The Working Class Republican

by Henry Olsen

  His other primary criticism was that federal programs could force people to do what unelected bureaucrats wanted rather than what the people themselves desired. This was particularly true in federal education programs. Reagan’s speech includes a variety of examples of “the lower level burocracy”23 telling local schools what to do and higher-level officials telling colleges and universities they had to follow federal mandates to ensure the government would meet its social objectives.24 In other cases, federal bureaucrats forced cities and states to spend money or hire staff they did not want in order to comply with federal mandates.25 The problem was the same one he had identified since his early speeches in the 1950s: government was using the cloak of compassion to mask its true aims, social regimentation and the suppression of freedom.

  Reagan’s reaction to the criticism clearly shows that he saw nothing wrong with states or cities taxing their citizens to achieve social objectives that did help the needy. When asked about whether New Hampshire residents would have to adopt income or sales taxes for the first time to pay for any remanded programs they liked, Reagan did not respond with an attack on government or a pledge that taxes should never, ever be raised. Instead, he asked his interviewer, “But isn’t this a proper decision for the people of the state to make?”26 Indeed, as governor he had chosen to make that decision in 1967, choosing to substantially increase taxes rather than dramatically cut spending in the face of the record budget deficit. Eight years later, Reagan saw no reason why Granite State residents could not make the decisions he did regarding taxes if they wanted the same level of spending as Californians.

  It is also worth noting that Reagan did not argue that the federal government had no legitimate role to play in these areas. His critique was not that the federal government could not do these things; it was that it should not do these things. And the reason it should not was because it was not in a position to know the problems and concerns of a state or city as well as its citizens. Thus, it was perfectly legitimate for the federal government to fund these programs or the general purposes that these programs were meant to address. Using the example of the Kerr-Mills Act, which gave the states money from the federal government to enact programs to assist the poor elderly with their medical bills, when pushed, Reagan quickly adopted the idea that a similar approach could be adopted for these programs as well. Libertarians who thought these programs were illegitimate, or old-guard conservatives who thought the federal government had no constitutional right to legislate in these areas, would find no comfort from Reagan’s position.27

  Reagan’s own statements about why he ran in 1976 are consistent with this view. While he did not mention the Chicago speech in his autobiography, he did say he ran primarily because of a concern that Washington “was gradually but inexorably taking power from the states.”28 The federal government had done this by creating programs that tell “states, cities, counties, and schools how to spend this money.” This in turn meant that “state and local governments [had] surrendered their destiny to a faceless bureaucracy in Washington that claimed to know better how to solve the problems of a city or town than the people who lived there.” The Founders, he wrote, “never envisioned vast agencies in Washington telling our farmers what to plant, our teachers what to teach, our industrialists what to build.”

  These sentiments are entirely consistent with what Reagan had said in his private speeches in the late 1950s and early 1960s and in his Creative Society speech. The problem with big government was not that it was taxing or regulating one set of citizens to help others, as some conservatives and all libertarians argued. It was that under the guise of helping people and communities, power was flowing to an unelected group of people to guide and plan society according to this small group’s wishes.

  This was not an attack on the public New Deal, the sentiments that Harry Truman advanced in his 1948 campaign. Helping people in need and creating institutions and programs that gave average people a hand up in their quest to lead free and dignified lives was as perfectly acceptable to Ronald Reagan in 1975 as it had been in 1935 and 1955. It was an attack on the sentiments advanced by Henry Wallace and the Progressives in 1948, the view that private activity itself was inherently suspect and that a society had to be planned and regulated on a national basis from Washington, DC.

  This crucial distinction between government activity and government planning allows us to understand why Reagan always made the bureaucracy the focal point of his attacks on government. Government activity could be, and often was, done by elected representatives. So long as their decisions arguably protected people from harm or gave them the ability to lead dignified lives of their own choosing, such activity was perfectly acceptable even if it led to higher taxes. Government planning, however, could not be done by elected representatives. The types of detailed decisions and interactions with individuals that carrying out plans required could only be done by professional bureaucrats.29 Only unelected, professional bureaucrats could deal with the daily complexities that inevitably arose from conceiving and executing plans.

  Since societal planning was the problem, bureaucrats had to become the enemy. Defeating them was Reagan’s animating purpose; depriving them of power was his conservative goal. Reagan’s interest in remanding programs to the state or local level derived from this impulse, not from any overriding belief that the activities themselves were inherently an improper exercise of governmental power.

  Reagan’s interest in reducing the amount of government spending was directly tied to these principles. As we shall see later in this chapter when we examine his radio broadcasts, the spending Reagan attacked always fit into one of two categories: it either enabled federal bureaucrats to advance their plans over those of ordinary citizens, or it gave money to people who did not deserve public assistance. Government then and now spends a lot of money that fits into one of these categories, and hence there was and remains great leeway to reduce the federal budget. But there was and is a lot of spending that does not fit into either category, spending that the early conservatives who rallied around Barry Goldwater and today’s libertarians oppose as intolerable and unconstitutional impositions on liberty. On that ground, Reagan always stood with New Deal Democrats and against FDR’s critics on the right.

  Partly because of his Chicago speech, Reagan’s campaign was on life support by late March. He had lost six straight primaries or caucuses, including the races in New Hampshire and Florida, where his federalism proposal had been a major issue. He headed into North Carolina as the underdog with little money but the support of the conservative Republican senator Jesse Helms. Helms’s organization would help offset the lack of cash, but what the campaign really needed was a message that could rally support.

  Reagan found that message by focusing on foreign policy. He started to emphasize his opposition to many aspects of the Ford administration’s policy of détente—also known as “peaceful coexistence”—with the Communist Soviet Union. Most important, much as he had in 1966 when he found a populist issue to campaign on—opposition to radical student demonstrations at UC Berkeley—he picked up a populist issue that had not received much attention before: ownership of the Panama Canal. The canal, the only direct waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, had been built by the United States, and the land surrounding it had been owned by the United States since 1903. The Ford administration was in negotiations with the Panamanian government, headed by the unelected strongman General Omar Torrijos, who was friendly with Cuba’s Communist dictator, Fidel Castro, to return the canal and the surrounding Canal Zone to Panamanian ownership. Reagan would have none of it.

  Waging the campaign on his familiar anti-Communist principles, Reagan pulled off a major upset and won the North Carolina primary. But his campaign was still starved of funds and he wouldn’t have state organizations like Helms’s to aid him elsewhere. Reagan needed money to wage battle in the states yet to come. So he took again to the airwaves on March 31, making a nationally tele
vised address to appeal to the faithful for the money that would let him fight on.

  Reagan’s speech employed familiar themes, such as the threat from the Soviet Union and the problems with what he, quoting Cicero, called “the arrogance of officialdom.”30 It is notable, however, for three things: his direct attacks on President Ford, his invocation of Franklin Roosevelt, and his emphasis on protecting the security that some government-sponsored programs afforded millions of Americans.

  In his autobiography, Reagan claimed that he entered the race against a sitting, albeit unelected,31 Republican president only after he “pledged to follow the Eleventh Commandment.”32 While he claimed to have followed that pledge “not to speak ill of another Republican,” in fact he attacked President Ford by name fifteen times in this crucial address. He blamed Ford for failing to stop inflation despite a pledge to “Whip Inflation Now,” for signing an energy bill Ford had planned to veto that reduced American oil production at a time of energy shortages and rising gas prices, for preparing to give away the Panama Canal, and for failing to effectively fight Soviet communism.33 Reagan had never before criticized a sitting Republican president in this manner, and the nature of his attacks were substantially identical to those he would levy against Democratic president Jimmy Carter four years later. The man who had a decade earlier called on all stripes of Republicans to make peace to fight the common foe was now directly responsible for dividing the party himself.

  Of course, these attacks were coming from a man who himself had long been a Democrat. Reagan viewed the Republican Party not as an ancestral home as so many party faithful did, but as a vehicle in the current situation for maintaining American values. American values transcended party, and so when someone in Reagan’s mind endangered American values, he saw no barrier to saying so. For Reagan, the Eleventh Commandment seems to have been a bar to the sort of personal attacks often levied against someone’s character, not a barrier against talking about someone’s record.

  Ford’s biggest sin in Reagan’s eyes was that he was part of the “Washington Establishment.” Reagan told the viewers of his March 31 speech that this establishment “is not the answer. It’s the problem.” And Ford had “for most of his adult life . . . been a part of the Washington Establishment.” He was thus incapable of seeing how government and bureaucracy were harming America, and was unwilling to stand up when necessary to the establishment to fight for American values. Ford’s Republicanism was thus more harmful than either Eisenhower’s or Nixon’s or even Rockefeller’s, as Ford was simply the creature of the very enemy Reagan sought to defeat.

  Looked at in this vein, Reagan’s otherwise strange invocations of nonpartisanship make perfect sense. While he acknowledged he was seeking the Republican nomination, he started his speech by “hop[ing] that you who are Independents and Democrats will let me talk to you also tonight because the problems facing our country are problems that just don’t bear any party label.” The former New Dealer also invoked the Great Depression, saying that no one who had lived through that could “ever look upon an unemployed person with anything but compassion.” When criticizing Ford for firing his more hawkish Defense Secretary, James Schelsinger, for suggesting America was weaker militarily than Ford wanted to let on, Reagan quoted FDR for the proposition that in dark times “it is time to speak the truth frankly and boldly.” And he moved into the conclusion of his talk by again citing FDR’s famous statement that Americans “have a rendezvous with destiny.”

  I doubt any other Republican would give a major speech while fighting for the Republican Party nomination that contained no positive references to any Republican president or figure, but did include direct and indirect references to FDR, the GOP’s historic enemy, the man who had transformed America’s majority party into a minority fighting for its life. No amount of political calculation or prudence can explain this. It is simply the case that even when he was launching a battle for the control of the Republican Party from that party’s right, he was campaigning as the true inheritor of Franklin Roosevelt’s mantle.

  And so it was that FDR’s heir went out of his way to reassure the Republicans, Democrats, and independents watching him that their hard-won social protections would be safe under him. He emphasized his commitment to “restore the integrity of Social Security,” arguing that benefits were under attack from the inflation Ford wasn’t stopping. He promised to appoint a presidential commission to “present a plan to strengthen and improve Social Security . . . so that no person who has contributed to Social Security will ever lose a dime.” He noted how his welfare reforms had pruned rolls while increasing “grants to the truly deserving needy by an average of 43 percent.” He even made a point of explaining how as governor he had taken a teacher’s retirement fund with a massive unfunded liability and left office with it “fully funded on a sound actuarial basis.” People who truly needed and relied on the social insurance and government programs enacted after 1932 had nothing to fear from Reagan.

  Reagan’s message started to resonate after North Carolina, and the rest of the year was a knock-down, drag-out battle between the two men. But in what was to become a pattern for the next forty years in intraparty battles, Reagan’s victories in the South and Rocky Mountain West were offset by losses in the Northeast and most of the Midwest. When Reagan lost the Wisconsin and Ohio primaries by ten points each, the convention table was largely set in favor of Ford.

  Reagan’s gambit to overcome Ford’s advantage was controversial at the time and remains so to this day. At that time, not all delegates were pledged to candidates coming into the convention. Hundreds of delegates in the bastions of liberal Republicanism, New York and Pennsylvania, were legally uncommitted and hence capable of changing their minds and backing Reagan. With that in mind, Reagan did something no candidate had done before and selected a vice presidential running mate before the convention: Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker.34 Conservatives immediately erupted, as Schweiker had one of the most liberal voting records in the US Senate. Reagan, however, defended this pick as principled to the end of his life, arguing that he had once been a liberal and his discussions with Schweiker convinced him that his running mate was like he once was, someone on the verge of converting to conservatism.35 Schweiker’s voting record did in fact move noticeably to the right after his selection and remained so until he left the Senate in 1981 to become President Reagan’s first secretary of Health and Human Services.36

  Reagan’s daring maneuver failed to dislodge liberal Republican delegates from their informal commitments to their state party leaders and President Ford. Despite thrilling millions, Reagan’s second bid for the presidency fell short, garnering 1,070 delegate votes to President Ford’s 1,187. Reagan gamely supported the Ford-Dole ticket, campaigning for it in many states. Ford roared back from a nearly thirty-point deficit after the close of the GOP convention in August, but fell just short, losing to the Democratic candidate, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, by about 2 percent in the popular vote and by a 297–240 margin in the Electoral College.37

  Reagan was now in the political wilderness. He had lost two races for the presidency and no longer held elected office. He was already older than anyone who had been elected president since William Henry Harrison in 1840; if he were to run again in 1980, he would be the oldest man ever elected to his first term. Moreover, he would be running as the nominee of a party that was at its lowest ebb of fortune since the Great Depression. Republicans held only 143 of the 538 House seats, 38 of 100 Senate seats, and a paltry 12 of the 50 governorships. No one would have blamed Reagan if he and Nancy had retired to their beloved ranch and lived out the rest of their days riding horses and enjoying the California hills.

  That was never in the cards. Reagan wrote that after he lost he told the California GOP delegation that “Nancy and I are not going back and sit on our rocking chair and say ‘that’s all for us.’”38 He knew then and there he was running again. “I wasn’t the reluctant candidate I’d been in
1968 and 1976,” he wrote. “I wanted to be President.”39 It wasn’t long before he presented himself once more to his loyalists.

  The setting was the fourth annual Conservative Political Action Conference. His speech, delivered on his sixty-sixth birthday, is simply one of the most important, and perhaps the most underappreciated, of any talk he ever gave.

  Reagan’s speech was titled “The New Republican Party.”40 It sought to do four things at once. First, give conservatives hope that they could win despite years of defeat. Second, persuade them that their home was in the Republican Party, not in a new third party, as many prominent conservative intellectuals had argued. Third, show that this new party would be one firmly grounded in conservative principle. Fourth, and most important, show that devotion to ideology—even conservative ideology—was the enemy of everything they held dear.

  He was able to accomplish the first two tasks easily. He started his speech by noting that many polls showed that either a large plurality or a majority of Americans described themselves as right of center or conservatives. He later briefly dismissed the calls for a “new political party” by noting that the Republican Party already included “the biggest single grouping of conservatives.” “It makes more sense,” he said, “to build on that grouping than to break it up and start all over.”