Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  Coughlin’s listeners were able to point a finger. There were men in power to be blamed for their poverty and joblessness. And their fears for the future were not unfounded if the Communists were getting set to take over the country. Within two years, Father Coughlin’s audience grew to an estimated thirty to forty-five million and he became a strong political force. But he had risen from the Midwest and those states considered his words gospel. Father Coughlin was no doubt one of the first political voices Dutch Reagan heard. (Whether or not Reagan was strongly influenced by Father Coughlin, there were striking parallels in their vocal talent, and later on he shared some of the priest’s early, less-radical political views.) Communicating through the medium of radio appealed to Dutch, which is why he so enjoyed the act of pretending to broadcast school games. Wallace Stegner in his brilliant essay “The Radio Priest and His Flock,” wrote, “On what grounds except bigoted grounds could one mistrust a priestly friend of the poor? What madness would lead anyone to repudiate so substantial a straw in these drowning times. To many, his [Coughlin’s] was the only voice [in 1930] that spoke the truth.” (Years later, when Reagan went on the road for General Electric, audiences had the same reaction; how could one mistrust a man who had appeared onscreen for two decades as American as apple pie?)

  By the end of the thirties, Father Coughlin was to turn into a hate-monger, a fascist demagogue. Perhaps the priest with the silver tongue was corrupt from the beginning, but in 1930 his future pro-Nazi theories were a number of years away and the seductive voice, one of the great speaking voices of the twentieth century, was a bright-burning candle in dark times, which led the way for many. A career in radio took on new meaning as a path to fame and power. Dutch, of course, avidly followed the great radio sports announcers of the day and confided his dream—that he might one day join their august body—to Margaret, but she thought at the time it was only a passing idea. Margaret had been president of the sophomore class and once again had taken high scholastic honors while Dutch had just managed to slide through. Nonetheless, the year was memorable for him. He had won his varsity letter in swimming. He and Margaret, Homer Jordan and Enos Cole had appeared in Aria da Capo in the national play contest at Northwestern and brought back third place—a tremendous achievement for such a small school. There had been so many marvelous evenings shared with Margaret that they had all flowed into one romantic haze—the spirited Christmas party at Professor Jones’s home and the cold weekend winter nights when they had trailed into Gish’s Emporium to warm up on fifteen-cent bowls of hot chili.

  Both Dutch and Moon returned to Dixon for the summer of 1930. Moon found a construction job and Dutch went back to work at Lowell Park. There was no doubt in either of their minds that they would not abandon college. Dixon offered very little in substantial employment. Boys they had gone to high school with were still jobless two or more years after graduation.

  Margaret spent most of the summer in Eureka with her family, but she came up to Dixon several times to visit friends. Never had she looked as beautiful as she did that summer. The round softness of her face and body had slimmed, so that her bone structure could be better seen. Her dark eyes—always lovely—had come alive and flashed with excitement and intelligence. A womanliness had enveloped her. For the first time, Dutch experienced some shyness in her presence. She was a few months younger than he, but suddenly she had taken on an aura of a mature woman. They were still going steady, and people in Dixon remained confident that one day they would wed. Love in Dixon followed a familiar pattern. Boys often married their childhood sweethearts and girls seldom played the field for very long. One could afford to be a coquette at seventeen or eighteen, but a year later such an attitude could damage a young woman’s reputation.

  The summer was a happy one for Dutch despite the signs of the advancing Depression around him—the hard look on Jack’s face, the intensity of Nelle’s prayers, the shrinking size of Jack’s pay envelope, the move to a smaller apartment. Dutch spent every day but Sunday morning at Lowell Park, where the same group of youthful admirers attended him. The notches increased, his local fame spread. Evenings he stopped by Fluffs Confectionery, where his friends gathered for phosphates. When Margaret was in town they had eight-cent ice cream cones at Prince Ice Cream Castle and went roller-skating for fifteen cents at Moose Hill. But mostly he took Margaret to the Dixon Theater (twenty-five cents Mondays through Thursdays) to listen to the three-keyboard Barton organ and see a double-feature movie, newsreel and cartoon. Journey’s End had been made into a film (this time he did see Colin Clive, the Stanhope of the London play cast). Fredric March starred in The Royal Family of Broadway, Greta Garbo in Anna Christie, the Marx Brothers in Animal Crackers, Lew Ayres in All Quiet on the Western Front, Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, Walter Houston as Abraham Lincoln, Richard Barthelmess and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in The Dawn Patrol, Edward G. Robinson as Little Caesar, the blond bombshell, Jean Harlow, in Hell’s Angels. But, Johnny Mack Brown as Billy the Kid was his favorite.

  At the end of the summer, to Dutch’s shock, Margaret told him she planned to spend the next year at the University of Illinois. Her great thirst for knowledge was not being satisfied at Eureka. They would write, she would see him often—after all, the campus at Champaign was even closer to Eureka than Dixon was. Margaret had a strong sense of her own needs. It would have been useless to try to persuade her to change her mind, even if he had thought he had that right.

  They said good-bye the first day he returned to school for his junior year. Immediately, he propelled himself even further into the mainstream of college life. He won his second varsity letter in track, and he became the official swimming coach, the cheerleader for the basketball team, president of the Boosters Club, an editor of the yearbook, a member of the student senate, treasurer of the drama fraternity and remained on the football team. He appeared as the lead in four productions, waited on tables and worked for Heinie shoveling snow and helping to stoke the many school furnaces. And his grades improved—although he was not disappointed when he did not win honors.

  At the end of the year, he appeared in a school production of a play called The Brat, in which he portrayed “the young attractively drunk playboy brother” of a “stuffed shirt.” Cast in an Eliza Doolittle-like role of the street urchin he saves from his brother’s lust was a shapely senior several years older than her classmates. With Margaret away at Illinois, he contracted a “disease” that he christened “leading-ladyitus,” seeing her “in light of the role [she] played.” The romance was short-lived, lasting through two weeks of rehearsal and the one performance of the play presented the week before the Christmas holidays, when Margaret, glowing and animated, returned home and promised she would come back to Eureka for her senior year.

  Summer 1931 was spent lifeguarding again at Lowell Park (seventy-one notches by the end of summer, eleven that season). The pay had not increased, but he felt lucky that the Graybills had not had to cut his salary. Tough times had hit Dixon with a sharp uppercut to its gritty, outthrust jaw. Newman’s Garage had a daily line of weary jobless who queued up for bread and coffee. The factories around Dixon were folding one by one. The foreclosures of local farms had hit an all-time high. The mood in Dixon was somber. As Dutch headed into his senior year, it dawned on him that his degree could well prove useless. Yet, something drove him on. He hoped for a kind of miracle that might make him a football star after all and bring offers from the professional teams. At the end of the summer, the Fashion Boot Shop closed its doors. Jack managed to find a job as a traveling shoe salesman for twenty-two dollars a week including his expenses. Nelle was hired as a sales clerk and seamstress at the Marilyn Shop (women’s wear) for fourteen dollars a week. No one worked harder. Her employer, Mrs. J. W. Sipe, recalled, “Sometimes, I would say to her, ‘Don’t do that. It’s too much for you.’ She would say, I wouldn’t ask anybody to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.’“ Nelle waited on trade, fitted, sewed, pressed, cleaned the premises and often
walked a mile or more out of her way home to deliver a package.

  In the autumn of 1931, the Reverend Cleaver became the minister of the Christian Church in Eureka and Margaret returned to the college. Shortly after the start of the school term, Dutch was elected senior-class president and Jack lost the job he had on the road. He found another one managing a small store for “a cheap shoe chain outfit” in Springfield, Illinois, two hundred miles north of Dixon with Eureka in between. For three months, he and Nelle were separated, but the boys did manage to visit Jack once when Mac’s Golden Tornadoes played a team in Springfield. Seeing Jack as the sole clerk in the squalid “hole-in-the-wall with its garish orange paper ads plastered over windows in front and one cheap bench with iron arm rests to separate the customers (if there was more than one at a time)” was a sobering sight for both Moon and Dutch. The Fashion Boot Shop had been a palace compared to the Springfield store.

  The Tornadoes lost to Springfield, but the highlight of the trip for the brothers was bringing Jack back to the college dormitory where they had been put up for the night and having him join the team for dinner. Jack was in rare form. McKinzie recalls how “he started telling stories when they sat down and was still talking when the boys walked him down to the door. He was a gifted storyteller and a pretty rabid Democrat. Talked about how things would change once the Republicans were shoed out of office. S-H-O-E he meant, because he said he knew just how to do it. Put the sole of your shoe—well, you know what he meant.”

  Christmas, 1931, found the Reagans together in Dixon. “Moon and I were headed out on our dates when a special delivery arrived for Jack. I can still see the tiny apartment living room and Jack reading the single blue page the envelope contained. Without raising his head he quietly remarked, ‘Well, it’s a hell of a Christmas present [being fired].’“ After the boys returned to school, Nelle and Jack moved into one room of the apartment on Lincolnway that they had occupied in that year and sublet the remainder. A bedroom hot plate served as their kitchen. Things got so bad that neighbors brought food on trays to keep the Reagans going after the grocer had stopped their credit. Finally (and without Jack’s knowledge), Nelle wrote Dutch for help and he sent her fifty dollars and pulled in his belt as far as it could go. Unable to find a job, Jack threw all his energy into volunteer work for the Democrats, convinced that if Hoover could be beaten and the Democrats returned to power, the country would pull out of the Depression.

  Eureka’s graduating class had dwindled to forty-five as young people dropped out to help at home or simply to keep themselves afloat. The school was in such a bad financial state that publication of the yearbook had to be abandoned. McKinzie fought like a tiger to keep the Golden Tornadoes competing. Trips to games on other campuses became impossible, so he talked and talked until the opposing teams agreed to come to Eureka. In November, Monmouth played at Eureka. Rain had fallen for two days and the team played in a muddy field. During the third quarter, Monmouth’s top player, Brownlow Speer, reached for a ball, slid and fell with such force that the leg injury he received required immediate surgery. He was taken to the hospital in Peoria while his team returned home. Dutch showed up about the time that he came out of the anesthesia to assure him his leg would be all right. It struck Speer as odd, because he could not remember Dutch as a child in Monmouth. But there was something in the smiling face of the tall figure who leaned in close to his bed that made him believe Dutch spoke the truth.

  Thursday, February 11, 1931, The Pegasus ran an editorial, “ ‘Shall We Stay Out of War’—The present agitation for war between the U.S. and Japan should be understood as an opportunity for all college students to show the real value of education. Now of all times is no time to go about talking militaristically. Whether you boys plan to go to war or not, if there is one, it would be much better if you would not discuss your intention with everyone else. Everyone has far more influence on other people’s actions than he is likely to think he has. You can’t know who you are encouraging to go when you air your opinions.” Fears of going out to seek employment where none seemed possible were, however, the real threat to the class of ‘32.

  There were attempts to lighten the gravity of the situation. On April Fools’ Day, a cartoon of Dutch in a beanie cap and striped trousers and a little tag that said “Rah for Seniors” was published in The Pegasus. A few days later a candid photograph of him taken when he was a freshman also appeared with the caption: “Snap of the late Dutch Reagan taken 4 years ago.”

  The June afternoon of graduation was clear as crystal. The lawns of the campus had been freshly mowed and a soft breeze carried a heady, grassy scent. Most of the graduating students were broke and in debt (Dutch among them). The day was so perfect that as McKinzie says, “It seemed there was a right to hope.”

  Dutch spoke as president of the class at graduation. Margaret was awarded highest honors for her grades. Clyde Lyon, Eureka’s new president, gave a stirring address insisting the graduating class not let the future “bully them into non-achievement.” The Reverend Cleaver blessed them and told them to “hold God and God’s word in their hearts.” All forty-five students stood in a circle holding a rope of woven ivy that had been cut from the brick walls of the school buildings. A tradition that had been going on for more than thirty years then took place. Each student was to break the ivy, signifying his or her breaking with the past and each other and going forward into the future. The exceptions were those students who used the tradition as a way of announcing their intentions toward each other. Couples who wanted to be recognized as such stood side by side and did not break the chain but held fast together. With bright sun overhead in a blue, pacific sky, Margaret and Dutch remained “connected.” There were cheers and excitement, then some tears as old friends parted. Dutch Reagan’s college years were at an end. Now came the frightening business of having to go out and make a living.

  * The Reverend Cleaver earned about thirty-eight hundred dollars in 1929, and considerably less during the Depression.

  RADIO WHO

  “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

  —FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT, Speech accepting renomination, June 27, 1936

  6

  JACK REAGAN WAS A FERVENT DEMOCRAT IN SOLID Republican country, as were his sons. He did not need Father Coughlin to tell him “Roosevelt or Ruin,” he believed this to the core of his conscience. America was caught up in the election and Illinois was especially feverish since the Democratic Convention was to be held in Chicago that July. Jack toiled long and hard in Dixon’s small Democratic headquarters. The Reagans were living mostly on Nelle’s salary. Jack had applied for any job possible; none was available to a forty-nine-year-old man who had never done physical labor. He managed to hold on to the old Oldsmobile just in case he got a job on the road again, but there was no money for gas and oil. Dutch contributed ten dollars a week to the house from his earnings as a lifeguard. Moon had been rehired at the Medusa Cement Company at a reduced salary. The Reagans were managing to eke by and had even moved into a two-room apartment at 207 North Galena Avenue so that “the boys could have a bedroom to come home to.”

  Still, the Reagans’ adversity could not compare to what was happening to the local farmers who daily fought foreclosure. No substantial farm aid had been passed when Congress adjourned in July. After much squabbling, the elected body had voted to assist farm families of four with an average relief of fifty cents a day. In Washington that month, President Hoover, fearful that groups such as the angry unemployed veterans who called themselves the Bonus Marchers (twenty thousand strong) might attack the White House, had “the Army [led by General Douglas MacArthur], with fixed bayonets and tear gas,” drive the marchers out of Washington and reinforce police patrols surrounding the White House, an act that gave the Democrats great momentum.

  Jack had wanted desperately to attend the convention as a delegate and was greatly disappointed when the party rejected his application. This did not diminish his ent
husiasm or diligence on behalf of the Democrats or keep Dutch from wearing a “Win with Roosevelt” button on his bathing suit.

  In the spring of 1932, Dixon took positive steps “to combat the ravages of unemployment and near starvation that stalked the community.” As the number of destitute families escalated, canvassers were hired by the town at one dollar a day to go door-to-door to every house in Dixon urging the residents who could spare any amount of money to spend it locally on improving their homes and businesses or on purchasing items they needed. “These things,” the Dixon Evening Telegraph reported, “will end idle dollars, fear, perverted thrift and hoarding, and help in a return to prosperity.” Individuals pledged to spend $127,579 before June 1. Only a fraction of this was realized, and on July 19 the Telegraph stated that the “Paul Rader Pantry of Plenty System has been launched to help feed our own and Chicago’s starving thousands.” Rader was a Chicago evangelist. The Christian Church and eighteen other Dixon churches backed his plan. Several canning and food experts arrived in town equipped with ten large steam pressure cookers. As a result of their concentrated drive, the churches received donations of fresh fruit and vegetables from small private gardens, and meat and poultry from those who raised their own. These foods were canned over the next eight weeks. When the experts finally departed, they did so leaving town with a total of 5,891 cans to distribute in Chicago, an equal amount remaining behind to feed Dixon’s needy.