The Working Class Republican

by Henry Olsen

  Contrast this expansive view with the more crabbed one of his good friend William F. Buckley Jr. In an August 1983 column, Buckley discussed how government programs to fight hunger cost more than they should. Citing a 1969 study that showed “99 percent of our biological requirements” could come from “four basic foods . . . bulgur wheat, dried skimmed milk, dried beans, and lard,” Buckley said that hunger in America could be eradicated if “every grocery store in the United States would be furnished with as much of these four foods as there was any call for.”49 This program would eliminate “biological hunger, as distinguished from, say, gourmet hunger” at less than 25 percent of the cost of the food stamps program.50 Such a program would give “society a perfectly defensible sense of moral composure,” according to Buckley.51

  Like most conservatives of that generation, I idolized Buckley. He was responsible for the only time in my life I seriously came to oppose a position Reagan held. I watched, enraptured, as a sixteen-year-old when Buckley debated Reagan on his PBS show, Firing Line, over whether the United States should give up control over the Panama Canal. I went into the debate agreeing with Reagan, but came out agreeing with Buckley. Like many, I was enthralled by his charm, his wit, his eloquence. One brief exchange between the two, one I’ve remembered vividly for forty years, showed how the erudite editor could win friends instantly. After about an hour of formal debate, Reagan was allowed to question his close friend directly. He started by humorously asking, “Why haven’t you already rushed across the room here to tell me that you’ve seen the light?” Buckley sat calmly and replied drolly, “I’m afraid that if I came any closer to you the force of my illumination would blind you.”52

  Buckley and Reagan had more to do than anyone else with making American conservatism a viable creed and a political force. Yet when it came to the matter of the quality of life for the poor, Buckley had more in common with Goldwater than with Reagan. The idea that compassion requires more than simply keeping the poor alive, but instead insists that one recognize “the purpose and worth in each and every human life,” seems to have been difficult to grasp for two of conservatism’s three most important figures.

  The rest of Reagan’s “Creative Society” speech follows from these three premises. If it is legitimate for popular government to decree that “the problems of human misery can be solved,” then it follows that “the big question is not whether—but how and at what price.” If self-government and dignity are essential to human happiness and freedom, then it follows that attempts to meet those needs and solve those problems must maximize the ability of all citizens to choose their own paths and solve their own problems to the greatest degree possible. And if one believes human need is objective rather than subjective, then limiting governmental assistance to need solves the problem of cost.

  This Creative Society was not to be a wholly private, decentralized one. Proclaiming that “there is no major problem that cannot be resolved by a vigorous and imaginative state administration willing to utilize the tremendous potential of our people,” Reagan called for a vast, government-led initiative to “call . . . on the best in every field to review and revise our governmental structure and present plans for streamlining it and making it more efficient and more effective.”53 Under his leadership, California’s government would “coordinate the creative energies of the people for the good of the whole.” One can almost hear in Reagan’s call the echoes of FDR’s earlier call for “bold and persistent experimentation” as the hallmark of his New Deal. Reagan’s government might be smaller, but it would be no less active or energetic.

  Some might read this as perilously close to Henry Wallace’s planned society. Not so, said Reagan. Echoing the essential insights from the Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek’s classic book, The Road to Serfdom, Reagan said that “the idea of an economy planned or controlled by government just doesn’t make sense. No matter how talented the government is, it is incapable of making the multitudinous decisions that must be made every day in the market place and in our community living.”54 Thus, his government would push decentralization—local communities should govern more of their own affairs and people should have more control over theirs. But it would not remain aloof and indifferent to solving problems the people wanted addressed.

  Reagan then offered a few specific proposals to flesh out these ideas. Local governments should be able to pass ordinances that make it easier to control “skyrocketing crime.” Business and community leaders should be consulted as to how best to “make California once again attractive to industry.” “Campus researchers and others experienced in philanthropy” would be convened to determine how to address the welfare caseload, which had doubled in the prior five years, such that those who needed permanent or temporary help received it and those who could support themselves would be helped to do so. Control over education should also be passed from Sacramento to local school boards and individual state colleges and universities.

  Reagan emphasized that these efforts need not result in new government programs. He approvingly cited a number of examples of private-led efforts that rehabilitated the sick and assisted the poor. They, however, were to be only the preferred, but not the sole, approach. The Creative Society wasn’t “some glorified program for passing the buck and telling people to play Samaritan and solve the problems on their own while government stands by to hand out Good Conduct ribbons.”

  He ended his speech by reprising the essential choice facing Americans that he posed in his speech on behalf of Goldwater. Decrying government planning and control, he said people who called for that “in reality are taking us back in time to the acceptance of rule of the many by the few”—exactly the evil he decried in 1947 when he was an ardent New Dealer. He called talk “in America of left and right” to be “disruptive talk, dividing us down the center.” The choice between left and right was a false one. “The only choice we have is up or down—up, to the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the deadly dullness of totalitarianism.”

  This self-avowedly centrist approach left Brown little room to effectively attack Reagan. As Reagan refused to make the sort of wild, bombastic claims that often got conservatives into trouble, Brown was increasingly left with nowhere to go to revive his flagging poll numbers. He resorted to a tactic that would be reprised by Reagan’s later foes, one that would fail as badly in this first attempt as it would in later campaigns. Brown tried to scare California voters, especially African Americans, into thinking Reagan was both too wild and inexperienced to be trusted with high office and prejudiced against minorities.

  Brown targeted Reagan’s acting career. Claiming that as an actor Reagan had no knowledge of or experience with state government, Brown ran a series of television commercials focusing on Reagan’s lack of direct knowledge. The spot ended with Brown telling a group of African American schoolchildren that Reagan was an actor, “and you know who shot Lincoln, don’t you?”55

  Subtle innuendo in the Daisy ad had worked for LBJ against Goldwater, but this ham-handed effort fell flat. Much as Jimmy Carter would attack Reagan on the issue of race so viciously in 1980 that liberal editorial pages called him to stop engaging in a campaign of meanness, Brown’s unfounded insinuation turned voters off. A small but persistent lead for Reagan turned into a large one, and it became clear the only thing left up for grabs was Reagan’s victory margin.

  Reagan’s campaign did what it could to maximize that margin. My first political memory is as a five-year-old boy seeing a Reagan for Governor sign in front of Ricky Gutierrez’s house on Burbank Boulevard in the Woodland Hills portion of Los Angeles, a neighborhood of small, three-bedroom, 1950s-built homes. In researching this book, I discovered why I saw that sign. From the start Reagan had showered attention on the state’s large Mexican American population. In speeches, signs, and ads, Reagan asked Latinos “Ya Basta?” or “Had Enough?”56 Shrewd Democratic Party poll watchers saw early on that Reagan would do better than most Republ
icans among these voters, and indeed he did, Ricky’s parents’ among them.57

  Reagan also showed that no one understood working-class, New Deal–friendly Democrats better. He won statewide by nearly one million votes out of six and one-half million cast, a 58–42 percent landslide. His strongest base of support, and the places where he increased support over traditional Republican levels, was in those working-class neighborhoods where Republicans had traditionally struggled. These areas were places like the San Fernando Valley, the part of Los Angeles where I lived, and in countless faceless suburbs unknown to most but home to millions of people. Places like Norwalk, Lakewood, and Hawthorne, places settled by southern and plains Democrats fleeing the Dust Bowl or northern and midwestern ethnics looking for a better climate and a better life. So long as the Republican Party fought elections on themes like business versus labor, or liberty versus the New Deal, they voted strongly for Democrats. But when the question was, as Reagan put it, not between left or right but between up or down, they enthusiastically favored “up,” even when it carried a Republican label.

  One can see this most clearly by comparing Reagan’s share of the vote with that of the 1962 Republican gubernatorial nominee, Richard Nixon. Nixon lost Norwalk by a 65–35 percent margin in 1962, but Reagan carried it four years later by a 57–43 margin, a stunning 22 percent improvement that was more than twice his statewide gain.58 Other working-class white suburbs saw similar gains. San Leandro, a suburb of Oakland, went for Brown over Nixon in 1962 by a 60–40 percent margin, but in 1966 it favored Reagan over Brown by 58–42. South Gate, another Los Angeles white working-class town, switched from being 54 percent Democratic in 1962 to 66 percent in favor of Reagan in 1966, while nearby Lakewood went from 58–42 Brown to 62–38 Reagan.

  These trends applied in rural areas as well. In more highly educated counties populated by traditional Republicans, Reagan ran only slightly ahead of Nixon’s 1962 performance.59 The San Francisco Peninsula, for example, was then largely Republican. Reagan ran between 4 and 7 percent ahead of Nixon in the four counties that comprise the peninsula. But in the then-traditionally Democratic rural counties inland from the coasts, Reagan ran unprecedentedly far ahead of Nixon. He ran between 12 and 28 percent ahead of Nixon in each of the nineteen rural counties north of the state capital of Sacramento, many of which had been carried by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election. Reagan did only slightly worse in the rural counties to Sacramento’s south, running between 9 and 17 percent better than Nixon in all but one of those fifteen noncoastal, rural counties. Rural, working-class Democrats found as much to like about Reagan’s new politics as did their suburban counterparts.

  Reagan’s victory meant his ideas would now be put to the test. California had been running a budget deficit during the campaign, a fact that would require whomever won to decide how to bring it into balance. Reagan had often proclaimed that the government spent and taxed too much. Would he challenge the bigger government consensus and try to dramatically cut state spending or accommodate spending by hiking taxes?

  Those who heard only the antigovernment rhetoric in his speeches would have had reason to think he would try to undo many of the programs that at that time were relatively new. Medical assistance to the poor, known in California as Medi-Cal, had been passed by Congress only in 1965. The federal government’s expansion of the nation’s main welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), was also relatively recent, a product of the Great Society. The state had only recently expanded its three state-financed higher education systems, the University of California, the California State University system, and the two-year California Community Colleges. Goldwater-style conservatism would clearly have favored attacking these programs before raising a dime in tax hikes.

  Those who listened more closely could have found clues to what they would later explain as Reagan’s “pragmatism.” His speeches, as we have noted, always included segments that clearly stated a philosophical support for the aims of many, if not most, of the programs whose survival the liberals so dearly loved. Reagan thought these aims could be accomplished in other, less expensive ways, but he never expressed the Goldwateresque view that their existence itself was an imposition on liberty.

  One could also have seen glimpses of the real Reagan in an exchange he had with the prominent NBC journalist Sander Vanocur on that network’s premier Sunday political talk show, Meet the Press.60 On that show, Reagan was asked whether he opposed the legacy of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had been a moderate-to-liberal Republican governor of California until his appointment to the court by President Eisenhower.61 As a justice, Warren led the court into its most aggressively liberal phase, expanding the reach of the Bill of Rights into many areas that had hitherto been considered the province of politics, especially at the state level. In this role, he had come to be strongly disliked on the right as someone who was trampling the Constitution. Reagan’s answer to Vanocur’s question spoke volumes as to his character and philosophy.

  Reagan started by asking Vanocur whether he was asking about “the Earl Warren of the Supreme Court or the Earl Warren as Governor of California.” While Vanocur later said this astute reply showed “he was in the presence of a real political pro,” Reagan’s follow-on was more revealing of the man.62 When the journalist clarified he was referring only to the gubernatorial Warren, Reagan expressed strong approval of his predecessor. He told viewers that most Californians would want to return to the days of Earl Warren, ones that included significant expansions of government spending and the state’s higher education system.

  He also praised the former California governor and senator Hiram Johnson, whose Progressive Party had controlled state government for four crucial years in the early twentieth century. Johnson, who was Teddy Roosevelt’s running mate when the former president tried to regain his old job in 1912 as the Progressive nominee, had sought, in Reagan’s words, “to return power and authority to the individual” when governor.63 The fact that he did so by severely restricting the power of political parties to control who they nominated and by creating the state’s first workman’s compensation insurance system—both significant expansions of government power opposed by conservatives of that era—seemingly paled in importance for Reagan compared with the aim of increasing the ability of the average citizen to influence his or her government and to live with greater economic security.

  None of this was inconsistent with what he had told Californians he would do during the campaign. Indeed, in a record his campaign sent to California voters entitled “Year of Decision,” he specifically said they would “get the services their taxes pay for without breaking their backs to pay for them.”64 He promised only to halt rising crime and the increasing cost of welfare, to give union members the right to a secret ballot on matters of union strikes, and to give more control to local governments. Nothing in this platform implied that he would back sharp cutbacks to services voters valued in the face of a rising deficit.

  Nor, as we have seen, was this platform opposed to what he had been telling Americans he favored in the prior decade. To borrow a phrase from President Bill Clinton, Reagan’s view of the New Deal and its state counterpart was to “mend it, not end it.”

  Both archconservatives and hyperliberals would find this out by the end of his first year in office. The former would find they had less to hope, and the latter would discover they had less to fear, than a superficial reading of Reagan would have led them to believe. But all that was in the future. Right now, Reagan could bask in the glory of a lightning-fast rise to national prominence and an even greater stage on which to shine. His first turn as leading man had produced great box office. He had finally kissed the girl, and she had kissed him back. Despite the inevitable twists and turns of political life, Reagan had found the rest of him, and he would keep finding it for the rest of his life.

  Chapter 5

  California Political Theater: Ronald Reagan Presents

&n
bsp; The scene: California’s ornate State Capitol rotunda. The date: January 2, 1967. The time: a few minutes after midnight. The space under the dome is filled with people, among them governor elect Reagan, his wife, Nancy, California Supreme Court Justice Marshall McComb, and a host of supporters and reporters. The purpose: to take the oath of inauguration.

  After reciting the oath of office, his right hand firmly placed on a four-hundred-year-old Bible, Reagan turned to his old friend from the movie business, the Republican US senator George Murphy. “Well Murph,” he quipped, “looks like we’re back on the late show.”1 The laughter soon faded, but the challenge Reagan faced did not.

  Rarely in American political history had someone done what Reagan had achieved, obtain political power almost exclusively because of his own ideas. Those ideas, presented in speeches to audiences both national and local, had encouraged the powerful few and the anxious many to seek him out, asking and even begging him to make those ideas real. Now as governor he would have both the opportunity to deliver and the necessity of fleshing out those ideas through the actions he took. Before he completed his oath, Reagan had been solely a man of speech. Now he would forevermore be one of words and of deeds.

  The specific challenges he would face changed frequently over the eight years he was governor. But meeting those challenges always involved applying the same, sometimes contradictory ideas he had presented for decades. Would Reagan’s desire to reduce government’s cost and size lead him to try to undo many of the New Deal–inspired programs that had made government big? When public sentiment seemed to support increased government regulation, as it did by the end of his first term in regards to environmental protection, would Reagan side with those who wanted to expand government? In short, was liberty threatened so much by larger government that the beast needed to be starved, now, and not simply tamed?