Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  The Democratic party had virtually fallen apart since Harding’s election in 1920. It no longer had either a national headquarters or a publication of its own and was laboring under a huge stack of unpaid bills. Its convention opened in Houston and Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered the nominating speech, placing the name of the governor of New York, Alfred Emanuel Smith, before the delegates. Smith also won on the first ballot. He had a reputation for decisive action and possessed a winning personality—”congenial, straightforward, unassuming, a wonderful teller of jokes, a man you would enjoy having a drink with.” The fact that he had attacked the Volstead Act (antagonizing Prohibitionists nationwide) set well with Jack. More important, Smith was a Catholic, which might have put Jack in his corner but was more damaging to his chances of winning than his stand on Prohibition.

  Jack was caught up in the fervor of the 1928 election. The old car sported Al Smith banners. Dutch was putting in too many hours at Lowell Park to help much with the campaigning. But he did demonstrate against outside workers being brought in to labor on the farms or in the local factories by marching with a group over the Galena Street bridge with protest signs. When Reagan was running for governor of California, a Time correspondent badgered him into explaining his sudden political emergence. “You have to start with the small-town beginnings,” he explained. “You’re part of everything that goes on.… In a small town you can’t stand on the sidelines and let somebody else do what needs doing; you can’t coast along on someone else’s opinions. That really is how I became an activist. I felt I had to take a stand on all the controversial issues of the day, there was a sense of urgency about getting involved.”

  The urgency prodding him in the summer of 1928 was the matter of how he would one day make a living. Nelle might privately have wished he would go into the clergy, but she never placed pressure upon him. Moon wasn’t setting the world on fire at the Medusa Cement Plant. Jack’s business venture had turned into nothing more than a poor-paying job. There never were any commissions to discount for his “share.”

  In the spring of 1928, Dutch had made some money caddying at the club. After being deserted for so many years, Hazelwood had been sold to Charles Walgreen, a Chicago pharmacist who had parlayed his unique talent as a druggist and entrepreneur into a large national chain of drugstores that gave customers cut-rate prices on drugs and beauty products.* Walgreen was in and out of Dixon often during this time, arranging for the reconstruction of the one habitable building on the estate, the old log cabin that had once been a gatekeeper’s lodge. He came to Dixon to supervise the work, bringing with him friends like Commander Byrd (who had just announced his plan for a flight to the South Pole), who presaged the future glories of Hazelwood. (Mrs. Walgreen recalled how during this time Dutch came to a picnic she and her husband gave for the caddies at the end of the summer, and Reagan added to this memory: “I was stretched out in a hammock and Mrs. Walgreen herself brought me a plate of food. That was my idea of being King.”) Between his work at the club and at Lowell Park, Dutch had saved four hundred dollars, which could not have seen him through college even if he had not felt obligated to help out at home.

  This was an age of heroes, men like Byrd, Lindbergh and the leading sports figures of the day. Dutch fervently admired a young man, Garland Waggoner, son of the minister whom the Reverend Cleaver had replaced. Six years earlier, Waggoner had been South Dixon High School’s star fullback and captain, and then had gone on to Eureka College (a Christian Church school) to become a football star. Dutch thought he would like to go to Eureka (about one hundred miles from Dixon). His dream was to make the football varsity team and to equal Waggoner’s success. Fundamentally a theological school, Eureka also offered other degrees. Jack talked to him about the possibility of becoming a salesman—he certainly had the gift of gab it required. But sports interested him the most. He loved football. Sure, he was nearsighted and it was tough to wear glasses on the football field. Yet he had a strong belief in himself, that he could—with God’s help—overcome this obstacle.

  The Reverend Cleaver had approved Margaret’s desire to attend Eureka (her sister Helen was already there and her older sister was a graduate), yet an additional incentive for Dutch, who could not conceive of being parted from her. His one obstacle was money. The tuition was $180 a year, which did not include living expenses. By the end of the summer he had not yet enrolled for lack of funds.

  One day he piled into Margaret’s coupe with its rumble seat packed with her possessions and drove with her to Eureka where she was registering for classes. Skirts barely touched the kneecaps that summer, but hers fell demurely far below. Margaret possessed a sharp mind and a good sense of humor. Her figure was trim, her dark eyes and hair entrancing. She talked about Eureka as a beginning, not an end. She wanted to see the world—France and the Far East. She had taken a primary course in French and liked to use the little that she knew in conversation. Being the youngest in her family had given her a special security to go with her natural pride, poise and spunkiness. Although Dutch identified with him, the Reverend Cleaver was an awesome parental figure, but Margaret had a way of getting around him.

  The road was hot and dusty. It was September and the fields were still high. They passed Chautauqua, where both senior high school classes of Dixon had held their joint graduations. Somehow Dutch knew he would not come back without at least a promise of his dream in hand. He had spoken at graduation (not as valedictorian but as class president), quoting John 10:10: “I have come in order that they have life in all its abundance.” He had an appointment with Dean S. G. Harrod when they arrived at Eureka, and arrangements had been made for him to stay the night at the Tau Kappa Epsilon (TEKE) House, one of the fraternities on campus. He would have to talk the Dean into giving him an athletic scholarship and secure work, for he did not intend to take the Greyhound bus back to Dixon in the morning.

  * These were H. F. Walder, Walter Smith and Dement Schuller, who repeated the march on July 1, 1979—sixty years later—when a new concrete-and-steel arch (the second of these) had been built to replace the one before.

  * The grandfather of Reagan’s future Lowell Park friend Bill Thompson,

  † Reagan claims the family kept a penny behind one of the loose tiles of this fireplace so that they might never be “penniless.” When they later moved, he took the penny with him and has kept it since as a lucky charm.

  * Reagan wrote: “The Depression made sure that day would never dawn.’

  * In 1966, in his autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me? (written with Robert C. Hubler), Reagan (referring to the glasses) wrote, “I hate them to this day.” As early as 1947, he was fitted with contact lenses. During the years that followed, he seldom was seen in public wearing glasses. The horn-rimmed spectacles he had once hated reappeared in 1984 when he began wearing them while giving speeches.

  * Dixon Library issued numbers instead of cards at that time. Number 3695 was given to Ronald Wilson Reagan on December 20, 1921.

  † By the 1940s the black population in Dixon grew to about four hundred.

  * The five fundamentals of belief were: “The infallibility of the Bible; the virgin birth of Christ; the Resurrection; that Christ died to atone for the sins of the world; and the Second Coming.”

  † Reagan continued to tithe 10 percent of his earnings directly to the Hollywood-Beverly Christian Church during his Warner Brothers years. In 1986, the church’s pastor, Benjamin H. Moore, stated, “The President still contributes weekly to the church.”

  * The Disciples movement does not believe in infant baptism.

  * The Christian Church encourages women in the ministry and had two women ministers at the time who were well known for the flamboyance of their millinery choices. At meetings their appearance was referred to as “the war of the hats.”

  * Dutch started high school at South Dixon but transferred to North Dixon his sophomore year. Sometimes he referred to his activities at South Dixon because the two schools w
ere not actually autonomous; they shared some sports teams, graduation, etc.

  * In 1966, now governor of California, Reagan wrote McReynolds: “My memory [sic] sharp and clear… of that young Dixon High School star who had the courage to tell the referee ‘yes’ he had illegally held on a block. The price was a 15 yard penalty, but the example set was well worth it.”

  * Reagan wrote in his autobiography that he received fifteen dollars, but Mrs. Ruth Graybill adamantly maintains that it was eighteen dollars.

  * Elizabeth Drew was a camera bug and shot pictures whenever she could. Cover photograph of Reagan as a lifeguard was taken by her.

  * Later to be excepted when Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for a third term in 1940, and then a fourth term in 1944.

  * Walgreen’s son-in-law, Justin Dart, claimed his father-in-law “made a million dollars during Prohibition selling prescription drugs with a high alcoholic content.”

  MAC’S

  GOLDEN

  TORNADOES

  “Don’t forget who you are and where you come from, and they can do nothing to harm you.”

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD,

  “The Diamond As Big As the Ritz”

  4

  EUREKA, THE VERY SOUND OF THE NAME CONJURES images of Greek gods and glittering gold seen for the first time through the reddened but gleaming eyes of a nearly demented old prospector or the likes of the Blue brothers. The Greek physicist Archimedes, upon his discovery (made while he was taking a bath) that gold, because of its density, displaces less water than an equal weight of silver, streaked naked through the streets shouting, “Eureka! [I have found it!]” The old prospector in Northern California supposedly also exclaimed “Eureka!” as the gold glimmered from the battered bottom of his prospecting pan—and so a town was named. The town of Eureka, Illinois, was, on the other hand, named for the school that was opened there in September 1855, the final dream of two men, Ben Major and Asa Starbuck Fisher. Their discovery was not the usual gold men lusted for, but the golden elixir of education combined with the teaching of the highest spiritual values.

  Ben Major was born in Kentucky. A successful farmer and a medical practitioner, he was convinced the system of slavery was against God’s word. In 1830, he determined to liberate the thirty slaves he had inherited from his father. Realizing they would not be prepared for such a challenge, he spent late evenings teaching them to read and write. At first, his lessons were resisted. But finally, Major’s teaching skills succeeded. When he felt his charges were able to cope with freedom, he left his farm in their care and, alone on horseback, set out in the fall of 1831 to find a home in some free state for himself and his immediate family. After cutting through the forbidding prairie land to the southeasterly section of Illinois, he reached Walnut Grove, a small settlement on the banks of the clear, rushing waters of Walnut Creek, founded only six years earlier by a group of about fifty people from Kentucky, Virginia and Ohio, refugees also from modes of life based on the ownership and exploitation of slaves. The majority were followers of Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone, who preached (as did the subsequent Christian Church) a release from divisive denominational creeds and a unity of believers in Jesus as Christ. Their theology was ideally suited to the frontier because it encouraged the spirit of the community.

  The Walnut Grove settlers had built log cabins from the straight-grained wood of the huge walnut trees that dominated their site. In the center of their settlement an old spring gave abundant cool water. Strangers passing through were always welcome to refresh themselves and their horses. The community spirit made a strong impression on Ben Major, and he returned to Kentucky with a plan that was to take three and a half years—to send his slaves as free men and women to West Africa, and then to move his family to the Illinois settlement. This involved transporting the black people to New York and then arranging passage for them to Liberia, where a man named Jehudi Ashmus and the American Colonization Society had succeeded in settling nearly fifteen thousand American freed slaves.* In 1835, Major returned with his wife and five children to Walnut Grove, where he first built a two-room log cabin and two years later a fine frame house. The children were taught at home. In the summer of 1848, Major wrote his nephew John Lindsay, a student at Bethany College, to inquire if he knew a fellow student who might consider coming to teach Walnut Grove’s school-age boys and girls (who numbered thirty-seven by then). Classes were to be held in his home until a schoolhouse could be built. The man Lindsay recommended for the post was Asa Starbuck Fisher.

  Fisher had been raised on a farm in Dillon Settlement in central Illinois, considered to be the Wild West at that time. He had taken a course of study at Knox Manual Labor Institute in Galesburg, then a small prairie village, and then taught in a small school in Marshall County, Illinois, for two years following his graduation.

  The elders of Walnut Grove agreed to pay Fisher three hundred dollars for ten months’ work. At the end of the first year, pleased at the caliber of the man they had hired as a teacher, they raised money for a small schoolhouse, which was named Walnut Grove Seminary. An addition was completed in December 1849, when the school was renamed Walnut Grove Academy. The same Christian attitudes and community spirit that had drawn Major to the settlement were the basic tenets of the school. The word spread and Walnut Grove grew.

  One day in the spring of 1850, so the story goes, Major and Fisher were walking along the road leading eastward from the school. Major stopped as they neared the edge of the settlement and, turning westwardly, pointed to a slope of land dense with woods. “On that rise,” he is claimed to have said, “we [the elders] intend to build a college, and we want you to be President.” Fisher did not reply “Eureka!” and race streaking naked through the timberland shrieking the word. Instead, according to the 1894 History of Eureka College, he replied in a suitably humble if loquacious Christian manner, “I am not ambitious for such a position, and possibly have not the requisite qualifications, but I am strongly in sympathy with the enterprise, and to the extent of my power will aid the brethren to push forward the noble work they have so generously undertaken.”

  Three years later Major died. Walnut Grove Academy continued through 1854-55, when on February 6 of that year it was chartered Eureka College.* Fisher was named the school’s first president.

  Dedicated to helping the economically poor student, the college held tuition prices as low as possible. In 1878, their catalog announced, “We intend to make Eureka College the cheapest school in this or any other state.” By 1894, the descriptive word had been upgraded to “least expensive.” Children of Christian Church ministers (like Margaret Cleaver) received grants, and those studying for the ministry were given education free of tuition. The school maintained ties with the Christian Church. From the beginning of its history, only about 20 percent of the student body was studying for the ministry, but the 1871 catalog stated: “The Bible is a regular textbook, and every student may prepare and recite a lesson in it at least once a week. While everything of a sectarian or denominational tendency is conscientiously excluded, it is designed to enforce the sublime morality of the Divine Volume.” Philosophical aims did not alter over the years. Teaching a Christian way of life was, and remained, the main objective. The 1936 catalog stated: “Religious values shall be found in courses of study, in the work plan and in recreational activities. The development of religious attitudes… is essential.”

  Dutch felt perfectly comfortable in a school with strong church ties. However, if he received a scholarship, he planned to work for degrees in social science and economics. Jack’s lack of business acumen had alerted Dutch to his own need to succeed on this score. His high school grades had not been spectacular (a low B average). Because he did not plan to go into the ministry or the teaching of religion, his chances of securing financial aid were slim. His only hope was to seek an athletic scholarship.

  The walnut trees had all but vanished by 1928, when Dutch and Margaret drove into Eureka. Unlike Dixon, the land ro
se into soft hills, and verdant pastures marked the spot where they turned off the narrow highway onto the main street. The small town of eighteen hundred people was so integrated into the college that their houses and lawns all seemed an extension of it. There were not enough cars for the establishment of traffic signals. No Bootleggers’ Knob either. The school sat on the heavily forested rise exactly where Ben Major had envisioned it would one day be built. Elm trees bordered the wide green lawns of the five redbrick ivy-covered buildings that were arranged in a semicircle (Burgess Hall, Administration Building, the chapel, Pritchard Hall and Vennum Science Hall).

  “I fell head over heels in love with Eureka,” Reagan later wrote. “It seemed to me then, as I walked up the path, to be another home. I wanted to get into that school so badly that it hurt when I thought about it.”

  Dean Samuel Harrod was a heavyset, bespectacled man who looked as though he had outgrown the size of his glasses and of his suit. Dutch knew he would be accepted as a student. All that was required was a high school diploma. The tuition was the problem. At that time, small schools (Eureka had an enrollment of 220 students) competed fiercely for football talent. The last decade had seen college enrollments more than double in most universities, and football had become a favorite college sport as well as a big business. Stadiums of monster size were being constructed—Ohio State had a 64,000-seater, Yale a bowl that held 75,000. Few schools could ignore the revenue football brought to them. A star player and a winning team drew students. Eureka’s elders considered football with some disdain. The school’s real commitment was to teaching a Christian doctrine, not to athletics. But without a competitive football team, a university lost scores of prospective good students—and Christians.