The Republican Party’s embrace of Ronald Reagan as its political ideal reveals a deep misunderstanding of the party’s rich political history. Contemporary Republicans continue to preach Reagan’s mantra of smaller government, tax cuts for job creators, a laissez faire approach to industry, and an adherence to traditional family values. Known as “The Great Communicator,” Reagan’s oratory skill and folksy approach continue to garner praise in Republican circles; his insistence on additional budgetary expenditures for the military and the influence of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) are credited with ending the Cold War. He was the oldest president, at age 79, elected to office, and survived an assassin’s bullet. These are impressive accomplishments, but in order to measure Reagan’s success, we must examine his personal and political character in relation to both words and deeds. Did Reagan adhere to these qualities, and were they really in line with the best interests of the American people? If found lacking in these qualities, is there a better Republican presidential choice to replace Reagan as a political ideal?
As the president who ended slavery, Abraham Lincoln remains the Republican whose legislation benefited the single greatest number of American citizens. However, Teddy Roosevelt serves a distant second as the Republican president whose policies reflected a genuine interest in uplifting the nation’s people. Unlike Reagan, who was elected president, Roosevelt became president after William McKinley’s assassination in 1901; in stark contrast to Reagan, Roosevelt remains the youngest president, at age 42, to hold the office. Perhaps the most glaring contradiction between the two presidents is that, unlike Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt’s fellow Republicans disavowed him because of his progressive views. Despite their differences, Roosevelt and Reagan viewed the federal government as inefficient and in need of reform. Both presidents begged Congress for funds to improve the nation’s defenses, and they shared a belief that industry performed an important role in relation to government and society. However, the different methods that each president utilized to attain his goals offer an insight into both men’s political and personal character. A comparison between Roosevelt and Reagan reveals a much better candidate for the cloak of the Republican Party’s ideal – Teddy Roosevelt.
Two great conflicts serve as bookends for Theodore Roosevelt’s life, The Civil War and World War I. Born into the social chaos preceding the war’s outbreak, Roosevelt experienced the internecine character of the Civil War, as family members served on both sides of the conflict. However, the knowledge that his father, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., paid three hundred dollars for an exemption and replacement in the Union Army troubled the young man. For Roosevelt, this small imperfection served as a lesson and in no way diminished his love for a father he described as charitable, gentle, and firm. Indeed, Roosevelt, Sr. practiced a style of “muscular Christian” charity that utilized his wealth and influence to assist the poor. Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s mother, Martha, had two brothers fighting for the Confederation, and the stories of their bravery in combat served as a reminder to the boy that his father had avoided fighting in the war. It was a blot on the family record that young Theodore would try to erase by leading his own unit on the battlefield in Cuba.
When Roosevelt landed on Cuba at the onset of the Spanish-American War, he was second in command of the First Volunteer Calvary, an eclectic mix of volunteer soldiers who christened the unit with the moniker “Rough Riders”. At one end of the social spectrum stood cowboy acquaintances Roosevelt befriended while working as a western cattleman. These men had fought in the Indian Wars, and grown accustomed to thriving in hostile environs. Hailing from the upper crust, Yale and Harvard chums eager to earn honor for their families, but reduced to cooking or cleaning latrines when called upon. Roosevelt believed everyone, regardless of social importance, was duty bound to serve his or her country during war. “He despised politicians who talked of war and sent others off to fight.” Offered the command position during the unit’s formation, Roosevelt declined, citing his inexperience as a military commander. Instead, he suggested Leonard Wood lead the Rough Riders, allowing Roosevelt to learn from a battle-hardened veteran.
Wood and Roosevelt proved to be masterful logisticians and leaders, as their volunteers received the newest weapons, smokeless cartridges that Roosevelt paid for out of pocket, and climate appropriate uniforms. Conversely, the regular army fought in heavy uniforms using bullets that when fired produced a wisp of smoke, revealing the soldier’s position to the enemy. In the hectic scramble to secure boats for troop movements, Roosevelt’s personal connections provided the needed transportation for his troops. Finally, as the battle for San Juan Hill raged, he remained upright on his horse in front of the Rough Riders, spurring them on. A witness to the charge stated, “No one who saw Roosevelt take that ride expected him to finish it alive.” After turning loose his horse, Roosevelt led his men on a charge up the hill, at times outdistancing them by one hundred yards; Cuba became the first domino to fall for the Spanish monarchy, which later also relinquished the Philippines to the United States. With his actions on the battlefield and Spain’s defeat, Roosevelt believed the family name restored. Among his soldiers, Roosevelt was considered a genuine leader. His commanders, however, held a very different view of Roosevelt, and for good reason; he criticized their leadership.
Roosevelt’s two major complaints involved food provisions and travel. During deployment, his troops received rancid rations that were sold to the military by war profiteers. Unwilling to let his men go hungry, Roosevelt again dipped into his personal wealth to purchase supplies. Perhaps his greatest ire was the government’s bureaucratic ineptness to secure passage stateside for his troops after the end of hostilities. With the approaching wet season and the accompanying mosquitoes, Roosevelt worried about the increased risk of malaria to the soldiers. In an effort to spur the War Department to action, Roosevelt offered for comment a letter on behalf of the expedition’s top leaders to a group of journalists; the letter, which later appeared in a number of newspapers, stated that the army must “get…out of Cuba before the force was obliterated by fever.” His comments embarrassed the Secretary of War, Russell Alger, and ultimately kept Roosevelt from receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor during his lifetime; Congress granted the metal posthumously in 2001.
Theodore Roosevelt’s quest to restore the family’s honor reveals a great deal about his character both as a leader and as a man. Driven by the memory of his father’s decision not to fight in the Civil War, Roosevelt proactively charted a course to redeem this slight. Prior to serving in Cuba, he held several important leadership positions, among them Civil Service Commissioner in Washington, D.C., New York City Police Commissioner, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy. However, when initially offered the Rough Rider’s command position, Roosevelt displayed an understanding of his limitations as a military leader, and the negative impact such hubris might have on his soldiers. Furthermore, by suggesting Woods as a more appropriate choice, he exhibited a penchant for recognizing talented individuals.
Roosevelt’s genuine concern for the wellbeing of his soldiers, and the actions he undertook on their behalf, contrasted sharply with contemporary military protocols that defined interactions between officers and subordinates. His willingness to “buy for his men beans and canned tomatoes,…ignoring the regulation that canned vegetables were for officers only,” displays Roosevelt’s altruistic attitude toward his common man. He learned this quality from observing his father’s philanthropic work. When the government failed in the simplest of its duties, feeding the hungry, it was the duty of those with the means to provide sustenance. Had Roosevelt decided to remain aloof from his men and provide only for himself, he faced no criticism from fellow officers. If soldiers went hungry, it was the War Department’s fault, and they would just have to wait for resupply, or scrounge for their own food. This attitude was beyond Roosevelt’s understanding because he recognized the fiscal limitations of the average soldier. A soldier, he believed, was simply the common laborer in uniform, and Roosevelt always believed in speaking for the common person.
It was a combination of concern for his troop’s health and Roosevelt’s natural impetuosity that led him to release the letter that publicly criticized the War Department. By virtue of his lowly status, a soldier’s voice was a mere whisper, so Roosevelt spoke for him. He had not safely delivered his men through battle only to watch them perish from a mosquito bite. He spoke out, as he had in the past and continued doing in the future, for the little person, and it cost him that award he craved the most, the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Roosevelt’s path to Cuba began and ended with his father’s decision to purchase a replacement during the Civil War; instead of bowing to resentment of his father’s perceived cowardice, he accepted this shortcoming and channeled it in a positive direction. Along the way, he employed the empathy learned from his father to care for his soldiers. Roosevelt referred to his father as “the best man I ever knew,” and often spoke reverently of him. This close familial relationship between Ronald Reagan and his father, Jack, is less evident, but no less important.
Much has been written about the life of Ronald “Dutch” Reagan, but most narratives downplay or only briefly discuss the relationship between father and son. Jack was an itinerant shoe salesman who moved the small family numerous times after Dutch’s birth before finally settling in Dixon, Illinois. Reagan’s mother, Nelle, labored as a seamstress, which allowed her time to serve as a source of support for members of the local Disciples of Christ church. Two working parents was a reality for a large majority of society in the 1920s. The often-unstable labor market left one spouse without work, in which case the family became dependent on the other spouse. These labor conditions for the working-class family existed in huge numbers throughout small towns across America; as the Great Depression tightened its fist, the nation’s poorest felt the effects first. Long periods of unemployment plagued families as the economic depression deepened; these were the realities of the Reagan home, but with the added burden of Jack’s alcoholism.
Jack Reagan’s condition imprinted itself deeply on an eleven-year-old Ronald; in reminiscing about his father’s drinking, Reagan said he found Jack drunk and asleep in the snow on the steps of the home. “I leaned over to see what was wrong and smelled whiskey. He had found his way home from a speakeasy and had just passed out right there. For a moment or two, I looked down at him and thought about continuing on into the house and going to bed, as if he weren’t there. But I couldn’t do it. When I tried to wake him he just snored – loud enough, I suspected, for the whole neighborhood to hear him.” In this encounter, Reagan acknowledged the shame visited on the family by his father’s alcoholism; indeed, it is the overriding motif of the incident as he remembered it.
Contemporary society defined alcoholism as an individual’s moral failure to curb a worldly desire. The event occurred in 1922, when the United States was two years into the Prohibition period. The main social drivers behind the movement were women and religious institutions, which together forced the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment banning alcohol. As a devout Christian and the family’s moral compass, Nellie fell neatly within both demographics. In keeping with her Christian ethics, she “urged them [Dutch and Moon] to be compassionate and understanding of their father’s struggle.” Nellie’s influence is on display when Dutch encountered his drunken father and vacillated between leaving Jack out in the cold and bringing him into the home’s warmth. The deciding factor for Dutch was concern that the neighbors might find his father in such a state.
Reagan’s retelling of the event imparts a sense of antipathy for his father. The Jack in this encounter is very different from the Jack that Reagan credited with teaching him “the value of hard work and ambition, and maybe a little something about telling a story.” His father was not only an alcoholic, but also a criminal by virtue of visiting a “speakeasy.” This behavior contradicted the values taught by the devoutly Christian Nellie, and when presented with the above conundrum the conflicted Ronald begrudgingly acted to assist his father. It was the humiliation induced by an alcoholic father, conflated with the Jack who taught hard work and ambition, which motivated Reagan to aspire for the nation’s highest office.
In response to his unstable living conditions, Reagan became introverted and sought emotional support from Nellie. She encouraged him to participate in local theater productions, and praised his performances. The impetus to Reagan’s acting abilities stretch back to his early youth when he “learned to pretend to be an insider despite being an outsider.” Although the family was poor, Dutch projected a middle-class aura to those around him, but in later recollections he said, “Our family didn’t exactly come from the wrong side of the tracks, but we were certainly always within sound of the train whistles.” His long honed acting talents and storytelling abilities served as the foundation that led Reagan into politics, and the Governorship of California. Ronald Reagan’s acting career placed him squarely in the public’s eyes, while also allowing him to garner social and political connections, and experience in mediation as president of the Screen Actors Guild. After several successful movie appearances, Reagan’s income allowed him to buy Jack and Nellie a home, a first for the couple.
Reagan’s Hollywood career was in decline when he successfully entered politics, becoming California’s governor in 1967. His stint as president of the Screen Actors Guild during the government’s forced restructuring of the film industry politicized a Reagan already seething at the amount he paid in taxes. By the time he entered office, the boy from Dixon no longer needed to pretense at wealth. Hailing from such a humble background in which both parents toiled in a fickle labor market, Reagan now possessed the necessary resources to uplift a substantial portion of California’s indigent population.
Instead, as California governor, Ronald Reagan instituted welfare reform as one of his mandates. Proponents of Reagan point out there were over 2 million people on California’s welfare rolls, which they insisted was far too many, and an indication of fraud and abuse. Reagan’s state welfare reforms began in 1970, after passage of the Civil Rights Amendment, and just as programs designed to assist African Americans climb out of an institutionally produced and entrenched poverty began to take hold. To accomplish welfare reduction, the governor redefined the understanding of what it meant to be poor in California by “tightening eligibility rules so that only the truly needy would receive public assistance, and wasteful spending would be eliminated. His stated intention to “bums back to work quote” successfully removed “three hundred thousand within three years” from welfare lists, “saving California taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars,” which Reagan promptly handed back to state landholders in the form of tax cuts.
After becoming United States president, Reagan expanded his welfare reform federally, again focusing the narrative on corruption and abuse within the system. For example, he spoke of the “welfare queen” as if the system was rife with malfeasance, when in reality it was an anomaly. Reagan’s vision of the poor echoed back to his role model, Jack, whose battle with alcohol hindered him from steady employment. He believed welfare recipients had no incentive to work because of the social safety nets provided by previous presidential administrations; instead of working, public assistance recipients were characterized as wasting the day away drinking or doing drugs, “because that was the life they preferred.” This view ignored the financial barriers to education and training faced by both the rural and urban poor.
The jobs traditionally within reach for the undereducated were in manufacturing, which was already in decline when Reagan took office. In an effort to save labor costs, a large segment of American manufacturers relocated operations overseas, leaving U.S. laborers the task of adjusting to a service industry labor market. As his social policies took effect, the disadvantaged turned to an underground economy that included prostitution, drug sales, gambling, and weapons to replace the vacuum left in federal welfare’s wake. This resulted in an explosion of criminal convictions that taxed an overcrowded U.S. prison system, which contemporarily houses the largest inmate population on the planet. Instead of funding education programs, drug-addiction counseling, and cultural centers, Reagan’s administration offered federal funding to states in order to implement the militarization of existing police forces.
When presented with the opportunity to uplift a substantial portion of American society, Ronald Reagan responded in the same manner as to a drunken Jack – grudgingly and with misgivings about one’s inability to work. Nellie’s religiosity moved Dutch to assist minimally an inebriated Jack, a man whose moral failings Reagan believed kept him from steady employment, and this attitude prevailed in his decision regarding welfare reduction. He believed religious institutions rather than government better served the poor, claiming that if they combined resources and cared for the needs of just ten indigent families, “we could eliminate all government welfare in this country.” Reagan conflated financial success with moral integrity, while contending, as in childhood, that poverty was reserved for the lazy or vice stricken.
Both Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt considered their fathers’ failings as surmountable obstacles, but each man approached the resolution differently. Roosevelt organized and led a military unit in the Spanish-American war to counterbalance his father’s perceived cowardice. Reagan redefined poverty’s rubric, paring down welfare lists and defunding education programs influenced by Jack’s imagined moral failings. Roosevelt’s actions aided the U.S. in the war against Spain, which expanded America’s economic and military reach. Reagan, too, broadened the military strength by increasing defense spending, but at the expense of domestic social programs. In a contemporary American society that values the proactive solution over the reactive solution, Roosevelt presents the better choice.
A large majority of contemporary Republicans self identify as Reagan Republicans, citing his party loyalty, ideology, and policies as the exemplary political identity. Reagan’s often cited Eleventh Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Any Fellow Republican, remains a party standard. His conservative ideology, rooted in small-town family values, still resonates with the party faithful. His conviction that government impinged on individual liberties and hindered economic growth persists in contemporary Republican policy development. However, Reagan’s political identity serves as a straw man for the realities of his political career. He championed this ideology, but in practice, found it very flexible.
Ronald Reagan’s political roots were planted in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic Party; when he voted for FDR in the 1932 election, Reagan agreed that under certain conditions, government’s duty to people required its taking action. FDR’s domestic policies benefited the Reagan household and millions like it across the nation. However, as Reagan’s success as an actor and president of SAG placed him in an increasingly higher tax bracket, his opinion on government’s broad influence gradually shifted toward the Republican Party. Reagan quit the Democratic Party in 1962 saying, “I was a Democrat when the Democratic Party stood for state rights, local autonomy, economy in government, and individual freedom. Today it is the party that has changed, openly declaring for centralized federal power and government-sponsored redistribution of the individual’s earnings.” Reagan proponents admit that he wanted to quit the party in 1960, but then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon “asked him not to do so: it would be better, Nixon said, if Reagan endorsed him and campaigned for him as a Democrat.” For two additional years, Reagan retained his Democratic Party credentials while operating as a Republican surrogate; nor was this the final instance when he ignored party loyalty.
Another of the tenets both parties adhere to is discouraging inner-party challenges to an incumbent president. In 1976, Reagan challenged Gerald Ford to the Republican nomination, claiming “Ford’s foreign policy failures” required that he act. The Republican Party’s nominee remained undecided until the convention, fragmenting a party that finally coalesced around Ford. By challenging Ford, Reagan undermined the incumbent’s credibility and cost his party the highest federal office in the nation; as a result, Democrat Jimmy Carter unseated Ford as president. Based on Reagan’s record as a Republican surrogate, and later challenging an incumbent Republican president, his party loyalty was meager at best.
Conservatives continue in their adherence to Ronald Reagan’s family values, to which he credited Dixon, Illinois, and its small-town character. Dixon provided the template through which he envisioned the nation’s future; contained within this template, the nuclear family consisted of a happily married, Christian man and wife. Abortion and contraceptive use were discouraged, and society expected parents to impart wisdom, love, and discipline on the resulting children. While frowned upon, conservatives recognized divorce as a necessary evil that could be overlooked. Within the family unit, the father acted as breadwinner, with the mother supplementing the family income when necessary; otherwise, she managed domestic affairs within the household.
However, Reagan’s childhood lacked many of these elements, which manifested later in the Reagan family dynamics. His defenders point to existing societal norms to explain his relationship with first wife, Jane Wyman. Married in 1940, Reagan told Wyman, “We’ll lead an ideal life if you’ll just avoid doing one thing: Don’t think.” Perhaps youth and a still-developing attitude toward women influenced Reagan’s words, but Wyman obviously disagreed, divorcing Reagan and retaining custody of their two children in 1948. His second marriage to Nancy Davis lasted until his death, but the couple’s scattering of children across two marriages resulted in a lack of “the warmth, stability, and values the Reagans publicly embodied,” because “the bond between Ronnie and Nancy became so intense it eclipsed all others, including their various offspring.”
Reagan’s connection to Dixon, Illinois is also tenuous, at best; he rarely visited his hometown, and most of these occasions were used to self-promote a film or election campaign. Between 1940 and 1970, he returned home on a mere eight occasions, and refused to lend his name or influence to various project requests by Dixon officials because it might appear cronyism. Instead, he spent much of his life in the California enclaves of Bel Air and Santa Barbara. Indeed, Reagan’s appreciation for Dixon and its family values appears illusory.
In regards to smaller government policy and promises made not to raise taxes, the record on Reagan suggests a pragmatic nature during both his gubernatorial and presidential tenures. He said, “…If I found when I was governor that I could not get 100 percent of what I asked for, I took 80 percent.” He believed the best means to limit government’s size and reach was to reduce departmental budgets, forcing departments to operate at greater efficiency with reduced costs. To accomplish this, Reagan appointed like-minded individuals as department heads, such as David Stockman and James Watts, who trimmed away large portions of their budgets.
As head of the Office of Management and Budget, “… [David] Stockman would turn out to be a disastrous appointment – he became the Robert McNamara of the Reagan administration – from which supply-side economics never fully recovered.” The OMB served as a presidential instrument to control budgetary spending, but when Stockman recommended deep cuts to social programs, the public backlash was immediate. Described by pundits as a “technocrat with the soul of a calculator,” he believed that the public “was not entitled to any services,” a view that negatively affected Reagan’s popularity in polls, forcing the president to announce that some basic social programs were “deemed untouchable.” Stockman further damage Reagan’s economic policies by candidly stating in a 1981 interview published in Atlantic Monthly magazine, “It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down,’ so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle down’ theory.” His implication that the administration’s economic plan was a “crackpot theory” undercut Reagan’s insistence that cutting taxes for the nation’s top earners encouraged greater investment opportunities, while creating more jobs for average Americans. Stockman remained with the administration until 1984, but neither his influence nor Reagan’s economic plan ever fully recovered.
James Watt’s appointment as Interior Secretary serves as another example of Reagan’s proxy attempt to reduce environmental regulations that he believed restricted economic growth. “Reagan and many conservatives loved the outdoors…But they feared the environmental movement as anticapitalist, big-government oriented, and too hostile to what they and their corporate supporters defined as progress.” While remembered for his attempt to ban the Beach Boys from performing on the Mall because their music attracted an “undesirable element,”
environmentalists attacked the conflict of interest between Watt’s oversight of federal natural resources and his position as a lawyer “funded to a large degree by mining, timber, and energy companies.” Watt shared Reagan’s belief that allowing industrial access to federal resources benefited both the private sector by providing raw materials, and the federal coffer by supplying a revenue stream. Watt ignored complaints made to the Environmental Protection Agency about industrial abuses, and “outraged environmentalist by selling off public lands, resisting efforts to declare species endangered, and encouraging more mining, drilling, and developing, while denouncing liberals as socialists.” Characterized as a plainspoken, “ingenuous evangelical Christian,” Watt’s public statements often proved distracting for the White House staff; he once described a list of appointees as, “I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.” Reagan, Stockman, and Watt shared the same political ideals, however, the American public found this ideology unpalatable, a sentiment not lost on legislators, who voted down Reagan’s policies.
If the nature of a presidency is an indicator of political character, the seven scandals that plagued the Reagan administration hang heavily over his political legacy. Two transgressions that politically and personally damaged the president’s image were the Iran-Contra scandal and the Department of Health and Urban Development grant rigging investigation. His involvement in the Iran-Contra affair provides an example of the flexible nature of Ronald Reagan’s political character, while the HUD grant rigging scandal serves as a reminder of the negative impact on the lives of the poor by influence-peddling former administration insiders.
In its most condensed form, the Iran-Contra affair involved the sales of U.S. military equipment by the administration to Iran in order to free American hostages, and using the resulting funds to support the Contra rebels fighting against a communist-leaning Nicaraguan government. Reagan approved the arms-for-hostage swap even though long-standing federal policies forbid any arms sales to the hostile Iranian government. Further, the administration violated congressional legislation expressly forbidding any type of U.S. assistance to the Contra rebels. As news of the scandal spread, revealing the extent of the president’s involvement, a majority of Americans began questioning his character; his image suffered further damage when the public discovered the Iranians reneged on releasing the hostages. Reagan supporters insist that his empathy toward the hostages moved him to approve the operation, while also citing his win-at-any-cost attitude about fighting the Cold War. Reagan’s belief, that direct intervention in Nicaragua in order to offset communism in South America, necessitated ignoring Congress and breaking the law. Under questioning, Reagan often claimed he was unaware of the operation’s details, and blamed a poor memory for not recalling details. “Ultimately, Reagan avoided impeachment by claiming he was out of touch and possibly incompetent rather than responsible and thus guilty.” Reagan’s culpability in the scandal remains intensely polarizing among both parties, but competence aside, his actions demonstrate contempt for the rule of law by a president with a slippery political character.
On the domestic front, in the 1980s the Department of Housing and Urban Development endured a grant rigging scandal that harmed most the very people that its mandate purported to assist, America’s homeless and poor population. The root cause of the department’s misconduct resides in Ronald Reagan’s small-government ideology that encouraged department heads to cut costs by reducing personnel. As the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Samuel Pierce epitomized the loyal, budget-cutting Reaganite when he reduced HUD’s budget by more than fifty percent. Taking advantage of the disarray in the wake of personnel cuts, the administration used HUD as an engine to drive cronyism and wealth accumulation for supporters and former members of the administration. The administration handed out positions in Pierce’s department as a political reward and often its appointees were ill suited for their jobs. One such political appointee, Deborah Gore Dean, operated as an assistant to Pierce and would “sit down at a table with a clipboard listing the projects she wanted funded…[and] the employees would pore through…binders to see whether the states that were hosting had even submitted applications for funding.” Ignoring long-standing federal regulations designed to protect the government from malfeasance, Dean “circumvent[ed] the agency’s policies to benefit favored developers.” Instead of creating responsible government, Reagan-influenced policies fostered an environment of corruption that allowed his supporters to profit off funds meant for the nation’s poorest individuals.
Evaluating the merits of Ronald Reagan’s political identity can be seen as a Rorschach test for Republican Party membership. His decision to identify as a Democrat but act as a Republican offers proof to staunch party members of Reagan’s loyalty, while Democrats view his actions as disloyal. Republicans describe his failed challenge to Ford’s presidency as justified, even though it cost the party the presidency. The family values he preached remained just beyond Reagan’s own ability to reach, as he remains the only president to have been divorced; his connection to Dixon, Illinois, while often referred to, ended when he left town for Hollywood as a young man. Finally, Reagan’s small-government policies failed to produce responsible public assistance, instead breeding an atmosphere of corruption and scandal for which the American taxpayer suffered. As the Republican Party’s political ideal, Ronald Reagan falls short of the very identity to which the party adheres.
The political identity of Theodore Roosevelt provides the better choice for the Republican Party standard-bearer. He entered politics as a Republican and would remain in the party until 1912, when he joined the Progressive Party. Roosevelt described party loyalty as, “A man cannot act both without and within the party; he can do either, but he cannot possibly do both.” Understanding that reform must come from within, he studied the local party machine and found rampant cronyism and graft between government and business, and decided to be the “person who leads to clean up government through civil service reform and legislation.” This narrative resonated with the voters in his New York district who voted Roosevelt to the state legislature. As with Reagan, Roosevelt believed the government required much needed reform, but he blamed a system that unfairly benefited politicians and wealthy private interests rather than protecting the nation’s working class. Instead, the government operated on a spoils system that allowed politicians to dole out jobs based on political or financial support.
To understand why civil service reform resonated with the public requires a knowledge of just how deeply ingrained graft and cronyism were in politics. Whenever a shift in power between the two parties occurred, a massive number of government positions held by the losing party became fodder for the incoming party to dole out as it wished. Perhaps the most infamous example of political cronyism remains the Democrat-controlled Tammany machine of New York City; by controlling access to city government positions, Tammany politicians controlled the flow and direction of labor and city contracts, and decided who would benefit in the financial largesse. As the politician’s power grew, so too did the number of patronage positions available to him, virtually guaranteeing future electoral success. The public chaffed at a spoils system that benefited only a select few and remained out of the purview for average Americans.
For Roosevelt, civil service reform was a campaign promise made in earnest. As a state legislator, he authored a bill that reorganized 10 percent of the state’s jobs under civil service rules. When Democrats shelved the bill, progressive Democratic Governor Grover Cleveland asked Roosevelt to reintroduce it, promising to support the bill’s passage by a majority Democrat legislature. His designs were “to take out of politics the vast band of hired mercenaries whose very existence depends on their success, and who can almost always in the end overcome the efforts of them whose only care is to secure a pure and honest government.” The public supported his reforms because it conformed to three of the most basic American tenets; it opened up new avenues of federal employment to all Americans, regardless of political affiliation, who tested well enough to earn the job. Roosevelt’s actions gained t he attention of President Benjamin Harrison, who appointed him to the United States Civil Service Commission, a position he retained into the Grover Cleveland administration.
Roosevelt was seeking new challenges when he accepted a position offered by Mayor William Strong on the New York City police commission. The NY police department had suffered recent allegations of corruption, and Roosevelt’s reputation as a virtuous reformer established him as the ideal candidate to restore public faith in the institution. At the end of the 19th century, NYC served as the nation’s financial capital and an important port of entry for both people and goods. As the city’s population expanded, so too did the opportunity for vices such as drinking, gambling, and prostitution. Approximately 8000 saloons operated within the city, some open seven days a week even though laws prohibited alcohol sales on Sunday. On a steady basis, police officers accepted bribes from brokers to ignore the rampant vice occurring on their beats or within the precinct. Corruption manifested at all levels with one precinct captain charging brothels and saloons an initial $500 fee, and an additional $50 monthly for protection from harassment. Perhaps more disturbing, patrolmen often drank on the job or slept instead of walking a beat, and many New Yorkers complained about the rough handling and language used by officers.
Upon assuming his position, Roosevelt instituted a number of measures designed to improve the department and weed out the most corrupt members of the force. He announced that charges brought against officers would be thoroughly investigated, and if true, they were fired and prosecuted; this prompted a rash of retirements by officers worried about losing their pensions because of malfeasance. The commission placed officer hiring under civil service standards that required new recruits pass an examination that tested knowledge, and physical and mental health; this testing insured that new hires merited the position. The commission issued promotions only after investigating the officer’s record, as the former protocol involved simply buying advancements. Finally, he met with Police Chief Thomas Byrnes and informed him officers were no longer to turn a blind eye toward any law; Roosevelt warned Byrnes that he would occasionally walk the city, day or night, and any officer misconduct he discovered was subject to discipline and firing. Roosevelt reported to the public, “We are bound to make all honest, brave and efficient members of the force who are bold in their dealing with the criminals and courteous in their dealings with the ordinary citizens, understand that we are their friends.”
True to his word, Roosevelt went on nighttime jaunts with Jacob Riis as a guide and discovered policemen drinking, sleeping, and meeting with prostitutes; but these forays into the city served another purpose by introducing Roosevelt to the brutal effects of poverty. He blamed alcohol for the evils he witnessed, and decided the police department would strictly adhere to the Excise Law banning Sunday liquor and beer sales. Roosevelt viewed law enforcement in terms of black and white, fair or unfair, just or unjust, leaving him very little room to maneuver on unpopular positions. Enforcing the Excise Law required that saloons close on Sunday, and it was his job to assure compliance. This was a very unpopular stance for the city’s working poor who labored six days a week, leaving Sundays as their only day to imbibe. He further limited the number of saloons by instituting a hefty increase on the fees to register a saloon, and requiring that they meet city safety-code standards. Unable to endure a dry Sunday, New Yorkers ventured out in search of a saloon willing to defy the law, and many saloon owners, believing Roosevelt’s rhetoric was mere lip service and a ploy to appear the reformer, opened their establishments only to be shut down by the police and heavily fined by a judge. In an effort to circumvent the law, saloon owners devised clever methods to conceal alcohol sales, many of which were resurrected and made infamous during the Prohibition Era. Throughout New York City, the realization occurred that this police commission, unlike the others before it, could not be bought.
While Roosevelt’s popularity increased nationwide, he was a political pariah in New York at both the city and state level. The unpopularity of Roosevelt’s virtuous crusade to clean up the police force and uphold the law caused many Republican-leaning New Yorkers to vote Tammany Democrats back into office. Politicians in both parties feared being implicated in the police commission’s investigations, and responded by drafting legislation to dissolve it. The combative relationship among the commission members further impeded its progress. State Republican Party boss, Thomas Platt, refused to support Roosevelt’s cause, and expressed outrage when, during the state convention, legislators clamored for, and eventually added, enforcement of the Excise Law onto the Party’s plank. Seeking to harness his energy, party leaders sent Roosevelt on a speaking tour across the U.S. in support of William McKinley’s 1896 presidential bid against Grover Cleveland. After reaching the White House, McKinley appointed Roosevelt Assistant Secretary of the Navy, an assignment that also provided him with an honorable escape from the police commission.
Undertaking civil service reform required a tremendous amount of political courage because it undercut political power by removing patronage positions from legislators. Had Roosevelt not read correctly public sentiment, the issue might have been a career killer. The nation’s rural population, however, responded positively to his rhetoric, and while the Republicans lost New York to the Democrats, the party prevailed in sending William McKinley to the White House. The party that even then enjoyed a close relationship with industry and finance now signaled its intention to support issues important to the working class.
While Roosevelt’s campaigns for civil service reform are highlights of his political identity, his tenure as Assistant Secretary of the Navy displays Roosevelt’s ability to restructure the U.S. Navy into an internationally recognized and feared sea force. This was no easy task, as United States foreign policy strictly adhered to isolationism, and any attempt to expand naval power smacked of warmongering. His argument that naval sea power trumped a standing Army ran counter to the American war experience. Roosevelt, however, recognized the threat posed by a newly militarized and aggressive Japan and reasoned that naval bases in the Philippines, Hawaii, and Cuba would provide a needed buffer for the nation’s coastal defenses. Saddled with a navy scoffed at by the international community, he established a training regimen to shore up and professionalize it. His request for “six new battleships, six large cruisers, and seventy-five torpedo boats fell on deaf ears in Congress; it responded by approving one new battleship and a small number of torpedo boats.
In keeping with his ideology of issuing meritorious promotions, Roosevelt extended “equal rank to the newly skilled engineers and to line officers, as electricity was put into renovated ships.” Perhaps Roosevelt’s most fortuitous promotion belongs to George Dewey, who was promoted to admiral. Dewey proved his worth by destroying the Spanish fleet at the Battle of Manila Bay while only suffering a single American casualty. Admiral Dewey’s success reassured an American public worried about the country’s declaration of war against Spain in 1898; it also surprised British naval officers whose attitude before the U.S. Navy’s departure for action, Dewey said, “…was to the effect: ‘A fine set of fellows, but unhappily we shall never see them again.'”
As president, Roosevelt continued to develop a strong navy by authorizing the construction of 6 new dreadnaught ships, 16 battleships, 6 cruisers, 12 submarines, and 16 destroyers. By the time he left office, the U.S. Navy was ranked number two in the world, surpassed only by Britain. To display the U.S. Navy’s newly developed might, Roosevelt deployed it in 1907 on an international tour, ostensibly to test the White Fleet, so known because of the ships’ light grey paint, and its crew’s performance during extended missions far from American shores. However, the White Fleet also impressed upon Japan the extended reach of the United States and its ability to protect the nation’s assets in the distant Philippines.
Although Roosevelt exerted a great deal of energy on work, he also enjoyed a stable and happy family life. As with Ronald Reagan, Roosevelt married twice, however his first wife, Alice, died while giving birth. He named the baby girl Alice, and gave her to Bamie, his sister, to foster; when he remarried to Edith Carow, Alice rejoined the family at Edith’s insistence. Stories abound of the many antics on which Roosevelt led the “bunnies,” his affectionate term for the children, during play; he told them ghost stories, joined into pillow fights, and led them on long outdoor hikes. Close family friend Gifford Pinchot reported watching the children slide down a rope extending from the homes second floor window, with Roosevelt “whooping and hollering to highlight the drama.” His concern for children extended beyond Roosevelt’s immediate family, as he championed regulations that restricted industry’s abusive child labor practices. Roosevelt described the importance of family in a letter to his son, Ted, Jr.: “Home, wife, children – they are what really count in life. I have enjoyed many things; …but all of them put together are not for one moment to be weighed in the balance when compared with the joy I have known with your mother and all of you.”
Much like his family life, Roosevelt’s administration enjoyed a relatively peaceful reputation, enduring only a single scandal. The Brownsville Affair centered on accusations that in 1906 “Buffalo Soldiers” of the all black 25th Infantry Brigade shot and killed a white bartender in Brownsville, Texas. During the investigation by George H. Burton, the U.S. Army Inspector General, soldiers were questioned about the incident but refused to implicate their fellow service members; based on Burton’s recommendation, Roosevelt orders 167 men “dishonorably discharged from the ranks of the storied Buffalo Soldiers.” Ignoring the national outcry, he stood firm on a decision that denied the soldiers any opportunity to receive a pension or future consideration for federal employment. The stain of Roosevelt’s actions remains particularly perfidious, as later investigations proved the soldiers’ innocence; the Nixon administration later reversed Roosevelt’s decision.
In relation to the contemporary Republican doctrine of efficient government, family values, and party loyalty, Roosevelt’s political identity more closely conforms than that of Reagan. He never vacillated between parties, as Reagan had, and proactively labored to change government through Civil Service Reform. Reagan’s reform method of financially constricting federal departments and social programs unpopular within the Republican Party further crippled government and punished the nation’s working poor. Roosevelt’s revisions expanded federal employment to all Americans, while also ensuring applicants merited the position to which they applied. Finally, his home life exemplified the family values so often guilefully heaped upon Ronald Reagan.
A comparison between the two men demands a discussion about their relationships to labor, industry, and finance. Contemporarily, U.S. citizens reside under a governmental system that operates closely with those elements that serve as an engine for American capitalism. In its purest form, the capitalist system requires both winners and losers to operate efficiently; for every gain in the market, somewhere in the system a loss occurred. This close relationship between industry and government exists throughout the nation’s history however, the Founding Fathers’ vision did not include placing industry’s interests before that of the population. As the nation’s economic system evolved from one of mercantilism to that of raw capitalism, the relative importance of industry to government eclipsed that of the population. The president’s role as the first citizen is to define and enforce the boundary between government and industry. Both Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt applied very different definitions to the boundary between these competing elements, and in defining this boundary, they indicated whether government functioned, as envisioned by Abraham Lincoln, “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Much of Roosevelt’s young adulthood spanned the Gilded Age, and his habit of dressing like a “dandy” is only one example of the period’s influence on him. A member of the nation’s financial elite, he benefited from the flow of resources that great wealth provided, including a Harvard education, comfortable and secure homes, a steady diet, and access to healthcare. The last was particularly important to a severely asthmatic Roosevelt, who, had he been born poor, probably would not have reached adulthood. He rubbed elbows with some of America’s most influential industry leaders, and understood the inside role capital performed as a lubricant in the political process.
Nurtured within a pro-business environment, Roosevelt’s initial views on labor matched those of industry, he supported laissez-faire capitalism that promoted the primacy of business over employee working conditions and pay; this included the owner’s right to deny employment based on age, race, sex, religion, and political affiliation. His evolution from pro-business to pro-labor was indicative of that of the Gilded Age population. Insulated by their social positions, middle-class and wealthy Americans only learned about poor labor conditions when trouble erupted. Conflict between industry and labor most often occurred when unions moved to organize workers. Industrialists employed a number of methods to combat unionization including the intimidation or firing of union workers, and replacing laborers with immigrants and African Americans, who worked for much lower wages. These measures succeeded in the short term, however as industrialism created great wealth for the nation, the deterioration in social and working conditions offset the gain for the poor, who increasingly found solidarity and support in unions.
While the nation remained largely rural, the effects of the booming industrial revolution caused urban populations to swell faster than a city’s institutional structure could keep up. This meant inner-city areas lacked garbage collection, running water, indoor toilets, bathing facilities, and fresh air. Because most factory workers lived within walking distance of the job, they journeyed from one extreme to another; most factories were dimly lit, intemperate, and dusty workspaces. Industrialists expected their employees to work a ten-hour day, and a six-day workweek. If a laborer suffered a debilitating or fatal workplace injury, no compensation or justice was forthcoming; instead, a replacement stepped in and production continued until the next accident occurred. Labor conditions in rural mining towns were often not much better. Company towns sprang up near remote mining sites, and forced workers to “buy their food and rent their miserable shacks from the companies.” Farmers, too, felt the heavy hand of industrialists in the form of inflated shipping rates charged to move produce. In many instances, farmers unable to pay railroad fees simply allowed crops to rot in the fields. Urbanites often suffered from the collusion between city government and railroad executives, as the scarcity of competition allowed rail operators to neglect repairs to equipment, leaving customers to pay a heavy price as unsafe railcars placed lives in danger of injury or death. Trains often operated sporadically, and the public considered the time schedules untrustworthy.
The shift in Roosevelt’s attitude toward industry began when, as a New York state legislator, he investigated the close and improper relationship between Jay Gould, State Attorney General Hamilton Ward, and State Supreme Court Justice T.R. Westbrook during the 1881 acquisition of the Manhattan Elevated Railroad by Gould. A year prior, Ward sued Manhattan Elevated as insolvent, a decision that Judge Westbrook approved. Ward then place two Gould employees as receivers, and after Manhattan Elevated stocks plunged by 95 percent, Westbrook declared it newly solvent, and gave it over Gould. In a letter to Gould, Westbrook stated, “I am willing to go the very verge of judicial discretion to protect your vast interests.” When his uncle and mentor, James A. Roosevelt, learned of Theodore’s intent to impeach Westbrook, and bring criminal charges against Ward, he pressed his nephew “to leave politics and indentify…with the right kind of people.” Stunned by his uncle’s words, Roosevelt later said, “It was the first glimpse I had of that combination between business and politics which I was in after years so often to oppose.”
It was a bitter medicine to swallow for Roosevelt when, after presenting exhaustive evidence to support his accusations, the Judiciary Committee reported finding no wrongdoing, and the state legislature voted 77-35 to accept its findings.
He angrily responded to Gould’s rough handling of the law by backing a bill that lowered fares on Manhattan Elevated from ten cents to five; Roosevelt reasoned that Gould profited unfairly at the public’s expense, while hiding much of the profits to avoid paying state taxes. The Five Cent Bill passed the legislature with massive public support behind it; however, Governor Cleveland vetoed the bill. Roosevelt later apologized for supporting the measure, but continued to express displeasure with industrialists of Gould’s ilk stating, “They are common thieves…they belong to that most dangerous of all classes, the wealthy criminal class.”
Roosevelt’s attitude toward industry continued to shift during his tenure as a police commissioner. As noted previously, he conducted frequent strolls around New York City to monitor police behavior, but when accompanied by social reformer Jacob Riis, the planned route usually included examples of industry’s detrimental impact at the community level. Prior to his police commission job, Roosevelt operated in that rarified air reserved for those of wealth and power, which limited his contact with abject poverty to isolated incidences. Now he confronted the conditions repeatedly, finding entire families in excess of five members occupying a single room tenement. These apartments contained no running water, and the stench of rotting refuse pervaded the buildings because tenants tossed garbage from their windows to the street or courtyard below, which went uncollected by the city. In response, he “closed down hundreds of tenements for incredible violations of the city’s health regulations.”
Because of his limited powers, health code violations were the only means available for him to assist the poor; if Roosevelt could not directly assist the poor, he would punish the property owners that benefited from these atrocious conditions. With the power of the governorship, Roosevelt’s hardened attitude toward industry became even more sharply defined, as he decided to hold industry accountable for paying its fair share.
During his political career, Roosevelt observed the exponential growth of industrial power and its consolidation to a small cadre of individuals who controlled vast trusts. Using vertical integration to control pricing, production, and availability empowered corporate leaders to hinder competition, which violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. These monopolies created massive fortunes for a small number of industrialists, providing them with unprecedented power to influence politics. Roosevelt was bothered that “neither the parties nor the public had any realization…or any adequate understanding of the dangers of the ‘invisible empire’ which throve by what was done in secret.”
To weaken the relationship between politics and government in New York, Roosevelt threw his political weight behind the Ford Bill, an 1899 state reform measure designed to tax franchises on state issued grants. He stated, “A corporation which derives its power from the State, should pay the State a just percentage of its earnings as a return for the privileges it enjoys.”
Fighting back, industrialists threatened to withhold campaign donations or general support from Roosevelt in future political campaigns if he continued with the legislation. State Republican Party leader Platt warned Roosevelt he would do everything in his power to delay or kill the Ford Bill, so Roosevelt publicly stated his intention to compromise. If the Platt-lead legislature produced a measure that met the governor’s standards, he would sign it; however, if he found the counter-legislation inadequate, Roosevelt intended to sign the original Ford Bill instead. The press and public sided with him, and Platt relented, allowing the bill’s passage. Roosevelt’s support of the Ford Bill speaks to his continued hardening attitude toward industry’s unfair advantage over government and the people. Faced with political ostracization, he pressed forward, recovering $11.5 million in taxes that the state spent on services for residents. It also serves as a benchmark in Roosevelt’s understanding of the boundary between industry and government, a boundary that broadened even further during his presidency.
Roosevelt considered himself an “accidental” president because, as vice president, he achieved the office after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901 by Leon Czolgosz. Unable to control Governor Roosevelt, Boss Platt sent him to what most believed was a political wasteland by cutting a deal with National Republican Party Leader Mark Hanna to place Roosevelt on the ticket as McKinley’s vice president. Platt’s machinations pushed an unwilling Roosevelt into a position that most politicians considered powerless. His addition boosted McKinley’s status, as Roosevelt was already a popular figure nationally because of his well-publicized reform battles against industry and corrupt politicians. Hanna understood the implications of a reformer as smart and energetic as Roosevelt occupying the nation’s highest office; when first approached with the plan by Platt, Hanna protested, “Don’t any of you realize that there is only one life between this mad man and the White House?” Now, as the nation’s first citizen and public steward, he possessed the power to correct the disparities between industrial political power and the government, but the nature of his presidential advancement meant he operated without a mandate. However, he considered a mandate unnecessary if federal laws were being broken, as was the case with the Northern Securities Company.
Owned by wealthy financier J.P. Morgan, the Northern Securities Company satisfied the criteria set forth by the Sherman Antitrust Act as a monopoly because, in 1901, its railroads controlled travel to the West. Unlike previous presidents, when Roosevelt decided to act, advance warning was not given to industrial leaders. The litigation enraged Morgan, who complained that if one of his holdings was violating federal law, the two men could collaborate on a solution. The hubris contained in Morgan’s response struck a chord with the President, the press, and the public, by implying that corporate political power allowed corporations to negotiate outside the law. This attitude Roosevelt roundly rejected and diligently worked to disabuse when he forced the break-up of Northern Securities.
The conflict involving Morgan and Roosevelt clearly defines his understanding of the proper relationship between government and industry. By pursuing the corporation under the Sherman Act, he signaled to industry leaders that government functioned not on a subservient or level plane with corporations, but as the dominant party in the relationship. Railroad tycoon E.H. Harriman warned Roosevelt that defeat and political ruin awaited him because “because whenever it was necessary he could buy a sufficient number of senators and congressmen or state legislators to protect his interests, and when necessary, he could buy the judiciary.” As president, he intended to protect the public’s interests, and if corporations obeyed regulations, its interests, too, were protected. The Roosevelt administration continued to push legislation that protected the public by passing the 1906 Food and Drug Act, which forbade selling tainted food or fraudulent drugs, and the Meat Inspection Act that required federal regulators monitor sanitary conditions in meat processing plants. The Hepburn Act of 1906 further regulated railroad fares and shipping rates by extending the power of the obscure Interstate Commerce Commission to set rates and ensure a competitive system.
Roosevelt’s grandest act as the people’s steward occurred in the arena of conservation. He enjoyed a deep and abiding love for the American wilderness, and believed its natural resources deserved protection from industrial overuse. An avid outdoorsman, Roosevelt owned a cattle ranch in the Dakota Territory, and built his log ranch house by hand. He observed the decline and extinction of displaced animal species as the logging, mining, and railroad industries carved up large sections of the wilderness in the rush for resources to supply American manufacturing. The unregulated harvesting of resources left a wake of environmental destruction that polluted rivers and lakes with the toxic chemicals used by mining to extract minerals, and denuded vast treks of forest to supply rail ties for westward expansion by railroads. If future generations were to have the opportunity to revel in America’s wild lands, judicious government oversight was required. To accomplish this, Roosevelt politically battled with industry-funded Senate leaders whose understanding of land use was very different from that of Roosevelt.
Federal land management in the early 1900s maintained a friendly relationship with railroads corporations by giving land allotments to incentivize westward expansion. Following the discovery of valuable ore resources, the government sold mining interests land allotments at greatly reduced rates. In many instances, both railroad and mining corporations resold these allotments for private development, reaping a healthy profit. If these industries did not own the land, as was often the case with lumber corporations, no authority existed in the areas to challenge its veracity to the resources. The overwhelming attitude among industrialists regarding federal resources was one of entitlement, because their efforts were responsible for bringing them within reach; in essence, the wilderness was a vast storehouse, theirs for the taking.
With these two competing views at war in 1902, Roosevelt began aggressively placing large tracks of land under federal protection, declaring many of them natural wonders deserving of protection for future generations of Americans to enjoy. To safeguard culturally historical sites such as Chaco Canyon and Devils Tower, he signed the Antiquities Act, a law that allowed the president to designate arbitrarily an area as culturally important to American heritage. By the time Roosevelt stood for re-election in 1904, he was responsible for creating “three national parks, twenty-nine national forests, and two federal bird reservations. After winning re-election, Roosevelt believed he possessed the necessary mandate from the people to push ahead with his conservation agenda. In 1906, Roosevelt introduced the United States Forest Service, and placed Yale-trained forester Gifford Pinchot in charge of the fledgling agency with domain over 60 million acres of land. Roosevelt argued for the agency’s necessity saying, “…the interests of the people as a whole are, I repeat, safe in the hands of the Forest Service. By keeping the public forests in the public hands our forest policy substitutes the good of the whole people for the profits of the privileged few. With that result none will quarrel except the men who are losing the chance of personal profit at the public expense.” Roosevelt further endeared himself to the public by allowing homesteaders 160 acres on federal lands, provided the parcel was occupied and improved upon. The government tasked the forest rangers with enforcing the law, which earned them the wrath of logging interests that paid individuals to act as surrogates for the industry. When discovered, the owner of a false claim faced aggressive prosecution, with penalties that included lengthy prison sentences.
Roosevelt’s protective, and some would say paternal, attitude toward the people included their safety and wellbeing in the workspace, and the right to demonstrate peacefully over unfair working conditions. In deciding whether to interfere in a labor dispute, the tipping point for Roosevelt appears to be when the threat of violence seemed imminent. Unfortunately, deplorable working conditions and a three-tiered wage system that benefitted whites first, followed by immigrants, with blacks receiving the lowest pay, kept tensions high between labor and management. Such was the case in the 1902 anthracite coal strike in which one hundred forty thousand miners, the majority immigrant, stopped production in a bid to gain a 10 percent wage increase, and the recognition of their union. In addition, the miners demanded a more fair system for weighing the coal, a determining factor in their wages, for which they labored twelve-hour workdays in dark, hazardous, and soot-filled conditions. In public opinion, the miners’ demands appeared just however, industry leaders refused even to consider the proposals. With winter approaching, Roosevelt threatened the coal operators with new federal regulations, forcing them to negotiate with labor in proceedings overseen by a federal commission. The miners earned the wage increase and a reduced nine-hour workday; in a first, government acted as an honest broker between labor and industry. In the final accounting, the miners failed to win recognition for the union, a condition that did not go unnoticed by Roosevelt.
In the contemporary pro-business environment, his decisions regarding antitrust litigation, conservation, and labor relations redefined government’s relationship with industry and reveal a president not only in step with public sentiment, but also at times ahead of it. The public took up his mandate in the coming decade by forming the Progressive Party. Roosevelt’s firmest opinion on labor appeared in his plank as the Progressive Party’s candidate in the 1912 presidential election; he demanded compensation for workplace injuries, regulations limiting child labor, a safe work environment, an eight-hour workday, and the protection of working women. Although he lost the election, Roosevelt’s fight for labor influenced his cousin, Franklin, who later ensconced the legitimacy of labor by federally recognizing unions’ right to exist alongside industry, by signing the 1935 Wagner Act. The loss also serves as an indicator of government’s limitation in the area of social welfare over industry in the early 1900s. This changed in the coming years as Fordism became the new standard for efficient industrial production by introducing the assembly line. More importantly, Ford paid workers in excess of industry standards because he believed employees deserved the means to purchase the sweat of their labors; Fordism promoted the ideology of consumerism in which the individual served both as employee and customer. Labor unions pounced on the political possibilities presented by the ideology that decreased working wages kept the individual from enjoying a consumer economy. This narrative of abundance just beyond reach, and the system’s undemocratic nature, allowed FDR to promote the Wagner Act as a fairness issue that allowed labor unions to compete with industry.
In 1929, Ronald Reagan benefited from labor’s expanding influence, of which Theodore Roosevelt was an advocate and later validated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he acted as spokesperson for Eureka College’s student union. Faced with a large school budget deficit, Eureka President Bert Wilson announced plans to cut programs, while also laying off a portion of the academic staff. Reagan blamed poor leadership in the mismanagement of the budget, and that students unjustly bore the brunt of Wilson’s ineptness; he called for Eureka College’s president to resign. The student union won the day as Wilson vacated the position, but the irony of Reagan’s involvement came at the school president’s expense. Months earlier, a desperate Reagan pleaded with Wilson for a needy student scholarship so that he could afford attendance; Wilson granted Reagan a scholarship and it cost him the job. That Reagan’s student union boasted the agency to force a college president from office speaks to unions’ growing importance, but also marks his entry into the labor movement.
After moving to California in the 1930s to work in film, Reagan joined the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), a union tasked with the workplace protection of a diverse cross-section of professional actors. As the federal government’s forced restructuring of the movie industry forced aging “B” actors such as Reagan into increasingly marginal roles, he focused more energy on his SAG duties. From 1947-1952, Reagan served as president of the union, and credited studio head Jack Warner with teaching him how to negotiate. He also complained bitterly about the federal regulations he believed impeded the film industry. During this period, his sympathies began shifting toward management’s understanding of film industry operations.
Reagan’s compliant attitude toward management while acting as SAG president indicates his initial shift from a liberal Democrat to a conservative Republican; his vacillation also serves to demonstrate Reagan’s understanding of the boundary between industry and labor unions. In a twenty-year span, he morphed from a student union spokesperson agitating against unfair school program cuts, to a president of SAG with sympathy toward management’s position. In his last year as SAG president, Reagan signed a waiver with Music Corporation of America (MCA) that provided the company with unlimited access to television resources, giving MCA an unfair advantage within the film industry. This conflict of interest attracted the attention of authorities in 1962, as a federal grand jury questioned his role in the affair, but chose not to indict him.
When Ronald Reagan became governor of California in 1967, the state was reeling from the social unrest that accompanied the Civil Rights Movement. The nation’s college campuses felt these effects intensely, as much of the movement’s momentum came from student protests, and the University of California, Berkley became one such hot spot. A student-lead demonstration over the school’s land usage policies erupted into violence after Reagan ordered 300 California Highway Patrol and Berkley police officers to disperse the crowd. In the clash, a police officer using a shotgun fired on a student, killing him; city residents and students retaliated by flooding into the area. Reagan countered by sending in 2700 National Guard soldiers to police the city and enforce a curfew. The individual who at one point in his life demonstrated against Eureka College’s improprieties defended his actions by stating, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” Reagan’s shifting attitude on protest and labor unions continued its movement toward a pro-business conservatism.
Evidence of Reagan’s complete transformation to an anti-union Republican manifests itself in his handling of the 1981 PATCO union strike of air traffic controllers. Unwilling to compromise with the union, Reagan fired 13,000 air traffic controllers and replaced them with military personnel until new controllers were trained. Historian Eric Foner stated that Reagan’s actions “inaugurated an era of hostility between the federal government and organized labor.” His positions on labor encouraged private employers to fire striking union workers and replace them with non-union employees, which Foner noted, “was a rare occurrence before 1980.” Speaking from a pro-business point of view, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volker called Reagan’s accomplishment “a turning point in America’s economic, psychic, and patriotic revival.” Reagan’s reversal on labor issues demonstrated only one element in his pro-business attitude.
The 1950s mark the last decade of manufacturing as a key factor in the American economy, and Reagan witnessed it while hosting the General Electric Theater television program. The show mixed in tours of General Electric factories with skits performed by contemporarily popular Hollywood figures. As General Electric’s spokesperson, Reagan often complained of the unfair burden placed on the corporation by federal regulations; however, the federal oversight that he so deplored was in place to protect worker safety and labor’s right to seek fair wages. Labor’s successes, however, increased cost for large manufacturers and spurred industries to move plants overseas, and seek economically distressed countries with more relaxed regulations and a cheap source of labor. Industries that remained within the U.S. updated factories with equipment to mechanize repetitive tasks, leading to a reduced manufacturing workforce.
While federal regulation and labor’s influence resulted in manufacturing’s wholesale abandonment of
America, both elements also combined to produce the world’s largest and most affluent middle class. The rising standard of living prompted a change in how Americans defined freedom from that of “economic independence and democratic participation,” to the “ability to gratify market desires.” Two factors that weakened labor’s position were the shift to a consumer society and the decline in manufacturing; however, America’s financial sector grew by developing mechanisms to ease the flow of credit to hungry consumers who, in turn, purchased new homes and all the items deemed necessary to fill it. By embracing a consumer culture, Foner stated, “Americans became comfortable in living in never-ending debt, once seen as a loss of economic freedom.”
Reagan’s five years as a G.E. spokesperson immersed him in a corporate culture that defined economic freedom as the worker’s right to quit an employer if unhappy, and the primacy of management to both control wages, and continue hiring practices that placed barriers to employment based on age, race, sex, religion, and political affiliation. During the show’s run, he visited 135 plants nationwide, and observed a growing social welfare state that enabled the poor to remain unemployed; however, this view of the indigent as freeloader ignored the contemporary reality of the high unemployment caused by manufacturing’s shift to overseas labor markets. Reagan believed government interference drove American corporations into a more business-friendly foreign market, which kept industries from successfully competing on a global level. Although he lacked the necessary power to implement change, the show provided a platform to influence the hearts and minds of American viewers on the benefits of corporatism to the nation.
Reagan’s pro-business message attracted the attentions of wealthy California businessmen who recognized the political and business opportunities implied in his ideology; they supported him in the 1967 California race after he promised to lower corporate tax rates, and relax regulations for business in the state, a program Reagan continued to espouse as president. Federal regulations limited the scope and range of industrial growth by forcing adherence to unrealistic or outdated rules, and he believed they warranted re-examination by the administration. Taxes, he believed, stifled spending for all Americans, from individuals to corporations. Influenced by Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), Reagan embraced a “supply-side” ideology that proposed reducing taxes for corporations and high-income individuals, believing the entitlements would encourage the growth of personal and corporate wealth. Flush with profits, they would reinvest their capital in new business ventures, or improvements to existing structures, and in the process create new job opportunities for working Americans. Supply-side economics, or “Reaganomics,” promoted a laissez-faire approach to government interference across a broad spectrum of industries, and Reagan assured big business that his administration intended to relax regulations. His ability to convince the American public of the veracity of supply-side economics and reduced regulations to improve the nation’s economy, speaks volumes about Reagan’s oratory skills. It also demonstrates his presidential understanding of the boundary between government and industry. Reagan believed that by assisting corporations, he also helped uplift poor Americans who needed employment.
We now know that Reagan’s economic and regulatory policies failed to meet the intended goals; wealth accumulated to a small portion of the American population while wages and employment stagnated for the working poor. The corporation’s ascendancy in government influence at the expense of the unions weakened labor’s ability to demand fair wages. As a result, the contemporary divide between rich and poor Americans is at its greatest level since the Gilded Age. Meanwhile, Reagan’s tax cutting strategies proved ineffective in producing the “trickle down” of wealth from the rich to the poor, because the wealthy horded the largesse, without rebuilding America’s manufacturing sector.
Street with no name 