by Henry Olsen
In both his campaign and precampaign speeches, Reagan emphasized popular control of government, not opposition to government, as his primary theme. The problem he attacked was not government per se but how government had grown remote by empowering bureaucrats and how it had started, through the Great Society, disconnecting income from work. None of the major innovations of the New Deal would be repealed or even verbally critiqued; indeed, Reagan always made clear that legitimate humanitarian goals would be honored and maintained.
These themes eventually coalesced into what he called the Creative Society. That society was one in which government had an important role in providing leadership, creating opportunity for its citizens, and taking care of those unable to care for themselves. It would unleash the creativity and compassion of its members, however, by giving individuals and nongovernmental entities the power to create and innovate and by looking outside the bureaucracy for answers when it faced a social problem that required some governmental action. One can see this as a conservative interpretation of the public New Deal or as a fleshing out of Dwight Eisenhower’s Modern Republicanism, which Ike had described as one that is “conservative when it comes to economic problems but liberal when it comes to human problems.”2 The fact that Barry Goldwater explicitly attacked Ike’s statement in Conscience seemed not to matter to either Reagan or his adoring audience.
Reagan’s Creative Society was also neither ideological nor partisan. Throughout this period, Reagan argued that differences among Republicans were unimportant compared with the challenge they all faced from the liberals. His words and deeds in this, the dawn of the conservative takeover of the Republican Party, were the antithesis of divisive or confrontational. Moderates and different shades of conservative all had a place at his table.
He also argued that Democrats and independents were welcome. One did not need to check one’s party affiliation at the door to enter Reagan’s house. Once inside, of course, the host wouldn’t object if you wanted to try on another suit of partisan clothes. But it was also OK if one did not. Reagan was seeking to lead a popular revolt, not a partisan one.
This philosophy was on display as early as November 1964. In an election postmortem speech delivered to the Los Angeles County Young Republicans, Reagan made many of the points he raised in his short National Review piece. But he also noted that a recent Gallup poll had found four ideas were popular across party lines: prayer should be allowed in public schools, the federal government’s power was too great, welfare programs had a demoralizing effect on their recipients, and government corruption was too extensive.3 These themes, especially the middle two, would feature prominently in his 1966 campaign.
Reagan’s broader philosophy of government was more clearly enunciated in a speech he gave in 1965 entitled “The Myth of the Great Society.” The speech was given after the massive output of congressional legislation in the wake of the Democratic Party’s 1964 landslide. In what would become the largest expansion of federal government power for nearly fifty years, Congress passed bills authorizing a multitude of new programs including Medicare, Medicaid, and a host of antipoverty initiatives that would become known was the War on Poverty. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was part of this landmark effort, and what would become the food stamps program would pass shortly thereafter. If there was ever a time to make the sort of criticisms Goldwater levied in Conscience, this was that time.
Reagan’s criticism was much more muted than Goldwater’s even as it was quite sharp. Despite opposing Medicare just a year earlier in his televised address, Reagan does not mention its passage directly or indirectly in this speech. There was no call to repeal and replace Medicare. Neither did he attack or even name Medicaid in the wide-ranging address.
Instead, Reagan attacked the War on Poverty. His specific criticism had nothing to do with that war’s “humanitarian aims”; with these he had “no quarrel.”4 Instead, he argued that it amounted to a “vast federalization of public life,” disconnected income from work, empowered social planners, and enriched an army of highly paid federal government employees whose interest it then became to perpetuate their programs regardless of their necessity. Indicative of this middle-ground approach was Reagan’s discussion of public housing. We “should provide adequate shelter for those, who through no fault of their own, cannot provide for themselves,” Reagan said. The problem with the Great Society was that it was too broad in its scope, and this failed to induce people to improve themselves.
Reagan continued this approach when discussing urban renewal. While eliminating slums was “a worthy goal,” he opposed the liberals’ use of eminent domain to take property from one private owner only to resell it to a private developer to build a government-favored project.
Toward the end of his speech he made one of his clearest statements ever regarding his philosophy of government. After arguing that Republicans could not let their enemies divide them into moderate, liberal, and conservative camps in the face of the common foe, he said the united party must run “by standing on principle.” The principle he then articulated (which we examined earlier) was not what many of his modern-day defenders would expect:
We too want to solve to the best of our ability the problems of poverty and hunger, health and old age and unemployment. We can put a floor below which no American will be asked to live in degradation without erecting a ceiling over which no citizen can fly without being penalized for his initiative and his effort.
There is nothing about that statement with which Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman would have disagreed, even as they likely would have interpreted it differently than Reagan. Libertarians and staunch constitutionalists, however, could not have agreed with it. Of greater political import, the modern-day followers of Henry Wallace would have vehemently opposed it as being insufficiently critical of the systemic inequities of modern American capitalism. Once again, Reagan’s conservatism was inherently grounded in an interpretation of the principles of the public New Deal and focused its criticisms on those who opposed the New Deal from the left.
Reagan spent much of 1965 preparing for his candidacy. Although he did not officially declare it until January 1966, he was interviewing potential campaign consultants much earlier in the year.5 His choice might have surprised and unsettled some of his more ideological supporters had they noticed: he chose the same firm that had run Nelson Rockefeller’s California Republican presidential primary effort just a year before, Spencer-Roberts.
Stu Spencer and Bill Roberts were the deans of the then-nascent field of political consulting in California. They worked only for Republicans in partisan races, but tended both personally and professionally toward the moderate side.6 They met and interviewed Reagan with trepidation, fearful that he would be a stereotypical conservative, angry and uninterested in pragmatic politics.7 They instead found an intensely earnest and intelligent man who knew his weaknesses, was willing to learn, and didn’t care at all that they had savaged Barry Goldwater in the prior year’s race. By their third meeting in the spring of 1965, they were hooked and signed on for the duration.
Reagan knew he lacked knowledge of what state government did, so he agreed to be tutored by two academics hired by Spencer and Roberts. In between his tours of the nation attacking liberalism he also traveled California in what would today be called an exploratory candidacy. He also delved into briefing books the academics and their team put together.8 Reagan would never become a master of the details of government, but he learned enough that he would understand the basic issues he had to address.
Reagan’s campaign stressed the same themes he had previewed in his 1964 and 1965 addresses, starting with his formal entry into the race. His platform was relatively moderate: in a half-hour televised talk he called for a better business climate, a law that would give cities and counties more power to combat crime, and lower property taxes.9 Reporters at his initial press conference tried to paint him as an extremist, a John Birch Society sympathizer or at least an antigovernm
ent zealot. But Reagan presented the same measured replies he had given previously, refusing to endorse the Birchers and keeping his specific critique of government to a minimum. When asked if he was a right-wing Republican, Reagan demurred, saying, “No, and I don’t believe in hyphenating Republicans any more than I believe in hyphenating Americans.”10 He emphasized his campaign could appeal to the “millions of fine, patriotic and sincere Democrats who are concerned about fiscal irresponsibility, excessive taxation, [and] the growth of government” simply by presenting his thoughts and proposed solutions.11
His most illuminating answer was to a question about the difference between the Republican and the Great Society approach to handling social problems. Citing “the Jewish book, the Talmud,” Reagan said the least desirable way to help people was “the handout, the dole; the most desirable and the most effective is to help people to help themselves.”12 That latter approach, he said, represented “the Republican approach.” It might have, although he would learn as governor that some of the most conservative state legislators had a much narrower view of who deserved help and what sort of help government should provide. But it definitely represented the approach Reagan had learned as a teen when he first read the book that led him to become a baptized Christian, Harold Bell Wright’s That Printer of Udell’s.13
Reagan first had to win the Republican primary before he could face the Democratic nominee. His opponent was the former San Francisco mayor George Christopher, a man firmly on the moderate side of the GOP. Christopher regularly attacked Reagan for his alleged extremism, arguing that a conservative Republican simply couldn’t win.14 Standing firm on his argument that dividing Republicans was counterproductive, however, Reagan refused to debate Christopher and did not lob similar charges at his foe. The contrast was telling: the moderate was negative and angry, the conservative positive and temperate. Republican voters, who had only narrowly supported Barry Goldwater in the 1964 GOP presidential primary over the liberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller by a 51–49 margin, gave the sunny Southern Californian a whopping 65–31 percent landslide in his first race.15
Christopher did, however, strike blood once in a very telling moment before the National Negro Republican Assembly’s California Convention. While Reagan still refused to debate, Christopher made a presentation to the group directly after one by Reagan and while the first-time candidate was still there. Reagan had told the group that he had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a “bad piece of legislation,” a statement that Christopher predictably used in his talk to imply Reagan might be prejudiced.16 This understandably infuriated a man who had been raised to see every person as a child of God. When a delegate stated he was “grieved” by Reagan’s position, the political rookie exploded in anger. “I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in my nature,” he shouted as he stormed out of the room.17
While he calmed nerves that evening by returning to the meeting and apologizing for his outburst, Reagan’s positions on welfare, crime, and other issues often left him at odds with the African American community and gave room for the Left to argue he was antiblack. This impression was compounded in 1966 by his views on the Civil Rights Act and his support of a 1964 voter referendum overturning California’s newly passed law banning discrimination in housing, the Rumford Act. While civil rights was not a Roosevelt priority in 1932, it certainly was a liberal priority by the end of his four terms. As we have seen, Harry Truman’s support for a strong platform plank endorsing civil rights led to Strom Thurmond’s anti–civil rights presidential campaign. Was Reagan’s opposition to these laws motivated by bigotry, political calculation, or something else? If it was a matter of principle for him, how did he square that with his otherwise very consistent belief that government had a moral duty to act to support the dignity of even the poorest of Americans?
There is no evidence Reagan’s stances were motivated by bigotry. Two reporters who covered him from the beginning of the 1966 campaign, Lou Cannon and Bill Boyarsky, defended Reagan against that charge even while disagreeing with his views on the Civil Rights Act and the Rumford Act.18 Reagan had not only stood up for Eureka College’s black football players in the incident noted in chapter 1; he had maintained a lifetime friendship with one of them, William Burghardt.19 In all of his long years in the public eye, no political opponent, reporter, or biographer ever dug up even a single quote or incident in which Reagan had displayed animosity or prejudice toward blacks. Reagan’s blowup was probably motivated by exactly what he said at the time caused it. “Bigotry,” he said, “is something I feel so strongly about that I get a lump in my throat when I’m accused falsely.”20
Nor is there any evidence he took his positions out of political calculation designed to covertly stoke racist support. California had long had less strained race relations than in other states, as the first African American major-league baseball player, Jackie Robinson, discovered when he left UCLA and Southern California in the 1940s. California whites still were often prejudiced, but this fact had not previously been enough on its own to sway voters to support a candidate with whom they otherwise disagreed. This was on display in the 1964 election, in which Goldwater—whose opposition to the Civil Rights of 1964 was a large issue in the race—received over 9 percent less of the popular vote than had Richard Nixon four years before. In the deeply prejudiced Deep South, in contrast, Goldwater ran between 10 and 62 percent ahead of the Nixon—the only states in the nation where Goldwater received a higher share of the vote than Nixon.
Reagan’s stances were more likely the result of principle and a startling naïveté regarding the actual lives of African Americans. Reagan had told the Los Angeles County Young Republicans in 1964 that government should protect the rights of all regardless of race or creed, but that “human hearts” could bring this about better than legislation. “We cannot legislate love,” he told the crowd.21
Reagan was also concerned about the loss of freedom when government, federal or state, dictates the immediate abolition of prejudice. This principle was in evidence in his opposition to the state’s Rumford Act. His concern was that it violated “the right of a man to dispose of his property or not to dispose of it as he sees fit.”22 This “infringement on one of our basic individual rights sets a precedent which threatens individual liberty.”23 Californians overwhelmingly agreed, as they had approved a referendum repealing the Rumford Act by a two to one margin. Nevertheless, the issue was again before the people in 1966 as the state’s Supreme Court had invalidated that vote, making the Rumford Act again state law.
It is noteworthy that Reagan always expressed sympathy with African Americans and did not make some of the legalistic or insensitive comments often made on the right in those days. Goldwater had insisted that the Constitution gave the federal government no power to enact laws banning segregation or overturning a state’s decision to whom to grant the franchise. Even William F. Buckley Jr., normally considered the epitome of the intelligent conservative, strenuously opposed federal laws designed to empower southern blacks, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on grounds that on occasion veered into racial generalities.24
Reagan was able to reconcile his general love of all people with his early civil rights positions because of his lack of personal familiarity with black communities. He had lived in only three states, Illinois, Iowa, and California, none of which had legal segregation at the time he lived there. The first two had only tiny African American populations in the cities in which he had lived, and his life in California was centered on Hollywood and the Westside of Los Angeles, neighborhoods that were then almost entirely white. He had encountered anti-Catholic prejudice in his youth and anti-Jewish prejudice in the movie industry. In both cases he firmly stood with the minority group. But he had never lived in close proximity to black neighborhoods or socialized with groups with a significant black contingent.
As late as 1980, Reagan could look back on his youth as one in which he was completely unaware of racial ani
mosity. During the 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter, he angered his lifelong friend Burghardt, when, in answering a question about civil rights, he declared that in the 1920s most Americans didn’t even know they had racial problems.25 While America certainly did have racial problems then; he probably represented the view of many white Americans in that era who, secure in their racial dominance, faced no significant public outcry to the status quo. Against such a cloistered background, Reagan could easily have believed centuries of racial prejudice could be overcome as easily as his parents had taught him it could.
This accidental isolation led Reagan to be genuinely surprised when he learned as governor how African Americans perceived public matters. As we shall see in the next chapter, Reagan met frequently in his first years as governor with African American leaders and learned how what he perceived as a matter of freedom was perceived by them as a matter of oppression. He quickly muted his support for the repeal or amendment of the Rumford Act, and Reagan never again raised the issue after an attempt to limit the act’s scope initially failed in the legislature. Christopher’s in-person attack, however, started the perception that Reagan was hostile to blacks.
Racial prejudice may not have been a vote winner in 1966 California, but that does not mean racial tensions were not an issue. Los Angeles had been victimized in the summer of 1965 by horrific riots in the black neighborhood of Watts. The incumbent Democratic governor, Pat Brown, had been out of the country when they started, and in that day before frequent air travel and the Internet he was unable to return or show he was in control of events as the city burned. His lieutenant governor, Glenn Anderson, dealt feebly with the tumult, failing to call out the National Guard to keep order until after most of the looting and mayhem had occurred. Voter anger at this, as well as at rising crime, increasing property taxes, and student demonstrations against the campus administration and the Vietnam War at the University of California at Berkeley put Governor Brown in a tough place as he sought his third term.
