Out of curiosity, her eleven-year-old son picked it up himself. He found in it the same moral matrix of all his favorite books: indolent and hypocritical “gentlemen,” a virtuous drifter whom they despise for his mean circumstances but who turns out to be far more noble than they, a chaste damsel to be rescued from defilement just in the nick of time—and, in the end, virtue rewarded, when the fatherless hero ends up as the town’s first citizen. The only difference is the religious tincture: in this novel the strutting hypocrites are pillars of the church—until, that is, the hero melodramatically exposes their hypocrisy, introduces the community to the true meaning of faith, eliminates drunkenness and other species of loose morality from the town, and is rewarded by election as their representative in the United States Congress. All this for practicing the biblical injunction that is the volume’s last words: “Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto Me.”
It taught Dutch an important life lesson: Christians could be heroes, too, just like Frank Merriwell and Ragged Dick. A few days after reading it, Ronald Reagan went to his mother and told her he wanted to declare his faith and be baptized, too.
Church offered another attraction: an opportunity to perform. His mother was a ham. A neighbor described her voice, when calling her boys in for dinner, as “theatrical.” The family never missed a “Chautauqua,” the itinerant speaker series that toured Middle America; in Tampico, Jack and Nelle played in amateur theatricals at the opera house. She had changed her name from the apparently more prosaic “Nellie” to “Nelle”—what a friend called her “professional poetry-writing name”; in Dixon, she became one of the town’s favorite “readers”—dramatic reciters of sentimental literature, a favorite parlor diversion of the time. Soon her second son started tagging along on her rounds (perhaps, since she was always off somewhere performing, and ministering, it started just as a way to spend time with her). In 1924 he acted in a Christmas play called The King’s Birthday. Three weeks later, at the church annual meeting, he “convulsed the audience,” the Telegraph reported, “with his one-act dramatic reading.” That summer he traveled with his mother to Tampico. “Each number Mrs. Reagan gave was enthusiastically encored,” a Telegraph reporter they apparently brought in tow recorded; “Ronald Reagan was encored several times.” He was fourteen. The following Easter he led the entire packed sanctuary in the annual sunrise prayer. He began, a biographer wrote, to emulate Nelle’s “mellow, distinctive voice, tinged with a hopeful cadence. When trying to be persuasive, he would lower the volume, speaking ‘barely above a whisper’ to win a confidential intimacy, and he instinctively knew just the right moments to raise that volume and lower the pitch for intensity.”
The stories Ronald Reagan told about his father, meanwhile, are few, abbreviated, and cryptic. They suggest a mercurial, unpredictable presence, rushing, rushing, rushing, appearing out of nowhere to fill a space with his aggression: dashing in at the tail end of his wife’s difficult labor; hurtling forth with news of the Eastland sinking. In one story Dutch is working at his job digging foundations when his father appears as the noon whistle blows. His son has just hoisted a pick in the air: “Without moving the pick another inch, I relaxed my wrists, opened my hands, walked out from under the pick, and headed toward Jack. The pick plunged to earth and stuck in the ground an inch or two from one of my bosses’ toes. As Jack and I walked away together, he said: ‘That was the damnedest exhibition of laziness I’ve ever seen in my life.’ ”
And there the tale ends—in admiration? Consternation? It’s hard to tell.
In another, Jack catches Dutch fighting in the schoolyard, “surrounded by a circle of eggers-on. He stopped the fight, tongue-lashed the crowd—then lifted me a foot in the air with the flat side of his boot. ‘Not because you were fighting,’ he said, ‘but because you weren’t winning.’ ”
And there that story ends—though with an admixture of resentment: “That was my first sample of adult injustice. I had been winning.”
The resentment resurfaces again in the curious tale of the rotten potatoes: “My father bought a carload of second-hand potatoes for personal speculation. My brother and I were ordered to the siding to sort the good potatoes from the bad.” They spent days in that sweltering boxcar, “gingerly gripping tubers that dissolved in the fingers with a dripping squish, emitting an odor worse than that of a decaying corpse.” Here Jack resembles nothing so much as the evil stepfather in the Horatio Alger book Silas Snobden’s Office Boy, who shows up out of nowhere and barks, “I’m your father now, and I mean that you shall treat me as such. When do you get your pay?”
Her mother’s beloved pastor died suddenly. Dutch made his replacement practically his surrogate father. He assures us that his actual father could occasionally show “great sensitivity”—like the time Moon’s senior class decided to wear tuxedos for graduation, and Moon decided not to show up because the family could not afford one. Then Jack invites him on a walk. They end up at Mr. O’Malley’s clothing store, where the haberdasher is waiting to fit him for a tux. It is telling that Moon, the family cynic, did not interpret the gesture as sensitive. He remembered it as Jack trying to save face in public. There is also the fact that sudden, extravagant acts of generosity are a frequent mark of alcoholic patriarchs, making up for equally extravagant failures.
There was little place for his father in Reagan’s heroic scripts, except as a figure to be pitied. In fact, the most famous story he tells of his father feels like a scene straight out of a novel by Harold Wright Bell—whose own father had been an itinerant drunk, too. One day, Reagan related in the opening pages of the memoir he published in 1965, he “came home to find my father flat on his back on the front porch and no one there to lend a hand but me. He was drunk, dead to the world. I stood over him for a minute or two. I wanted to let myself into the house and go to bed and pretend he wasn’t there. Oh, I wasn’t ignorant of his weakness. I don’t know at what age I knew what the occasional absences or the loud voices in the night meant, but up until now my mother, Nelle, or my brother handled the situation and I was a child in bed with the privilege of pretending to sleep.”
There follows the redemption:
“But sometime along the line to each of us, I suppose, must come the first moment of accepting responsibility. If we don’t accept it (and some don’t), then we must just grow older without quite growing up. . . . I bent over him, smelling the sharp odor of whiskey from the speakeasy. I got a fistful of his overcoat. Opening the door, I managed to drag him inside and get him to bed.”
Then, the happily-ever-after:
“In a few days he was the bluff-hearted man I knew and loved and will always remember.”
A good thing his father was passed out drunk, or else Ronald Reagan would not have had the opportunity to come of age.
WHAT HAD LURED JACK TO Dixon in the first place was the promise of a partnership in a fancy new shoe store. “Mr. Reagan, who will act as manager, is an experienced shoe man and also a graduate practipedist,” the Telegraph reported, adding an untruth no doubt provided by the story’s subject, who “had years of experience in many of the larger cities throughout the state.” (Galesburg, Monmouth, and Tampico were all smaller cities.) A historian who studied the terms of the partnership learned that the deal looked more like indentured servitude, in which he was to pay back his ownership share in commissions that always fell short of expectations.
Ronald Reagan would have to find his masculine role models elsewhere. Luckily, as adolescence dawned, a new mass medium was providing any number of real-life Frank Merriwells to emulate. Historians would call it the “Golden Age of Sport”—a time, as its bard, sports-writer Grantland Rice, put it, of “the greatest collection of stars that sport has ever known since the first cave man tackled the mammoth and the aurochs bull.” In the 1920s, the number of people who paid to see college football games doubled (the stadium at Frank Merriwell’s Yale held 75,000 fans). The biggest boxin
g matches were held in stadiums, including the grandest of them all: the “House That Ruth Built,” Yankee Stadium, which opened with an audience of 74,217 when Dutch was twelve.
George Herman Ruth, he of the proliferating nicknames—“Babe,” the “Bambino, “the “Sultan of Swat,” the “Maharaja of Mash”—was a prototype for a new kind of cultural hero: hymned as so larger than life that the year he hit fifty-four home runs, one press-box Aeschylus called the feat “as incredible as the first heavier-than-air flying machine.” Sports poetry became a regular feature in new magazines of mass circulation like Collier’s, where Dutch could have read Grantland Rice’s lyric about a farm boy who played for the nearby University of Illinois—
. . . which of them to tackle
Each rival must decide;
They shift with spectral swiftness
Across the swarded range,
And one of them’s a shadow,
And one of them is Grange.
Writing like that was how the nation learned that what it was observing were not merely boys’ games played by men but world-historic moral clashes revealing the moral secrets of the universe.
Boxing had been an outlaw sport until World War I, when the Army began using it for infantry training. Then the American Legion led a movement to lift state boxing bans as a patriotic duty and a young man who had grown up in hardscrabble mining camps (Babe Ruth had grown up in an orphanage, raised by monks) became champion by beating a fighter fifty-four pounds heavier than he in a fight the New York Tribune called the greatest bout “dating back to days beyond all memory.” Jack Dempsey had hardly lost before 1926, when Gene Tunney felled him before eighty thousand fans at Yankee Stadium. “Honey, I forgot to duck,” Dempsey told his wife—absurdly modest, just like a hero was supposed to be. The Dixon Telegraph had found the contest important enough to run three features on it in one day, not including a wire photograph rushed into the paper before press time captioned, “Tunney Starts Aggressive Attacks in the First Round.” Ronald Reagan, who made the exact same quip about not ducking to his wife after a 1981 assassination attempt, was plainly paying attention.
Sports stars were intimations that actual fleshly human beings, not just storybook heroes, could become superhuman, too. Sportswriting encapsulated a moral vision—the same one Dutch imbibed in his adventure stories. The actual Babe Ruth once unloaded a sack of letters on a rookie with the instructions to “put the letters from the broads in one pile and the ones with the checks in the other. Throw the other junk away, especially the sappy stuff from fans.” The mythic Babe Ruth “spent innumerable hours going out of his way to help youngsters singly and in groups, to take them autographed balls, to help pay their doctors’ bills”—at least in the writing of Grantland Rice, who also wrote, “The true democracy in the United States is not to be found among politicians, our so-called statesmen, our labor union leaders or our capitalists. It is only to be found in sport. . . . Here you are measured by what you are and what you can do. Nothing else counts.” It was sports, he said, more than war, “that help build up clean living, cool heads, stout hearts, and sound judgement under fire.” The heroes it raised up proved it.
There were suspicious circles even then. Scolds at the Saturday Evening Post carped that in the reckoning of a writer like Rice, Babe Ruth could not just show up for a game in St. Louis but instead “arrived after the manner of a human avalanche hurtling on its downward way from the blue Missouri heavens.” They argued that the reason for the hyperbole was commerce: “the sporting news must be played up as glorious and magnificent; the dull, the shoddy, the second-rate in sports must be left unsaid”; to write otherwise “might quench the inherent idealism in sports which is born and bred in every youngster in the United States. But most of all, it would discourage a potential customer.” Hagiography was part of the hustle, wrote W. O. McGeehan of the New York Herald Tribune, who called boxing “the manly art of modified murder”: “they raise false idols. They make heroes of brutes, they make demigods of inconsequential young men without character or true courage, they make saintly characters out of the vicious.” And, said the young liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the Nation, it could not last: “Heroes can thrive only where ignorance reduces history to mythology. They cannot survive the coldly critical temper of modern thought when it is functioning normally, nor can they be worshipped by a generation which has every facility for determining their foibles and analyzing their limitations.”
The scolds lost the contest. Radio came; the first heavyweight championship was broadcast in 1921, the first World Series in 1922. And when Dempsey and Tunney fought their rematch in 1927, Radio Digest claimed Graham McNamee’s broadcast caused 127 radio listeners to have heart attacks. The United Press tripled the size of its sports bureau; the average metropolitan newspaper carried two thousand inches of sports copy a week, twice the amount carried a decade earlier; and the Chicago Tribune, which circulated across the Midwest, ran a column called “My Most Thrilling Moment in Football”—every day.
More important, for a young man in Dixon, local newspapers described contests fought by local “nines” (baseball teams), “gridders” (football players), and “grapplers” (wrestlers) in the exact same melodramatic way—frequently on the front page. Small-town Midwestern boys could become terrestrial gods, too: Dutch learned that from the newspaper every single day.
His first surviving letter (“Smell that meat. Aint it good”) is also the first surviving piece of his sportswriting: “Dixon High school has played 10 games won 8 tied 1 and lost 1 they tied sterling.” He turned the discussion to Sunday School: “our class took the banners for attendance and collection”—“took the banners” is Golden Age sportswriting to a T—before turning back to football again, to a game that was canceled because “there captain got yellow” (sports even then for him was a test of character and mettle), and to a local boy named Garland Waggoner, son of his mother’s beloved, recently deceased, pastor: “monday mom got a letter from Mrs. Waggoner and she said Garland has made the team at Eureka they played Illinois this week.” Garland Waggoner became a football star at Eureka. And, at that, Dutch Reagan’s hero.
Heroes were everywhere, every day, in a small-town Midwestern paper like the Telegraph. It was part of the culture of the 1920s—headlines like ROUND WORLD FLIERS RESUME FLIGHT TOMORROW; UNSUNG HEROES OF U.S. / BOYS IN POSTAL SERVICE FACE UNTOLD HARDSHIPS / BUT ARE NEVER RECOGNIZED IN HONORS; “HUMAN FLY” TO SCALE BANK BUILDING. Charles Lindbergh dipped a wing when he flew over town on the way to an appearance in Peoria.
Such news in the Dixon Telegraph ran beside evidence of a modern world that was becoming increasingly chaotic, confusing, unmoored: “PONZI LEAVES JAIL WITH ONE IDEA—TO ACCUMULATE ANOTHER FORTUNE.” “GIRL BRANDED YOUTH WITH ‘KKK’ HE SAYS.” “GEN. DAWES CONDEMNED LA FOLLETTE / ‘UNTRIED AND DANGEROUS RADICALISM’—MAMMOTH CROWD.” “FIENDISH SLAYER IS HEADING FOR CANADIAN BORDER.” “Swooping down upon the East Davenport Turner Hall Tuesday, prohibition officers and a squad of local police seized more than 4,000 pints of beer, which was dumped.”
Thank God for the glory of sport. How deeply did the canons of sports heroics inform Ronald Reagan’s inner transformation? His son Ron once told a story about his father’s last days, when he could look back at a life in which he had become, by any reasonable reckoning, precisely the kind of man he had dreamed of: first a movie star adored by millions; then the most powerful man in the world, the slayer of evil empires. Weakened by Alzheimer’s disease, his mind reduced to its most primal constituents, he would wake with a start and cry that there was somewhere he needed to be: not a movie set where Bette Davis or George Cukor was waiting for him, nor the White House Situation Room, but a locker room. “There’s a game,” he would murmur; “they’re waiting for me.”
He was always a strong swimmer, and in the spring of 1926 he and Jack talked the operators of the local beach on the Rock River into hiring him as a lifeguard, even though he was only fifteen. He told the st
ories again and again: how he was hired at Lowell Park at eighteen dollars a week (fifteen in other tellings) and all the hamburgers he could eat; how he selflessly guarded the treacherous waters twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for the next seven summers; how his exploits soon proved so heroic that his boss (or in other versions, his father) provided him with an old tree stump in which to carve notches memorializing each life he saved—“the notches multiplied, and the log soon began to look like a flock of woodpeckers had chipped away at it.” “I guess you were notches one, two, and three on my log,” he wrote to a Dixon friend decades later. In 1986, at an Oval Office photo opportunity with the president of the U.S. Lifesaving Association, he told how, one time during college when he went back to the beach to visit with his replacement, he was asked to watch the water while the other man went to the bathroom: “Would you believe I had to go in and make a rescue while he was gone?” He also loosed himself from his religious obligations—beach, not church, was his Sunday duty now.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, right around this time, defined “personality” as “an unbroken series of successful gestures.” This named the accomplishment Dutch Reagan began displaying once summer was over, in high school. A new English teacher came to town, J. B. Frazer, who graded compositions not just for spelling and grammar but for imaginative liveliness. “Before long,” Reagan wrote, “he was asking me to read some of my essays to the class, and when I started getting a few laughs, I began writing with the intention of entertaining the class. I got more laughs and realized I enjoyed it as much as I had those readings at church. For a teenager still carrying around some old feelings of insecurity, the reaction of my classmates was more music to my ears.” Frazer also turned their lowly school into a theater powerhouse. And with his newfound confidence, Ronald Reagan discovered another avocation. By his senior year he never missed the chance to perform—usually star—in the productions. He had a way, a classmate remembered, of “sauntering across the stage,” drawing attention to himself “even when he was not speaking.”
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 7