President Ronald Reagan: The President who Changed American Politics

By Jensen Cox

Ronald Reagan is overwhelmingly elected president of the United States on November 4, 1980. It's an avalanche: jimmy carter, the outgoing president and a democrat, who was running for re-election, suffers a humiliation as Ronnie, as his friends refer to him, wins in 45 of the 50 states. Despite the odds, Reagan's election to the white house was greeted with surprise: a former Hollywood actor who was well-known to television viewers was elected to rule the world's most powerful superpower? Was it a risky bet or an occurrence that was in advance of its time?

Ronald Wilson Reagan's is actually an all-American story. Born in Tampico in 1911, at the time a tiny town in Illinois, little "Dutch" - as he is nicknamed in the family due to the chubby lines of his face - grew up in the geographical region which is the beating heart of the stars and stripes nation, the Midwest. The father is an Irish catholic without a stable job and with the vice of alcohol, the mother a very religious woman, devoted to the church of Christ's disciples. After graduating in economics, Reagan arrives in Hollywood almost by accident and has a decent career in the film world, until he discovers the importance of political commitment, first as president of the actor's union (screen actors guild) and then as governor of California from 1967 to 1975 in the ranks of the republican party, he who had been sympathetic to the democrat Roosevelt as a young man. The climb to the grand old party was now mapped out.

Forty years after Ronald Reagan took office in the white house, Jensen cox dedicates a detailed and compelling biography to the most popular president of modern America, full of information, news and anecdotes.

If today the eighties of the twentieth century are remembered as a happy season of well-being and economic prosperity, it is due precisely to that boost of optimism, pragmatism and modernization that Reagan was able to give to the United States and consequently to all industrialized nations of the west.

Architect, on an ideological and cultural level, of the "conservative revolution" and anti-statist that characterized the last decades of the short century, Reagan is also the president of the United States who defeated soviet communism - and won the cold war - "without firing a shot ", as Margaret thatcher was to say. Earning himself a place in history forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miller
• Release date: May 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223636748

Jensen Cox

Jensen Cox is an esteemed author renowned for his profound insights and meticulous research in the fields of history and business. With an exceptional ability to weave captivating narratives and shed light on complex subjects, Jensen has established himself as a trusted authority in both disciplines. Through his thought-provoking works, he has consistently delivered invaluable knowledge and enriched the understanding of readers around the world.

Book preview

THE

BORN POOR

The pastures of hate

The verdant landscape, a bright and shining nature, the undulating pattern of the hills in the background. We are in Orange County, New York State, and a beautiful black, shiny horse is kicking while a cadet of the West Point Military Academy tries to tame it, pulling hard on the bridle. The other junior officers laugh at their colleague's obvious difficulties. Only you from the South know how to handle horses, says the young man grappling with the capricious animal.

We know how to put the reins on, another cadet replies, with a strong Southern accent.

As it is said, you know how to give them to blacks too, by dint of whippings is the curt reply. Two groups of soldiers cast defiant looks at each other. There is a risk of a fight between the students from the southern states and those from the northern states. Then, the more reasonable of the two sides manage to appease spirits.

We are in 1854 and the delicate question of slavery, a hateful legacy of the past but which still resists in the southern states, is shaking the achievement of a unitary spirit of the young American nation still in formation. The already famous West Point Academy, founded in 1802, is frequented by young Northerners and Southerners, and certain angular political divisions inevitably run through the cadet corps itself.

To tell the tensions that snake in American society of those years will be, much later, Hollywood, a powerful tool of a collective narrative that will contribute, more than anything else, to forge the national spirit.

The film The Pastures of Hate unfolds its story along a double thread, which will eventually intertwine: on the one hand, the human and sentimental story that binds the two male protagonists, in love with the same woman; on the other, the political divisions between Southern segregationists and Northern abolitionists.

The second scene of the film is set in the dormitory of the military barracks, during a moment of relaxation in the evening. One of the pupils reads a passage by John Brown, a famous activist of the time who fought for the abolition of slavery: «The disintegration of the United States as it currently is is the aim of my struggle. This disintegration has the sole purpose of abolishing slavery throughout the territory. The United States will then be rebuilt on the great principle of emancipation...».

This time, a fight breaks out among the soldiers.

The film, shot by Michael Curtiz in 1940 (the original title is Santa Fe Trial ), immediately became a resounding box office success, also because two of the performers were among the biggest film stars of the period: Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland.

The plot is simple, sometimes obvious: as mentioned, two handsome young cadets are rivals in love, both aspiring to the hand of the beautiful Kit Carson Holliday (Olivia de Havilland). Soon, the sentimental dispute between the two brilliant cavalry officers finds another, even harsher, competition ground: the first, in fact, is called James «Jeb» Stuart (Errol Flynn), destined to become one of the most important generals of the Confederate army, the other is George Armstrong Custer, future commander of the cavalry of the Unionist army and later a famous general in the wars against the Indians. Playing Custer is a young actor not even thirty years old, a certain Ronald Reagan, specialized in supporting roles and certainly not as well known as Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland (the actress had just obtained the Oscar award for the role of Melania Hamilton in Gone with the Wind ).

While the characters of Jeb Stuart and George Armstrong Custer are real and belong in all respects to the history of the United States, the young Kit Carson Holliday is the fruit of the imagination of the screenwriters.

The Pastures of Hate evokes the very tough clash between the two souls of the young American nation which, before escalating into a civil war, was primarily ideological and moral. Abolitionist propaganda is not allowed inside West Point Academy, which is in the North, and cadet Carl Rader (played by the actor Van Heflin) – who read the passage by John Brown in the dormitory – is expelled from the prestigious military school a few days after graduation, accused of subversive activity. Jeb Stuart and George Custer, having become officers, are instead assigned to a distant territory, the Bleeding Kansas, impervious and turbulent. They end up in the garrison of Fort Leavenworth. Here the guerrilla actions of John Brown and his abolitionist followers are taking place, directing violent attacks against the regular army, as well as against the slave landowners.

The film takes place according to the most classic canons of the American western: horse riding, great prairies, shootings. During their stay in Kansas, the two new officers meet a wealthy entrepreneur, Cyrus K. Holliday, engaged in the construction of the new railway to Santa Fe, but above all they meet his pretty daughter, Kit Carson Holliday, named in honor of Kit Carson, legendary explorer of the Far West. Both Stuart and Custer fall in love with the girl, while never letting go of their military solidarity.

The army has the difficult task of reconciling the territory of Kansas, divided between the abolitionist group of John Brown, of which former academy colleague Carl Rader has also joined, and the militias of slave owners. After a few years, the tensions will be tamed and the two officers, promoted to captains, will be sent to Washington to complete their training.

However, John Brown did not abandon his cause and moved the guerrillas to an area not far from the federal capital, threatening them with direct attacks. This time it is Carl Rader who warns Stuart and Custer, now at odds with his former boss due to certain economic issues and excesses of violence. He joins them during a gala ball in Washington, during which the young Kit Carson Holliday decides to choose one of the two aspiring boyfriends. Since then, and inevitably, the paths of Stuart and Custer separate: they will become commanders in the opposing field during the Civil War.

For Ronald Reagan this is the twenty-fourth film of a short but intense career that began in 1937 with Love is on the Air ( L'amore è nell'aria ) directed by Nick Grinde. In three years, Ronnie thus manages to act in over twenty films, he jumps from one interpretation to another, the requests are there and he wants to earn, preferring quantity to quality.

In its own way, and albeit with all the limitations of the cinema of the time, which aimed at pure entertainment through sweetened stories, The Pastures of Hate is a film of civil commitment, which comes out at a time when America, still impregnated with racism, she abandoned the ideals of the Civil War of 1861-1865 with the return of racial segregation in the South. From a biographical point of view, it should be remembered that a few years earlier, Ronald Reagan had fought to prevent two of his African American college mates from being discriminated against on the basis of skin colour. One evening, in fact, during a trip to Illinois for the football team, a hotelier had refused to host the two black athletes, and so Ronald invited them to sleep at his house, only a few kilometers away from the place where they would play the next day. . One of the boys was named William Franklin Burghardt and over time would become an active political supporter of Ronald, within the African American community.

On the eve of the 1940s, the United States has recovered from the Great Depression of 1929, there is a new boundless confidence in the future and the Hollywood machine has resumed grinding movies and money. After the good performance in Curtiz's film, perhaps the young actor Reagan, who arrived at the cinema somewhat by chance, could have become a star of the Hollywood firmament. But it didn't happen that way. He had other things in mind, he preferred to accept everything that was offered to him, so as to accumulate enough money to definitively put his family's poor origins behind him.

Tampico

A long dusty highway, like many others in deep America. This is Main Street, an unremarkable place in the early 1900s. All similar, roads like this can be seen everywhere in the States. On both sides, a succession of regular masonry buildings, built with brown bricks. Downstairs there is always a business, upstairs two or three apartments, with tall, narrow windows. Main Street represents the bare center of Tampico, little more than a village, in Whiteside County. The first settlers arrived there in 1852, while the Municipality was founded in 1861. Chicago, the northern metropolis of the United States, is a long way away, 180 kilometers, while the town of Moline is closer. At the 1910 census, Tampico had 849 residents. To imagine a place like this, you need to know the novels of John Steinbeck, who in 1962 won the Nobel Prize for Literature precisely for his recognized ability to tell the story of the Midwest of those poor white Protestants who struggle against the strains of everyday life.

On Main Street is the Graham Building, a small two-story building. On the ground floor there is a commercial space which today is occupied by a bank branch. Next to the large window there is a door that gives access to a steep flight of stairs, at the end of which you enter an apartment with a rectangular plan, equipped with three large windows. The side walls rest on those of other buildings, more or less all the same. The property had been built in 1896 and until 1915 had housed the typical American rural center emporium, where a bit of everything was sold, from work tools to food. The owner of the building and the shop lived upstairs with his family, then business had gone so well that the man had moved to a more comfortable house, with an adjoining garden, in a less noisy side street of Main Street . He had given the apartment to his clerk, John Edward Jack Reagan, a muscular young man of Irish descent, who had recently married Nelle Clyde Wilson, a beautiful girl of Scottish and English descent.

In this house, the future fortieth president of the United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan, was born on February 6, 1911. This is the couple's second child, who, to tell the truth, had hoped for a girl. Instead a second boy arrives, following Neil, born three years earlier, in 1908. The house - three rooms, plus a bathroom and a spacious kitchen - is quite comfortable. Many years later, President Reagan would claim that he would have gladly given up living in the White House to rule America from the shop floor apartment of his childhood.

That day an unexpected blizzard rages on Tampico, the temperature drops below freezing and the roads are impassable. In the previous weeks, the midwife caring for Mrs Nelle Reagan had warned that the presence of a doctor would be necessary because the pregnancy was not regular. Edward is worried and bewildered, he doesn't know how to deal with the situation because there are no permanent doctors in Tampico. The employer has made the company's van available to him to pick one up in Moline, but it's impossible to move.

Fortune favors them. Dr. Harry Terry was stranded in the Main Street bar by the storm. It assists the midwife in the delicate stages of childbirth, which takes place, as was done in those days, in the bedroom. In the end, everything will be fine, but the doctor will recommend Mrs. Reagan not to have more children because it would be too risky for her health.

That day the Reagan family is united and happy. Edward, whom everyone calls Jack, the Irishman, offers drinks to Pitney Store customers. Happiness, however, is made up of rare moments. The Reagan family has to deal with poverty and with a permanent precariousness which, subsequently, condemns them to wander around the state of Illinois, while a further problem intervenes to punctuate tensions and malaise: Edward's accentuated alcoholism. His life will be a continuous pursuit of economic stability and a dream of well-being that will never arrive. Representative of women's shoes, clerk in various shops, he will often lose his job because of his vice. Perhaps not surprisingly, the fellow citizens define him as a nice and good man, but with a powerful thirst. ¹

As for his origins, they were the classic ones of the vast Irish community emigrated to the United States, to which Edward belonged. That it was historically very large is demonstrated by current data: ten times more people of Irish origin live in the USA today than there are in Ireland. Edward Reagan's great-grandfather, Michael O'Regan, had fled County Tipperary in 1840, like millions of his fellow citizens, brought to their knees by the great famine that had hit the island. But Michael didn't go to America right away, but to England, where he married another Irish emigrant, Katherine Mulcahy. The wedding had been celebrated in St. George's Cathedral, near London, in Southwark. On that occasion, October 31, 1852, a curious fact had occurred: Ronald's great-grandfather had signed himself in the parish register as Reagan, dropping the typical Irish O' and adding an a.

Ronald's grandfather, John Michael Reagan, born in 1854 in East Peckham, Kent, England, had arrived in the United States via Canada. While the maternal grandfather Thomas Wilson, of Scottish origins, was already born in Illinois and had married a woman, Mary Ann Elsey, born in England, in Surrey. Thus, Ronald's ancestry is Irish on his father's side, Scottish and English on his mother's side. He will never know his grandparents because they will all die before his birth. County Tipperary, where the great-grandfather comes from, is located in the province of Munster, in the heart of Ireland, exactly in the central-southern part. An agricultural and poor area.

As was the case in many Irish families who emigrated to the United States, Jack Reagan also rumored that his descended from King Brian Boru, an eleventh-century AD figure, Ireland's first national hero. Legends aside, Ronald's parents were both born in July 1883 in the same place, in Fulton, Illinois. They had known each other since they were children and they will get married in 1904, again in Fulton, with a Catholic rite.

By a strange agreement between the parents, the eldest son Neil will be baptized and will remain a Catholic for life, while Ronald will follow his mother, an assiduous frequenter of the Church of the Disciples of Christ, a community within which she was very active and influential, until become responsible for catechism and biblical readings. Linked to the Restoration Movement which advocates a return to the origins of Christianity, the Disciples of Christ are convinced that the Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Churches (although the latter is considered the closest) have manipulated the original teaching of Jesus. They represent one of those Christian movements – active in the Midwest – which have always characterized deep America, and which impress rigour, a sense of duty and mutual assistance on their communities. If the Reagan family manages to survive the Great Depression and the inability of its head of the family to commit, it will owe it to the active participation of the mother in the Church of the Disciples of Christ.

Illinois

Looking at it, Illinois is almost in the center of the United States, slightly to the east. Its territory is sandwiched between Lake Michigan to the northeast, the Mississippi River to the west, and the Ohio and Wabash rivers to the east. Almost a hinge between the states of the Atlantic coast and the enormous belly of America.

Also nicknamed The Prairie State Illinois, or rather the state of the prairie, Illinois not only interprets the spirit of the Midwest, but is also a sort of microcosm of the entire nation. Today it has the fifth largest GDP among American states and is sixth by population. Its most important city is Chicago, a metropolis that alone gathers a quarter of the inhabitants of the entire state.

As already mentioned, the United States in the early twentieth century presented itself as a young and confident nation. They symbolize the great opportunity faced by millions of people who, crossing the Atlantic Ocean, hope for a better life. It was the same with Ronald Reagan's ancestors. After all, these are the years in which the steamers unload in New York, making them pass through the islet of Ellis Island, millions and millions of men, women and children, coming from the Old Continent. However, it must be considered that at the end of the 19th century the flow from England, Germany, Ireland and Holland was almost exhausted. The new immigrants come mainly from Italy, Greece, and many are the Jews fleeing the pogroms, the anti-Semitic persecutions already taking place in Eastern European countries, such as Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Russia, Romania.

On the domestic front, having archived the painful page of the Civil War (which will fuel conflicts and divisions for another century), the United States is the protagonist of an extraordinary demographic, territorial and economic expansion. The new frontier to the Pacific will advance rapidly. The world economic hierarchies are being redesigned, England – which was the first to initiate the Industrial Revolution – must yield primacy to others. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States and Germany were in fact contending for the first position in industry and in technological innovations.

The United States, devoid of the complexities and superstructures of European society, place themselves at the forefront of progress in almost all sectors of the economy, and above all they are rapid and capable in applying the new discoveries of the technique. Industrial patents, which numbered two thousand in 1850-60, increased to 13,000 in 1870-80 and to 21,000 in the decade 1890-1900. Writer Mark Twain, one of the noble fathers of American literature, claims that the number of patents is a significant indicator for measuring the progress of nations. The railways went from 48,000 km of lines in 1860 to 310,000 in 1900, the railway companies became the richest business of the time, in 1874 four companies in the sector controlled the connections between the Atlantic coast and the Middle West: New York Central, Pennsylvania, Erie and Baltimore & Ohio. But soon others arrive: the New York, New Haven and Hartford, the Boston and Maine, the Southern, the Louisville and Nashville and the Illinois Central.

In 1867 a Milwaukee printer, Latham Sholes, developed the first typewriter, marketed six years later by the Remington Gun Company, a real revolution in the business world. In 1879 follows the cash register, invented by James S. Ritty.

M 1911 model , destined to make history and to be adopted by the forces of order as a service pistol until 1985. That same year sculptor Lorado Taft completes his most famous work Black Hawk (aka Eternal Indian ), a huge statue overlooking Rock River in River County.

The United States are the first to use the electric telegraph on a large scale, which already from 1862 connected the Atlantic with the Pacific coast, in 1878 Western Union, which controlled 80 percent of the service, has 312,000 kilometers of lines. In 1871, the Italian Antonio Meucci invented the telephone, but the United States was the first nation to rapidly spread this communication device, connecting cities and creating urban networks in some of these. Likewise, the USA will prove to be at the forefront of the use of electricity on a large scale. The first thermoelectric plant in the world has been in operation in New York since 1882, when it lights up some streets and private homes.

The iron and steel industry is the driving factor of American industry, iron and steel, produced in great abundance, are the basis for building railway tracks, bridges, skyscrapers, cars, engines, airplanes, agricultural machines, infrastructures of various types. From 1860 to 1900, pig iron production rose from 800,000 tons to 14 million tons, while the amount of steel produced in the USA equaled the sum of Britain's and Germany's shares. ²

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Illinois had already reached five million inhabitants and was a protagonist state of industrial and technological expansionism, which attracted strong external and internal immigration, coming from Europe and the southern states. The industry is facilitated by one of the best communication systems in North America, which benefits from Lake Michigan and rivers, especially the Mississippi. In this territory we soon specialized in certain productions: from agricultural machines (the first combine harvesters were born here) to railway carriages, not to mention rolled steel, aluminum and mechanical levers.

In Elgin, in Kean county, there is a thriving watch industry, telephones are produced in Chicago and, curiously, Illinois has the largest producers of chewing gum, a symbolic product of the USA . The same agriculture and livestock are boosted by the canning industry which cans meat and other foods.

Such a tumultuous development, together with wealth and well-being, also creates social tensions between the old residents and the new arrivals. In 1900 there were only 84,000 African Americans in Illinois, but within a few years massive migration from Southern states moved tens of thousands to the industrial cities of Chicago, Peoria and Springfield. In 1919, more than 100,000 African Americans were registered in Chicago alone.

The new social context triggers fears and generates an insane racism. Despite being a Northern state, which had made a fundamental contribution to Abraham Lincoln's unionist cause, the Ku Klux Klan is rooted in Illinois, a white supremacist terrorist organization close to the Democratic Party, which promotes the macabre practice of nocturnal lynchings. Street riots are also frequent, such as those that occur in Decatur, Cairo and Belleville.

The most serious episode takes place in August 1908, in Springfield, when on the 13th a young white woman, Mabel Hallam, married, claims to have been raped by a black male who sneaked into the bedroom of her cottage . The story becomes the pretext to unleash a mad and furious reaction, inspired by racist groups who burn and loot the houses and shops of innocent black families. Two African American men, one of whom is married to a white woman, are murdered, although they have no connection with the fact. The police reluctantly report some troublemakers, but there will be only one light sentence, while later it will be Mabel Hallam herself who admits that she has made everything up.

On July 27, 1919, in Chicago, a seventeen-year-old African American boy, while bathing in Lake Michigan, crosses the unofficial border between the area reserved for blacks and that frequented by whites. The latter begin to violently throw stones at the boy, until they hit him on the head and drown him.

William English Walling, a journalist of the time who will write a detailed chronicle of the violence in Springfield, will give a decisive impetus to the foundation, on February 12, 1909 (symbolic date of the centenary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln), of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ), historically one of the most influential associations that will fight for the respect of civil rights in the United States. ³

The Ku Klux Klan, a left-wing racist movement, in addition to terrorizing the African-American community, in the name of an alleged white and Protestant purity, also attacks the Catholic communities, especially the Italian and Irish ones, and manifests ruthless anti-Semitism. In those years The Birth of a Nation circulated , by far one of the most famous films in the history of silent cinema, directed in 1915 by director David Wark Griffith. A controversial narrative of the history of the United States that begins with the Civil War, to then tell its cruelties and above all the lacerations of a long post-war period marked by racial tensions in the South. This controversial film also describes the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, in Carolina of South, and at times it does so in apologetic tones. It is no coincidence that President Woodrow Wilson called it a nefarious production, despite having organized some private screenings of the film at the White House.

The Birth of a Nation turns out to be a success, also because the ticket is among the most expensive in the history of cinema. Every screening, especially in small towns, becomes an occasion for clashes. Afro-American associations try to block the diffusion of the film because they believe it represents an incitement to violence against black people. The film was banned in Chicago, in Denver, in Ohio, while heated riots broke out near the cinemas in Boston and Philadelphia, very often groups of white supremacists at the exit of the theaters indulged in violence.

For many years, Jack Reagan did not allow his children to see The Birth of a Nation and educated them to condemn racial and religious prejudices. Ronald will often tell an episode from his father's life of which he will always be proud. During a business trip to the southern United States to sell a lot of shoes, he happened to arrive tired in a modest hotel to spend the night. The porter, while he was filling out the acceptance form, had addressed him with these exact words: «You'll be happy here! You know, we don't accept blacks and Jews.' The indignant father had asked for the document to be returned, preferring to spend the night in the car.

Broth only

Please, don't forget! Ask for a lot of liver, but don't say we eat it. You say we have to give it to the cat. Smile and say thank you. Is Saturday. And like every weekend, the same scene repeats itself. Little Ronald and his brother Neil, ages four and seven, are on the doorstep. The mother gives the eldest ten cents. A very modest amount. The two little brothers, even in the middle of winter, wear shorts. They have no coats, only battered scarves and threadbare sweaters. The only decent thing are the shoes, because the father sells them and he got two pairs as a gift from his employer.

Every Saturday morning, Neil and Ronald are shipped off to the Meat Market at Cottage Grove Avenue and 63rd Street, next to the train station. The ten cents are used to buy a bone for broth, but the mother is also waiting for the liver, which butchers usually give away thinking it was meant for some pet. In the Reagans, on the other hand, they cook it fried and this is the most nutritious meal in the family, a variation that is allowed on Sundays. The children wait for him for seven days, they know that for the rest of the week there will be only broth on the table, topped off with a few potatoes and carrots, and some bread.

So usually eats a poor family like the Reagans. Sometimes the mother, who does various chores in the church, manages to bring home some poultry and some apples to supplement the meager diet of her children. Jack works in the most absolute precariousness, generally he doesn't last long in one place, because he indulges too much in