagan transformation story, it’s worth exploring a bit what actually happened in each.
The first experience supposedly happened during Reagan’s service as an officer in World War II. Despite his age—he was nearly thirty-one years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941—Reagan was called up to active duty because he had enrolled in the army reserves in the mid-1930s while working in Iowa as a sportscaster. He had avoided having his poor eyesight detected upon signing up, but now that there was a shooting war going on, the army would take no chances on someone so nearsighted that he had to wear thick glasses when not filming. Reagan was therefore assigned to stateside duty and eventually assigned to a Los Angeles–based unit that spent the war making films to boost morale for the home front. As he tells it, late in the war he felt he needed to dismiss a less-than-competent secretary. Bureaucrats from the War Department, however, told him it would be easier to promote and reassign her than to fire her because of civil service protection.23
This was the second time Reagan says he experienced what he interpreted as bureaucrats protecting their own turf. His father, Jack, had found work running Lee County’s relief programs in 1932, and then had moved on to running the county’s new, New Deal–funded Works Progress Administ
ration office in 1933. His job was to try to find temporary work for the unemployed. But the men themselves started to decline the offers, as taking part-time work made them ineligible for other relief programs that provided a more steady income. Reagan later interpreted this as proof that “the first rule of a bureaucracy is to protect the bureaucracy.”24
Neither experience, however, seemed to move Reagan at the time. He was, as we have seen, relentless and passionate in his defense of the New Deal during the 1930s despite his father’s experience. And he came out of the army dedicated to such a strong brand of liberalism that he knew he was “still being called a Red in certain Hollywood circles.”25 In hindsight he might have recalled these incidents and seen how they confirmed his new perspective, but at the time they did not alter his political views.
His stay in England (from November 1948 through March 1949) also does not seem to have moved his contemporaneous political views. There’s no denying that Reagan did not like the England he found. Wartime rationing and price controls were still in effect, leading to widespread shortages of food and a lack of the sort of creature comforts most Americans took for granted. The air was sooty with the famous London coal-streaked fog, which would disappear for good only in later years. There was no central heating, and fuel rationing meant the cold, damp English winter affected every facet of his stay from the movie set (many actors got colds from working in the poorly heated soundstage) to his hotel.26 He even took the extreme step of writing the head of the studio, Jack Warner, humorously but pointedly detailing the many difficult, uncomfortable moments that were relieved only by the generous distribution of “YOUR cash.”27
Reagan would later say this brush with “womb-to-tomb utopian benevolence” had shown him how the welfare state sapped the will to work.28 But at the time this trip seems to have had little effect on his views. He campaigned actively for the Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, was considered as a Democrat for Congress in 1952, and argued in favor of New Deal liberalism with friends and acquaintances alike for years thereafter. Again, while his time in London clearly bothered Reagan, it is quite a stretch to say it changed his politics.
The final experience he mentioned was quite important and thus bears extensive examination. After his discharge, Reagan joined a host of liberal organizations because “he was ‘hell-bent’ on saving the world from Neo-Fascism.”29 Among them were the American Veterans Committee and the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP). In the course of his involvement with these and other groups, Reagan expressed the then-common belief among liberals that Nazism and fascism had arisen in Europe in large part because of unemployment and economic discontent. Large expansions of government power and programs were, in his view, necessary to prevent “home-grown fascists” from “realiz[ing] their dreams of a strongman government in America.”30
Unlike some in these groups, however, Reagan was always consistent in attacking “the menace of the complete left.”31
They, too, want to force something unwanted on the American people, and the fact that many of them go along with those of us who are liberal means nothing because they are only hitching a ride as far as we go, hoping they can use us as a vehicle for their own programs.32
The solution to this, for Reagan, was simple: liberals needed to affirm their belief in the American form of government and private enterprise. His political coming of age began when he discovered just how many people in the organizations he had joined could and would not permit those groups from making such mom-and-apple-pie affirmations.
The most important of these episodes came in the summer of 1946 at an HICCASP meeting. FDR’s eldest son, Jimmy, was a member and aware of Communist involvement in the group. He proposed that the Executive Committee issue a resolution in favor of private enterprise and the American Constitution. To Reagan’s shock, many members vociferously opposed this, with some shouting that they would prefer Russia or the Soviet Constitution to America.33 While Reagan was part of a small group to try to work out a compromise resolution, the effort ultimately failed in large part because of the refusal to explicitly condemn communism. Saddened and wiser, Reagan followed Roosevelt, the Oscar-winning actress Olivia de Havilland, and others and resigned from HICCASP.34
Shortly thereafter, Reagan played a leading role in turning back a more serious attempt by Communists to infiltrate Hollywood. An organization called the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a group consisting of nine smaller and distinct unions, started to try to break other studio unions away from the larger, more powerful International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE).35 One such effort was the CSU’s attempt to attract the small, 350-member union of set decorators. IATSE refused to recognize this move, and the resultant battle over union jurisdiction threatened to break out into an industry-wide strike by all unions, a move that would shut Hollywood down.
While the specifics regarding Communist involvement in the CSU effort remains disputed to this day, there is significant evidence that many leaders in the CSU were either Communists or were working in league with Communists. Reagan increasingly spoke out in meetings of the Screen Actors Guild against supporting a strike in support of the CSU. As a result, he was appointed to a special committee to address this dispute. His leadership in opposition to what he saw as a Communist-inspired attempt to take over the movie industry’s labor unions led to a threatening phone call. The caller told him that if he resisted the CSU’s efforts, a group would come and “fix his face”—throw acid in it—so that he would never act again.36 Reagan was licensed by the police for months thereafter to carry a loaded pistol in a shoulder holster for self-protection.
Reagan successfully kept SAG and other unions out of the CSU plan, helping to lead to its demise. A grateful union rewarded him by electing him in March 1947 to the first of many terms as its president.
While crucial to understanding Reagan’s future path, this experience did not swing Reagan from left to right as is often claimed. Its primary immediate importance was to awaken Reagan to the tactics and determination Communists employed. The searing fight confirmed him in an intense, lifelong opposition to communism and the Soviet Union, but at the time intense anti-Communist sentiments were common in the Democratic Party. Indeed, the question of whether communism was an inherent and implacable foe of the United States was a primary factor in the division between Truman and Wallace in 1948. The Democratic Party remained open to fierce anti-Communists for many years thereafter. It was only with the rise and increasing domination of the party by the neo-Wallaceite New Left—which the nomination of George McGovern in 1972 symbolized—that anti-communism of Reagan’s variety became unwelcome in Democratic ranks. Had the intensification of his opposition to communism been the only or even the major item he changed his mind on, Reagan could have joined the many future members of his administration, such as UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and fought the battle against communism within the Democratic Party until well into the Carter administration in the late 1970s.
Reagan’s activities in 1948 show how little his encounters with communism changed his views on domestic policy. His public stance against communism in America’s most visible industry immediately made him a national public figure. Important newspapers like the Chicago Tribune asked for his views on how to fight communism. The House Un-American Activities Committee, then at the height of its influence, even subpoenaed him to testify in an investigation into the Communist infiltration of Hollywood. Despite these high-profile opportunities, nothing Reagan said or did demonstrated any change in the opinions he had expressed before these events.
In both cases, Reagan gave a strong defense of civil liberties, opposing efforts to ban the Communist Party (“Tomorrow it may be the Democratic or the Republican Party that gets the ax”).37 His Tribune interview also reiterated his previous views regarding the importance of liberalism to America’s future, saying “the only logical way to save our country from all extremists is to r
emove conditions that supply fuel for the totalitarian fire.”38 Later that year, Reagan made a national radio address on behalf of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union supporting Truman’s election and decrying “Republican inflation” and excessive corporate profits.39 Reagan would never again be accused of being a Red, but his move to the political right remained many years in the future.
Something did happen then, though, that would start to push Reagan away from the Democratic Party: the government’s 1948 victory in an antitrust suit against the movie industry. In United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., the Supreme Court held that the movie industry’s ownership of movie theaters, and the requirement that only those theaters could show their first-run films, violated the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.40 These practices had meant that studios could ensure their films would be aired before the public; it also allowed them to pay less in theater-rental charges than if they had to compete to rent screen space. This gave studios increased profitability and economic security, which gave in turn allowed them to place actors, writers, and directors under contracts, thereby guaranteeing their ability to produce films quickly and at relatively low cost.
Reagan had been the direct beneficiary of what was called the “studio system.” He had been signed to a contract by Warner Bros. in 1937 on the basis of one screen test, and was then given dozens of B-level films to act in within his first couple of years in California.41 Thousands of actors were in Reagan’s position, given some measure of economic security by the contracts, even if many of those agreements were tilted heavily in favor of the studios. Similar levels of security were given to others employed by the industry.
These contracts came at a price, however. The studio controlled the ability of an actor to make a film—the studio could both deny the actor the right to work for another studio and control which films the actor appeared in. The same multiyear contracts that gave aspiring actors security prevented stars from fully benefitting from their fame if they did hit it big. As one might expect, stars came to resent this system, at it both lowered their wages and gave them less freedom to work as they saw fit.42
