Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Social Security proved wildly popular at the polls, not least because the greatest cost was pushed to those future generations. Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936, and though one out of every seven American workers remained unemployed, he trounced Republican Alf Landon by the largest electoral margin in history until then. Roosevelt interpreted the result as an endorsement of the New Deal and a repudiation of the Supreme Court, and in early 1937 he prepared a measure to bend the court to the people’s will. Roosevelt’s plan would add justices to the court, nominally to ease the workload of the most elderly justices but transparently to add liberal voices and votes to its decision-making process.

  Roosevelt’s political instincts rarely failed him, but this time they led him badly astray. His “court-packing plan,” as it was quickly called, revived conservatives who had been dispirited by the 1936 election results, and it added to the ranks of Roosevelt critics many moderates who cherished the constitutional separation of powers. A president less intoxicated by his victory at the polls would have heeded the warnings, but Roosevelt stubbornly demanded that the Democratic leaders in Congress drive his court measure forward. They tried and failed, and Roosevelt suffered a stinging political defeat.

  The setback proved all the more painful when the economy shortly plunged. After four years of recovery, during which the unemployment rate had declined from 25 percent to 15, the economy unexpectedly lurched into reverse gear. Unemployment leaped while production collapsed; most of the gains of Roosevelt’s first term were undone. Economists then and later argued the causes of the recession, variously blaming premature tightening of fiscal policy by the administration and Congress, clumsy monetary policy by the Federal Reserve, and sabotage by capitalists willing to cut off their noses to spite Roosevelt’s face.

  Whatever the causes of the recession, the consequence was to weaken Roosevelt further. Conservative southern Democrats now challenged him openly, and Republicans scored big victories in the 1938 midterm elections. The once powerful president found himself sorely beset and staggering into what appeared certain to be his final two years in office.

  AMONG THE EARLY movies Reagan appeared in were several cops-and-robbers films. Hollywood wrestled with the issue of crime, notwithstanding Harry Warner’s appeal to the authority of the Bible. Movies were perceived as more powerful emotionally than the other mass media of the day—the press and radio—and the industry itself and certain outside agencies took pains to ensure that films not contribute to the delinquency of youth or other impressionable people. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, headed by Will Hays, established a production code designed to protect the morals of America—and, not coincidentally, preserve the industry from profit-threatening negative publicity. The Roman Catholic Church created the Legion of Decency, which likewise policed movie morals, with less concern for the industry’s bottom line and more for the influence of the church.

  Few themes were taboo per se. Crime and violence could be treated, likewise sex. But they had to be placed in the context of broadly accepted community values. Crime passed muster so long as the criminals met their comeuppance in the final reel. Physical violence had to stop short of the gross or shocking, but fisticuffs were fine as representing a manly outlet for righteous anger and an occasional necessity for the defense of the vulnerable. Marriage was the appropriate setting for sex; if extramarital sex took place, it ought to produce unhappy results.

  Reagan negotiated the code easily. The sexy parts went to other actors, and in films involving crime, he battled for good, often with his clenched hands. “When do I fight?” he asked the director of Code of the Secret Service upon arrival on the set, according to Warner Brothers publicity. The studio account went on to explain that within the hour the actor had “five skinned knuckles, a bruised knee, and a lump the size of an egg on his head.” Reagan played Brass Bancroft, a Secret Service agent who foils counterfeiters and other miscreants with some cleverness but much brute force. The industry paper Film Daily called Code of the Secret Service a “rip-roaring thriller of bare-fisted walloping action,” while Warner Brothers boasted that a companion film, Secret Service of the Air, featured “a cafe brawl that is an all-time high for the rough and tumble.”

  The Brass Bancroft movies—Reagan starred in four—hewed to the mandate that crime not pay. This was a critical matter during the 1930s, when abundant evidence indicated that crime did pay. Prohibition had prompted criminals to organize, the better to assuage the thirst of urban tipplers who had never supported the alcohol ban and saw nothing wrong with taking a drink. Prohibition ended during Franklin Roosevelt’s first year in office, but the crime cartels carried on. Roosevelt’s attorney general, Homer Cummings, declared a war on crime and mobilized the newly named Federal Bureau of Investigation, headed by J. Edgar Hoover, against it. The actions of the G-men weren’t universally applauded; in the depths of the depression popular sentiment sometimes gravitated toward flamboyant criminals like the dapper John Dillinger and the photogenic Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.

  Yet the appeal of the outlaws simply intensified the pressure imposed on Hollywood by government and respectable opinion not to glamorize the gangsters. Government’s leverage was the threat of antitrust action against the studios, which oligopolized their market and stifled competition. Respectable opinion could orchestrate boycotts of theaters and films, as when the Catholic cardinal of Philadelphia, offended by a provocative Warner Brothers billboard, forbade his flock to attend movies. The prelate’s action got Hollywood’s attention. An industry executive recalled a meeting of top executives: “There was Harry Warner, standing up at the head of the table, shedding tears the size of horse turds, and pleading for someone to get him off the hook. And well he should, for you could fire a cannon down the center aisle of any theater in Philadelphia, without danger of hitting anyone!”

  The campaign against crime segued into a fight against other challenges to the status quo. In a decade when capitalism appeared to have run aground, more than a few Americans sought alternatives. Communism appealed to many who noted that the Soviet Union, the homeland of communism, wasn’t suffering from the depression that had paralyzed the capitalist world. The fact that international communists were among the few standing up to fascism added to the allure of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Hollywood actors and writers might or might not have been drawn to communism in greater proportion than Americans at large, but they were more visible, and as a result their actions were more closely monitored. When Errol Flynn, Warner Brothers’ most valuable property, traveled to Spain to see how the communists there were doing against the fascists in Spain’s civil war, the Hearst newspaper syndicate condemned him as a communist fellow traveler. Jack Warner fretted that Flynn’s career was over. “If any more stuff comes out in the American papers like this, the public certainly won’t want him,” Warner said. He informed Flynn how dire his situation was, and Flynn stepped back.

  The lesson wasn’t lost on other actors. Reagan’s Illinois upbringing and education hadn’t exposed him to much in the way of radicalism; his knowledge of communism wouldn’t have filled a short scene in a skimpy screenplay. Yet his early experience in Hollywood made him realize that whatever it promised for the rest of the proletariat, communism would be nothing but trouble for a studio contract player. He would stick with the forces of law and order, on screen and off.

  NO CODES GOVERNED Hollywood’s treatment of foreign affairs, but the studios nonetheless touched the subject at their peril. The isolationism that had gripped the country in the wake of World War I remained strong, causing American elected officials to keep their distance from the troubles of Europe and Asia. Franklin Roosevelt had been an ardent advocate of the League of Nations and other forms of American foreign engagement until the election of 1920, in which he took the second spot on the Democratic ticket. But after he and James Cox, the presidential nominee, went down to a disastrous defeat, in no small part on account of the League’s unpopularity,
Roosevelt kept his internationalist views to himself. He spent his first term as president dodging foreign affairs, pointedly refusing to accept responsibility for any multilateral approach to ending the depression.

  But isolation had serious drawbacks. Japan had exited the world war and the postwar peace conference miffed at not having been accorded the respect received by the other members of the victorious alliance; the Japanese government spent the next two decades devising means for compelling respect. It severed Manchuria from China in 1931 and applied increasing pressure against the rest of the country. In 1937 it launched an open war against China, seizing the capital city of Nanking in especially brutal fashion.

  The affairs of Europe were even more alarming. Italian democracy succumbed to the blows of Benito Mussolini and his fascist thugs; in 1935 the thuggery spread to Africa when Italian forces invaded Abyssinia, as Ethiopia was then called. Spain’s civil war produced horrific bloodshed and an evil premonition that if fascism triumphed there, as it seemed likely to do, it might conquer much of Europe.

  The greatest danger developed in Germany. Adolf Hitler took office as chancellor just weeks before Franklin Roosevelt became America’s president. Hitler’s hatred of Jews was no secret, but only gradually did the world discover how fully that hatred informed the policy of Germany. The National Socialist, or Nazi, Party and its allies in the German parliament imposed increasing debilities on the Jews living in what Hitler called the Third Reich (the empires of Charlemagne and then the Wilhelms having been the first two). Hitler denounced the postwar settlement and rebuilt the German military; he demanded territorial adjustments to restore Germany’s prewar borders.

  The reaction in America to all this took two forms. On one side were internationalists who believed Hitler and the other fascists represented an existential threat that the remaining democracies, including America, could ignore only at grave peril. On the other side were isolationists who declared the danger overblown and likely to produce the same sucker’s sentiments that had drawn the United States into the world war in 1917. Franklin Roosevelt agreed with the internationalists yet couldn’t afford to provoke the isolationists. In October 1937 he tested the waters of internationalism with a speech in which he called for a “quarantine” of foreign aggressors. The timid response by his fellow internationalists, however, and the denunciations by the isolationists, coming amid the grief he was getting over his court-packing plan and the recession, deterred him from doing more.

  Hollywood had no responsibility for American foreign policy, but it reflected the same divisions that paralyzed Roosevelt. The Warners, Louis Mayer, and most other leaders of the industry in the 1930s were Jews, and they naturally looked on Hitler’s ascendance with apprehension. But precisely because they were Jews, they often felt marginally positioned in American society. To pay special notice to the Jews of Europe would underline their difference from other Americans, a difference many had taken pains to diminish.

  So they waffled. Louis Mayer asked news baron William Randolph Hearst to inquire of Hitler about Germany’s aims and plans, and he accepted Hitler’s assurances, relayed through Hearst, that Berlin had no aggressive designs. Irving Thalberg, who worked with Mayer at MGM, was less hopeful but not more willing to challenge the Nazi regime. “A lot of Jews will lose their lives,” Thalberg said upon returning from a visit to Germany in 1934. Yet as a people, he predicted, the Jews would survive. “Hitler and Hitlerism will pass; the Jews will still be there.”

  The Warners took a stronger stand, in part because Hitlerism hit them sooner than it did some of their colleagues. During an early outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Germany, Nazi goons murdered the Warner Brothers representative there. The company responded by closing its German distribution office. As individuals, Jack and Harry Warner embraced the cause of European Jews, supporting Jewish refugees from Germany and speaking out against Hitler.

  Yet even the Warners hesitated to use their most compelling platform, the pictures their studio made. Harry Warner blasted Hitler in speeches but was cautious in approving film ideas. “Are we making it because we’re Jews or because it can make a good movie?” he asked of one potentially controversial project. In this they aligned with Adolph Zukor, the head of Paramount, who carefully distinguished politics from entertainment. “I don’t think Hollywood should deal with anything but entertainment,” Zukor said. “The newsreels take care of current events. To make films of political significance is a mistake.” Audiences could find their politics elsewhere. “When they go to a theatre they want to forget.”

  REAGAN’S ROLE as George Gipp was the one that would be remembered the longest, but the part he was proudest of was Drake McHugh in Kings Row. The film, based on a best-selling novel of the same name, almost didn’t get made. The novel was steamy, involving incest and nymphomania in addition to more-pedestrian extramarital sex and physical violence. Industry and outside censors at first tried to block its conversion to film, then settled for its bowdlerization. Yet the dramatic centerpiece of the story remained for Reagan’s character, when the disapproving surgeon father of his romantic interest takes the opportunity of a rail-yard accident to gratuitously amputate his legs. “I started preparing for this scene days before it was filmed,” Reagan recalled. He imagined what it would be like to wake up from the anesthesia and discover that his legs were gone. Even so, he wasn’t ready for the shock he received when he mounted the special bed the propmen had constructed for him, with holes for his legs to disappear through. He looked down and for a moment imagined he had suffered the fate of his character. “I just stayed there looking at where my body ended. The horror didn’t ease up.” He told the director to forgo a rehearsal take. “Just shoot it,” he said. The cameras rolled; Reagan opened his eyes, reached down to where his legs had been, and screamed, “Where is the rest of me?!”

  Of all his film roles this was the one Reagan thought might have won him an Academy Award nomination. But Warner Brothers put its weight behind James Cagney, who starred that same year in Yankee Doodle Dandy, and Reagan was left out. Warner nonetheless gave him a raise and a new contract and expressed unbounded confidence in his future.

  5

  REAGAN WOULD LATER derive great benefit from lucky timing, from being in the right place at the right time. But in the early 1940s his timing could hardly have been worse. While Kings Row was in production, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, exploding the premise on which American isolationism had traditionally been based. The oceans no longer afforded protection; the world’s problems—the ambitions of aggressors, the struggles for empire and influence—were America’s problems, whether Americans liked it or not. Until that fateful day—December 7, 1941—the parting counsel George Washington had given his countrymen about avoiding foreign entanglements had provided a plausible basis for American policy; in the flames of Pearl Harbor, the Father of His Country’s hoary counsel became stunningly obsolete.

  Franklin Roosevelt had anticipated the moment, though not the locale. For many months tension had been rising between the United States and Japan. Tokyo was determined to gain predominance in East Asia and the western Pacific; Roosevelt was equally determined to keep this from happening. He warned the Japanese diplomatically; when his warnings failed, he ordered a halt to shipments of American oil and steel to Japan. The Japanese interpreted Roosevelt’s embargo as a declaration of economic war, which it was. Both he and they understood that the embargo threatened to bring Japan’s war machine, engaged heavily in China, to a shuddering halt. The Japanese high command prepared a strike to the south and east, toward the resource-rich East Indies. Roosevelt, who had learned military strategy during seven years’ service as assistant navy secretary during World War I, fully expected such a strike. What he did not expect—what no one in the American chain of command expected—was that the Japa nese would inaugurate their southwestern offensive with a blow to their far east, against the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Consequently, the surprise was total and the damage to Amer
ican battleships, the heart of the fleet, overwhelming. The deaths of more than two thousand Americans added to the pain the nation felt and to the culpability that might have been charged against Roosevelt.

  But Roosevelt deflected the blame downward and outward. He launched an investigation of the navy commanders responsible for Hawaii and the Pacific, and he went before Congress to register the nation’s outrage at Japan’s murderous violation of the rules of civilized behavior. The day of the attack would “live in infamy,” he said. He asked for a declaration of war, which Congress delivered at once. When Germany, Japan’s Axis ally, declared war on the United States three days later, Americans rallied around their president as they have always done at the start of wars. The only critics leveling serious charges against Roosevelt were the most die-hard of the isolationists, who charged him not with knowing too little about the Japanese plans but with knowing too much. Realizing that events had cut the ground from beneath them, they alleged that Roosevelt had engineered the Pearl Harbor attack in order to stampede the American people into war.

  Roosevelt didn’t dignify the charge with denial. He recognized that he had won the argument over America’s international role as definitively as arguments are ever won in political life. He knew that what had been impossible just weeks before was now not merely possible but necessary. For two decades he had believed that the United States must play the leading role in world affairs, but for most of that time he had been compelled by America’s popular aversion to foreign involvement to keep this belief to himself. Finally he could speak his mind, confident that the American people would follow where their commander in chief led. The few isolationists left could only gnash their teeth in vain.