by Bob Spitz
McKinzie was a tougher sell. He didn’t fall for Dutch’s “inflated tales” of his football prowess. Coach Mac had scouted all the local high school phenoms and knew Dutch wasn’t one of them. His gridiron legacy in the 1928 Dixon yearbook—“Dutch Reagan took care of his tackle berth in a creditable manner”—said it all. But at six feet and 160 pounds the boy had the right size, with those swimmer’s shoulders, and Eureka was in desperate need of big bodies. They’d gone the past year without winning a single game—through the whole season the football team scored a total of two points. And 1928 would be another “rebuilding” season; they’d take anyone able to compete.
Financial assistance was cobbled together that very afternoon. Sam Harrod came up with something he called a Needy Student Grant—half of the $180 tuition—“created on the fly” in his office. The $270 board would be deferred until later in the next semester. In the meantime, Dutch could share an apartment for $2.50 a week above a commercial building in downtown Eureka with another freshman, Samuel Rode, shaving another $125 or so off his account. There was also a package of work deferments, which included jobs waiting tables, washing dishes in the women’s dormitory, raking leaves, and working at the school’s steam plant. Taken together, this gave Dutch the wherewithal to enroll, along with some breathing room—not much, but enough to get by. He’d not be returning to Dixon.
College—Dutch was going to college, the first in his family to make the leap. It was a personal victory. He’d dreamed about making a better life for himself. He’d worked hard and saved every cent he could. Now he was on his way: a freshman at Eureka College.
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Dutch got swept right into the spirit of things. His class was the first to have an organized orientation, and the program was a humdinger. The guest of honor was the oldest living alumnus of the college, Benjamin Johnson Radford Jr., a member of the Class of 1867 and one of the boys of Company G. An actual Civil War veteran who had known Abraham Lincoln. Dutch made it a point to introduce himself to Radford out by the fabled Recruiting Elm, which still stood in the middle of campus. Afterward, he took part in the Ivy Ceremony, a Eureka tradition for all incoming students. The west face of Burgess Hall—the main building on campus—was covered in ivy taken from the grave of Alexander Campbell, one of the co-founders of the Christian Church. The class of 1900 had planted it and created the ritual that took place each fall, when incoming freshmen are given a sprig from the wall to drop into a community basket, thus investing themselves in Eureka for the next four years. When they graduated, their diplomas would contain another sprig, the symbolic significance being that ivy can be planted anywhere, and graduates with the skills, abilities, and talent can now plant themselves anywhere. Although no one would be so bold as to think in the White House.
What Dutch would remember most about it was the feverish political climate. Much of the conversation that dominated his first day at Eureka—September 20, 1928—concerned the hurricane that had swept through Puerto Rico and South Florida, killing 2,500 migrant workers when the levees at Lake Okeechobee broke. There was plenty of grousing about President Herbert Hoover’s focus on the fate of the sugar crop and factories in the area. What about God’s children? The doctrine of moral sense? The attention paid to developments on the world stage was a revelation to Dutch. The atmosphere was highly charged, passionate. It galvanized him.
His course load, on the other hand, wasn’t that demanding: English lit, French I, rhetoric, history. Most electives he chose were in the combined major of economics and sociology, started only that year and headed by Archibald Charles Gray, who taught all of its classes. Among Eureka’s free-spirited faculty, A. C. Gray stood out as its freest and most spirited. He had studied at Yale with Reinhold Niebuhr and came to Eureka as a professor of Bible studies. Gray, in his travels, had witnessed the demoralizing effects of greed and industrialization on the American worker and felt the system needed a top-down overhaul. Social reform . . . social justice—they were favorite topics that Gray propounded. A former student recalled those opinionated lectures and said, “He couldn’t stand the rampant capitalism of the 1890s, the robber baron control of the railroads, Rockefeller’s monopoly of oil.” Over time, he pressed Eureka’s administration to devote more attention to the evolving study of economics and sociology, convincing them in 1927 to create the department that he would spearhead.
“Daddy” Gray’s courses were a popular draw: he was a dynamic lecturer—some considered him a firebrand—and famously generous when it came to grades. Even so, Dutch got C’s early on in his economics classes. Studying wasn’t exactly his primary concern. He got D’s in a religion lecture called “The Time of Christ” and in a gut course on romantic literature. Instead he gravitated to extracurricular activities. Two weeks into the first semester he joined the school’s weekly newspaper, writing unsigned pieces for The Pegasus about sports and breezy observations on the goings-on around campus. He pledged a fraternity—Tau Kappa Epsilon—and haunted the TKE house, where nightly pinochle games among the “fraters,” as they called one another, stretched well into the morning and Monopoly games lasted all week. And, of course, there was Margaret Cleaver.
Dutch saw Mugs whenever he could. Despite the fact that she had come to Eureka primarily to study, there was still plenty of time to socialize. There were mixers in Pritchard Gymnasium, ice-cream socials on the lawn, and movies at the Jewel Theater a few blocks away. Mugs pledged Delta Zeta sorority, which met in the parlor of a women’s dormitory, where couples sought dark corners and swayed to the music, occasionally sneaking a kiss or two. And on warm nights they participated in a Eureka tradition known as kegging. According to a fellow student of Dutch’s, “The practice might be compared with entertaining a girl in the rear seat of a parked car, but since we had no cars we used the woods.” One routinely saw couples strolling along College Avenue with a blanket and picnic basket in tow, heading toward the cemetery on the far edge of campus. The baskets, however, were strictly a ruse. “A dormitory housemother would make a sandwich and thermos of coffee to legitimize the pretense,” but the chief purpose was some serious necking. Kegging couples would angle for a headstone large enough to throw “a sizable pool of shadow,” providing cover from prying eyes. Dutch and Mugs liked to think their romantic trysts were private, but in eerie moonlit moments, one of the TKE fraters might give out the fraternity whistle, prompting echoes of recognition throughout the cemetery.
Kegging was an innocent kind of hanky-panky just this side of improper. Eureka advocated strict standards of conduct that weighed more on the women, who were repeatedly admonished about decorum. There was a dress code: skirts had to be long enough to ensure that the calf wasn’t exposed, and slips were mandatory under sundresses. A rigid nightly curfew prevailed. Miss Lydia Wampler, the dean of women, “took a head count of the girls in the dormitory before and after each dance.” She also made it a point to speak to everyone as they returned from an outing, leaning in close to determine if there was anything untoward on a student’s breath.
Dutch also found time to pursue his other true love: football. Coach Mac took a hard look at the recruits and determined that Dutch was not as advertised—certainly no Garland Waggoner. He was “slow afoot, average in size, and lacking in many techniques.” Then, of course, there was the nearsightedness to consider. Glasses were out of the question on the playing field, which meant that Dutch couldn’t see a 200-pound nose tackle, let alone a spiraling football. It was hard to envision him making a contribution to the squad. Still, he had a “good attitude” and there was all that enthusiasm to consider. In the end, Mac couldn’t afford to be choosy. He needed to field a team of twenty-seven players, with Dutch the twenty-seventh—and last—student to apply. Process of elimination: he’d take Reagan, but he wasn’t happy about it.
Ralph McKinzie was a difficult man to please. He was what the Reagan biographer Edmund Morris called “an austere, flinty litt
le Okie . . . [who] betrayed the effects of being tackled too often.” But to the Eureka faithful he was “revered and loved,” as close to a god that the Church would sanction. As a Eureka student, he had lettered in every sport throughout all four years of his college career and was elected as halfback to the Midwest All-Time Football Team. In one legendary basketball game against Bradley, Mac scored all fifty-two of Eureka’s points, prompting the newspaper headline “McKinzie Beats Bradley 52–0.” He had heart, but so did Dutch, who was determined to prove to his coach that he deserved to play.
During team drills and practices, Dutch was fodder, a glorified tackling dummy. It was clear that he wasn’t going to play. “Dutch—I put him at end on the fifth string,” Coach Mac recalled, which was football code for riding the bench. He wasn’t even given one of the maroon-and-gold team uniforms: he wore a white practice jersey even during games. Week after week, Dutch sat and stewed. And watched. The way Eureka played against other schools—miserably, always miserably—it seemed senseless, if not cruel, not to give him a shot, especially if one of his teammates needed a blow. The games were exhausting affairs. There was no platooning involved. “You played offense,” a teammate described, “and when the other team got the ball, you played defense.” Dutch could have stepped in for a quarter or two, but he was his own worst enemy. “I told everyone who would listen that the coach didn’t like me,” he said.
Reagan was quickly shining in other arenas, however. Within two months on Eureka’s campus, according to an observer, he “was already known as a good speaker.” He expressed himself regularly in Pegasus columns, and sharper opinions and insight were reserved for bull sessions at the TKE house, where politics was often debated. There, Dutch was in his element. Jack had indoctrinated him in liberal ideology, and he found plenty to rail against in this Republican milieu.
Dutch soon developed a reputation as a debater. He never let his emotions get the best of him—never raised his voice, gestured wildly, or pounded the table. He wasn’t hotheaded, even when he stood his ground in fiery debates against the upperclassmen in the house, brothers who were already involved in the political rumblings on campus. And from the time classes started in 1928, those rumblings had been building. Eureka’s board of trustees was scrambling to manage runaway debt. As the board assessed it, the problem stemmed from overreach. The college offered courses in twenty-eight majors, a luxury for such a small, impoverished school. Rumors had been circulating all semester that certain departments would be scaled back, and several eliminated, along with a number of professors, at the whim of Bert Wilson, the college’s authoritarian president.
Wilson was already a much-despised figure on campus. “Domineering” and “driven by a stern fundamentalism,” he had persisted for years in outlawing dancing, a form of entertainment that he found personally objectionable. He was so dead-set against it that, a year earlier, when students attended an American Legion dance in town, he had them confined to campus afterward and subtracted grade points from their records.
Relations deteriorated further when word got around that the board of trustees, which met in October 1928, had ratified Wilson’s austerity program. Art and home economics were to be dropped entirely from the curriculum, with no recompense for the juniors and seniors already majoring in those programs. Football and basketball were on the bubble. Students, predictably, were up in arms. The TKE fraternity president, Leslie Pierce, felt that the student body had been sold out and began to organize opposition to Wilson’s cutbacks. Pierce didn’t trust the present student government. He knew that two years earlier Bert Wilson had reformed that organization in order to limit its power. At Les Pierce’s bidding, a secretive organization was formed—a student government within the student government—called the Committee of 21. It was without portfolio but its members had plenty of influence—the leaders of fraternities, sororities, and sports teams from every class.
A pivotal moment occurred on November 16, 1928, when the trustees agreed to further cost-cutting by reducing the remaining departments to eight, combining related subjects such as English and rhetoric, and mathematics and physics. This triggered an initiative by the Committee of 21 to circulate a petition calling for Bert Wilson’s resignation. It took less than a week of canvassing to collect 143 signatures, enough to present it to the school’s trustees.
“Ronald W. Reagan” was scrawled clearly across the document, along with every other member of Tau Kappa Epsilon. Whether Dutch was part of the volunteers collecting signatures is unknown, but he was certainly an activist for Wilson’s demise. He felt the board was “cutting out the heart of the college.” On November 23, when it became apparent the board intended to ignore the petition, a committee was formed to explore the possibility of a student strike, with Dutch representing the freshman class.
This was no slapdash action. The students were organized. They met off campus, in both a local bank and at the courthouse, and hired a University of Chicago Law School attorney, Frances Ridgeley, whose father was the state’s attorney for Woodford County and a Eureka alumnus. Both Ridgeleys, father and daughter, had political clout, while the school relied on advice from a small-town lawyer. “The board was outgunned in terms of legal representation,” says Junius Rodriguez, a current Eureka professor and historian. “The students came at them with everything in their arsenal.”
But President Wilson fired back. On November 23, The Pegasus reported that he had intimated to the board that the college might be better suited elsewhere—perhaps in a larger, more diversified city like Springfield. “Eureka was too small a town to provide jobs for students,” he said. There was no daily newspaper to furnish the publicity a college needs. The day of rural towns was over; people were abandoning them in favor of metropolitan areas.
Many of the town’s leading lights sat on Eureka’s alumni committee and the board. In one fell swoop, Wilson had managed to turn them against him. The next day, Bert Wilson resigned.
It was an empty gesture. The following Tuesday, November 27, with the entire student body crammed into the stadium for the afternoon football face-off against rival Illinois College, word started circulating that Wilson’s resignation wasn’t accepted. The trustees had met throughout the day and not only given the president a vote of confidence, but considered reprisals against certain students and faculty responsible for the attack against him. Dutch recalled looking up at the bleachers from his spot on the bench and seeing everyone hidden behind a copy of The Pegasus. “A few copies even showed up on the bench.”
That sealed it. The students were due to leave for Thanksgiving holiday after the game, but those plans were abruptly postponed. The agitation on campus was undeniable. An emergency summit would take place later that night. Dutch, who was set to depart for Dixon with Mugs and Sam Rode, his roommate, headed to the TKE house to await further word.
The sign came just before midnight. Members of the Committee of 21 arranged to have an old college bell toll for fifteen minutes straight, a ferocious sound that cut through the night and could be heard for miles in every direction. Students emptied out of the dorms, many still in their pajamas. Faculty came running from their homes. Within minutes, the chapel was jammed—more than two hundred people sat shoulder to shoulder.
The chapel was a campus touchstone. Sunday services and mandatory convocations were held there, but it doubled as a common room that had been used for years by a literary society. It had high, dark wood-beamed ceilings and a propellerlike chandelier whose glass sconces threw beams of soft light across the clustered student conclave. That night, everyone knew what they were there for. The word “strike” buzzed in all corners of the room. Emotions ran high; the chapel fairly percolated with nervous anticipation while the leadership huddled to one side, drafting the prospective resolution.
Restive voices cut through the hall. It was well after midnight, pushing toward one. To calm the situation, the leaders drafted George Gunn, a music profes
sor who had joined the rally, to sing a medley of old Negro spirituals. It was that kind of surreal atmosphere.
The holdup, on the other hand, was anything but dreamy. The student leaders struggled with how best to deliver the strike resolution they had written. Somebody had to address the crowd in a persuasive enough manner for the students to adopt it by acclamation. But—who? The seniors were graduating; they wouldn’t be effective. It had to be someone who was a dynamic speaker and could captivate the crowd, but also someone perceived as having plenty at stake. A freshman, perhaps, with four years ahead of him.
Finally, Leslie Pierce brought the meeting to order, offering reports from the minutes of the trustees’ meeting. The news wasn’t favorable, as expected; none of their complaints had been given consideration. A procession of student speakers followed in his wake. Then came the moment everyone had been waiting for: Dutch ambled up onto a stage, clutching the resolution. The crowd grew hushed. As he looked across the hall he could make out many familiar faces, among them Dean Harrod, his journalism teacher Professor Wiggins, and A. C. Gray, all of whom had sided with the students. “I’d been told that I should sell the idea so there’d be no doubt of the outcome,” Dutch recalled. Drawing on experience from acting in his mother’s morality plays in Dixon, he mixed old-fashioned preaching with a generous dash of stage presence to deliver the motion that would rock the audience:
We the students of Eureka College, on the twenty-eighth day of November 1928, declare an immediate strike pending the acceptance of President Wilson’s resignation by the board of trustees.
The spectators had waited until 1:45 a.m. to hear those words. Now, according to Dutch, “they came to their feet with a roar,” ratifying the strike by unanimous approval. The room resonated with peals of thunderous applause. He recalled the reaction as “heady wine,” and he drank it in. Howard Short, who was the senior class president, must have felt exonerated. “We put Reagan on because he was the biggest mouth of the freshman class,” he recalled. “He was a cocky s.o.b., a loud talker.” And also, Short knew, effective. Dutch knew how to sell an idea.