Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  “I’d been told,” Reagan recalled, “that I should sell the idea so there’d be no doubt of the outcome. I reviewed the history of our patient negotiations with due emphasis on the devious manner in which the trustees had sought to take advantage of us. I discovered that night that an audience had a feel to it and in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together. When I came to actually presenting the motion there was no need for parliamentary procedure; they came to their feet with a roar—even the faculty members present voted by acclamation. It was heady wine. Hell, with two more lines I could have had them riding through ‘every Middlesex village and farm’—without horses yet.” When Dutch finished his rousing speech a co-ed fainted in the audience and had to be carried outside to be revived.

  The students put forth a written statement adopted unanimously: “We, the students of Eureka College, on the 28th of November [it was now well past midnight], 1928, declare an immediate strike pending the acceptance of President Wilson’s resignation by the board of trustees…” They stood and sang the alma mater. By two-thirty A.M., the meeting was over and the strike won. Two students, Bruce Musick and Howard Short (president of the student body), took another statement, saying the student body would remain out on strike until Wilson resigned, and placed it under Wilson’s door. The Golden Tornadoes, acting as “police escorts,” showed all the women to their dormitories and then patroled the campus to make sure there was no disturbance.

  Burrus Dickinson (a student and from 1939 to 1954 president of Eureka College) stated, “The agitation was centered in the TEKE House where [Dutch] lived. As far as the students were concerned it was a strike against Wilson’s domineering personality and his prohibition against dancing.”

  Bruce Musick remembered, “The strike climaxed efforts of the majority of the students to bring about a change in what they thought were outmoded rules governing student behavior—rules against dancing and smoking. Wilson and the whole administration were persons steeped in the belief that the then-current wave of liberal thought and action was a sign of moral decadence.”

  Dutch had finally gotten off the bench, but he had done so in the area of politics, not athletics. He later minimized the importance of this student rebellion. But no matter how inconsequential forcing Wilson’s resignation might have seemed to Reagan later, the removal of a man in authority from a job to which he had been elected is an important undertaking, more so when it involves a student rebellion and especially at a time when such things were not occurring on American campuses. The item was news enough to be carried by the United Press and printed in The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. Also, from Reagan’s own description of his feelings at the time, “Hell, with two more lines I could have had them riding through ‘every Middlesex village and farm’—without horses yet,” he had experienced a new feeling. He had so connected with an audience that he had been able to sway their emotions into a mass reaction. Nelle’s evangelistic talents and Jack’s sales techniques had melded together into something new and thrilling for him. It was, indeed, as he had said, “heady wine.”

  The day before Thanksgiving, the clouds swept down and hung over that part of Illinois between Eureka and Dixon. By night a heavy rain fell that lasted almost without stop for the entire week that followed. The Rock River rose dangerously high. The brown earth turned to black mud. Out of town, haystacks grayed from exposure to the rain and everywhere a penetrating dampness, a smell of mildew and a depressing bleakness persisted.

  The situation in the Reagan home was serious. Not only was money short, but Nelle and Jack were having troubles. “We knew she [Nelle] had her problems,” Mrs. Mildred Neer recalled, “but we knew God was helping her. She wasn’t the kind of person to come and cry on your shoulder and tell you her problems. Neighbors and relatives suggested she get a divorce [because of Jack’s drinking] but this was absolutely against her beliefs. Nelle taught very strongly against divorce in her Sunday School class. Once she found out that she had accidentally offended one of the members [of her class] whose parents were divorced and she got down on her knees and asked forgiveness. That was Nelle Reagan.”

  After the great exhilaration of his part in the school rebellion, the reality Dutch found at home was difficult to face. He talked about returning to Dixon after the term to help out, but Nelle would not hear of it. The Reverend Cleaver invited him on a family outing to Rockford (forty-five miles north) to see “the supposedly original London company play [in] ‘Journey’s End.’“* The live theater experience, his first with a professional company, coming so fast on the heels of his rousing chapel speech, had a mesmerizing effect on him. “For two and a half hours I was… on the stage. More than anything in life I wanted to speak his lines [the male lead’s].”

  Although he had appeared in many dramatic productions and given good amateur performances, Dutch had never been exposed to a play that so absorbed him and a character with whom he could identify. “If I had only realized it,” he added, “nature was trying to tell me something—namely that my heart is a ham loaf.”

  Snow had replaced the rain once Dutch returned to Eureka, and with the snowfall the strike began with impressive strength. Only six students attended classes and among those were President Wilson’s two daughters (he had eight, but only two attended Eureka at the time). Regular study hours were set up by the strike committee. The students assigned their own work according to the schedules to be met.

  For one week the campus looked like a political convention. Reporters had arrived from all over. A press headquarters and a student public-relations office had been established. The Pegasus issued daily bulletins on the progress of the negotiations. Byron Colburn, an alumnus and member of the board, became the acknowledged agent for conciliation. He spent the week talking to the students, faculty, alumni, trustees and President Wilson.

  On Thursday, December 6, the United Press reported a rumor that the whole school would be moved to Springfield, arousing the local merchants who feared disaster in such an event. The Alumni Committee issued a statement calling for a “quick end to the turmoil before the college or its reputation is destroyed.”

  By December 7, the impasse had been resolved. Wilson submitted his second resignation at a closed meeting of the trustees.*

  Board chairman Richard Dickinson* was named acting president of the college. By nightfall of that same day, the press decamped. Saturday, regularly scheduled classes met; and by Monday the campus had returned to its usual routines. The students had won. No classes were dropped and dances (one was held to celebrate) became a part of Eureka campus life, but even with the repeal of Prohibition, alcohol was not consumed on campus or at any social affair attached to the school.

  Howard Short added, “Bert Wilson was not a good college president… [but] he was a great Christian man. He never let this experience affect his relationship to any of us, as far as I could judge.

  “Some years later he visited me in Akron, Ohio, as a representative of our pension fund [Christian Church]. This was during the Depression days and nobody had any money. He said, ‘Howard, you simply have to belong to the pension fund. You cannot afford to do otherwise. I will take a note for your first three months’ payment so that you and your young wife will be protected.’“

  “The students were caught up in the changing modes of the times,” Bruce Musick remembered. “As I view it there is little or no resemblance between the Eureka affair and the more recent [campus] revolts.… We thought we were big shots, important in the eyes of all those who really counted—our friends.”

  Dutch’s good looks and naturalness won him most of the leads (not always the best roles) in the Dramatic Club. No microphones were used in those days and Dutch could always be heard. His college reviews repeat the word “presence.” He had a way “of sauntering across the stage” that drew all eyes to him even when he was not speaking. Now he was conscious of his appearance in a way he had never been before. A studied manner can be detected in his appearance
in all photographs but those to do with sports. The collar of his jacket is upturned (the only one so worn in group pictures). His hands rest, gunslinger fashion, on the corners of his pants pockets. A lock of hair falls slightly onto his forehead, softening the scholarly look of his horn-rimmed glasses.

  “He stuck with the football squad all fall,” Short recalled, “although he never even got a first-class jersey. It was difficult not to get one in Eureka! I was the manager of the team that year, and so I had a lot of contact with him and respected his nerve and his determination.”

  What he did not achieve on the football team he made up for in swimming (this never was to satisfy him, however). During the big swimming meet in his freshman year, he won every event (crawl stroke, backstroke, one hundred meter, two hundred meter and relay) except breaststroke. “Everyone admired Dutch, I can’t think of anyone who disliked him,” classmate Stanfield Major said. He had a personality that was ingratiating. “Other kids on the squad came to me to speak for him,” Mac added, “and I knew he didn’t put them up to it. He was a leader and used his power well.”

  All the character traits that he had exhibited in North Dixon High reinforced themselves at Eureka. He never had been or would become a great student. His needs did not lean in that direction. College was a way-stop, a place to refresh oneself for the journey ahead at the same time as one mapped out a route. He managed—just—to get passing grades, and Eureka was not a school of extremely high grading. His startling memory and his ear for words got him through English, French and history. But economics was an instinctive science for him. He understood the more complicated theses without a great deal of studying. Had he applied himself just a little more, Margaret Cleaver felt, he could have excelled. But his real interest and constant attention went toward his extracurricular activities, which did not help his grade average—football, swimming, the work on The Pegasus, and the Dramatic Club. He said his enthusiasm was in “drama, sports, and politics and not always in that order.

  “I was afraid if my grades were good I might end up an athletic teacher at some small school… raising other little football heroes,” he told an interviewer in 1939. “I was awfully afraid [of] about what was going to happen after college. I wanted more than [Mac] had—not that such a life and such a job is bad; it’s wonderful for some people, but I had an idea in the back of my head that I wanted to be an actor.… To get a coach’s job you naturally had to have a certain scholastic standing, so I was careful not to get it. I even dropped some courses so that I’d be behind in the educational credits. I didn’t want to take the chance of weakening when the time came.”

  Politics had become a form of expression, an art. He felt pride (where Bruce Musick felt shame) in his small involvement in the student rebellion because it had been a “serious, well-planned program, engineered from the ground up by students, but with the full support and approval of almost every professor on campus.” He liked order in his world and in his politics.

  He saw what was happening around him. Some good friends had been forced to drop out of school. Lump Watts and several others from the football squad had left even before the freshman term ended. By the end of the year, only one black girl of six black students who began the year remained in his class, all victims of family reverses. The auctioneer’s gavel had lowered on many farms near Dixon and Eureka. Dutch had not seen the prosperity the rest of America saw in the twenties. His life had been unrelieved pinching and saving, doing without, being grateful for little in the way of luxury. His immediate ambition was not riches, just better conditions—bills paid, money in the bank for an emergency. He feared his own conservative nature would force him to compromise, to abandon a crazy dream of standing alone on a stage as he had at the lifeguard station with everyone looking at him. After all, what kind of sense did such a wild scheme make? He believed in working for the essential needs in life. He did not have the urge to drink, and he did not smoke.

  At nineteen the man was fully formed, and that included the charismatic personality that gave him a kind of power over others. He did not use it to any advantage. But after the night of his speech in the chapel, he knew he could do so if he wished.

  * The emigration of American freed slaves to Liberia (which means place of freedom) virtually stopped with the advent of the Civil War. Several of Ben Major’s former slaves became government officials in Liberia and later visited Major in Illinois.

  * Reagan’s birthday, coincidentally, is also February 6, the date of the founding of Eureka.

  * Since the R. C. Sherriff play opened at the Apollo in London on December 9, 1928, only six months earlier, this would have been impossible. Laurence Olivier, the original Captain Stanhope in the London company, was replaced after a month (because of other contractual arrangements in England), and Colin Clive played the role for a run of eleven months at London’s Savoy Theatre. However, Journey’s End opened successfully at The Henry Miller Theatre in New York on April 22, 1929. American touring companies of the play spread out across the country that summer. Reagan must have seen one of these companies.

  * Wilson’s resignation speech was as follows: “The situation that has been created makes it impossible for me to continue with any satisfaction to myself or with any possibility of effective results to the College. In leaving my position, I want you also to know that I go bearing no ill will or malice. Other avenues of service are open to me, and a burden will be lifted from my shoulders if tonight I know that I am freed from any further connection with this unfortunate situation.

  “As for the students, I have known them all by name, and the towns from which they come. I wish every one of them the best that the future has in store. I am still a firm believer in the idealism and integrity of the present generation of American youth. And for all these here at Eureka, since Christmas time is approaching, I say to them in the language of Little Tim, ‘God bless you every one.’“

  He added in closing, “It is my desire that this resignation become effective immediately. This is irrevocable. It cannot be reconsidered.”

  * Dickinson and James M. Allen each served one year as acting president. Clyde Lyon was elected president and served from 1930 to 1936.

  5

  DIXON THOUGHT OF DUTCH AS A YOUNG MAN ON his way up. When he returned for the summer of 1929, he was one of only 8 percent of the Dixon High School graduating class of 1928 who had gone on to college. In his eyes, the year at Eureka had been a failure. Mac’s Golden Tornadoes and his basketball team, the Red Devils, were unquestionably the big men on campus, and he had not become one of their elite number. He had grown up in the heroic era of American sports. Football greats like Red Grange and baseball giants like Babe Ruth were more easily recognized by the public than was President Herbert Hoover. They had become legends not only by the yardage they made and the home runs they scored but because the sportswriter had become a major literary figure and the sports announcer a media star.

  All-American for three consecutive years, Red Grange, the “Galloping Ghost” of Illinois, was now a professional. “What a football player—this man Red Grange,” Damon Runyon rhapsodized. “He is melody and symphony. He is crashing sound. He is brute force.” Not to be eclipsed was coach Knute Rockne’s stalwart Notre Dame teams, which had won more than one hundred games in a decade and lost only a mere fraction of that number. The year Dutch had entered Dixon High School, Rockne’s swift backfield had entered football history with the prose of sportswrit-ers like Grantland Rice: “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.”

  Dutch wanted so badly to be a football star that his other achievements at Eureka seemed unimportant. But to the folks at home, especially the adoring kids whom he mesmerized at Lowell Park, Dutch Reagan was as big a hero as Red Grange. Or at least he was their hero—touchable, near—and knowing him made th
em feel special. He had a way of remembering a kid, “I couldn’t believe it. He was five years older than me and I had five older sisters and brothers at home,” Michael Ruark recalled. “They called me ‘Peanut.’ But Dutch—’Hey, that’s a pretty good dive you got there—champ,’ he said. ‘You sure have made some progress since last year.’ Champ. I felt six feet tall.”

  When Dutch returned to his job as lifeguard, the notches multiplied and the log soon began to look as if a flock of woodpeckers had chipped away at it. People speculated that Dutch Reagan would end up a famous athlete, a world-class swimmer. Margaret came to the park in pale summer prints, her dark hair waved softly around her young face. They would take out the park rowboat and Dutch would work the oars as she sat facing him, listening to him talk of his dreams in his smooth, confident voice. His hopes to become a professional athlete looked dim. That did not fill Margaret with concern. She valued more serious aspirations. Her warm, safe life had given her a patina of assurance and she was unresponsive to any idea that might disturb the even flow of her emotionally and economically secure youth.

  Despite his austere exterior and the basso profundo of his voice, the Reverend Cleaver believed women were born with equal rights and should be given the chance and the responsibility to accomplish more than to waddle in a man’s shadow. He had three daughters and no son. Mrs. Cleaver was an extraordinarily intelligent and pleasant woman, active in church affairs and education, and she had inspired her daughters to follow their own independent dreams. Margaret had a fierce urge to travel, to study other cultures, and although the Cleavers were not a family of great, or even moderate, wealth, she had not been discouraged.*