The Only Voice for Real Liberals
The postwar years were defined by labor strife around the country. In Hollywood the battles began before the end of World War II, with violent confrontations outside the gates of the major studios, and continued until 1949. The core conflict was between two unions, the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) and the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU). IATSE had a history of corruption and mob control, but was feared by the studios because it included projectionists and had the power to shut down movie theaters. The smaller CSU was run by a former boxer named Herbert Sorrell, who was accused of being a Communist.
As his acting career sputtered, Reagan was drawn into this battle as a board member of his own union, the Screen Actors Guild. Like most of his colleagues, Reagan wanted the American Federation of Labor to step in and arbitrate the dispute. When the AFL declined to intervene, SAG declared itself officially neutral, but in practice took the side of IATSE and the studios against the CSU. SAG’s decision to cross the CSU picket lines in September 1946, which Reagan advocated, resulted in the worst violence Hollywood had seen. Actors had to be smuggled into the Warner studio via a sewer tunnel or lie on the floor of a bus to avoid flying rocks and bottles. Reagan was filming a beach scene for the romantic drama Night unto Night when he was summoned to a pay phone. An anonymous caller warned him that if he continued urging SAG members to break the strike, goons would disfigure his face with acid. On the advice of the head of studio security, he began carrying a gun.
In December 1946, the SAG membership voted with him by a ten-to-one margin after Reagan made a forceful case against the CSU strike at a meeting at the Hollywood Legion Stadium. Though the aftermath continued into 1947, SAG’s breaking the strike meant the demise of the CSU. Reagan’s leadership in avoiding an interruption in their work and incomes made him popular with his fellow actors, who chose him over Gene Kelly and George Murphy for the presidency of the union a few months later, and reelected him five more times before he stepped down in 1953. Opposing the strike made him equally unpopular with prominent members of the Screen Writers Guild who were sympathetic to the CSU. Reagan’s position led to a decisive break with the Hollywood left, which turned hostile toward him, calling him a scab, a fascist, and a tool of the studios.
At the same time, Reagan saw Communists trying to take over liberal organizations in which he was active, including the American Veterans Committee and the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, known as HICCASP. The fight inside HICCASP paralleled the union battle, separating liberal actors from the more radical writers. By mid-1946, when Reagan agreed to become a member of the executive council, Communist sympathizers were turning it into a front organization. At his first council meeting, Reagan joined with Franklin Roosevelt’s son James Roosevelt, the actress Olivia de Havilland, and others in proposing a statement repudiating communism.
Reagan soon began cooperating with federal authorities in their efforts to identify Hollywood Communists. His brother Neil later boasted about spying on HICCASP for the FBI, but Ronald never gave a full account of his own involvement. As his FBI file later revealed, he and Wyman shared the names of people they suspected to be Communists. When the House Un-American Activities Committee held highly publicized hearings about the motion picture industry in October 1947, Reagan traveled to Washington as a cooperative witness.
He was not, however, a pliant one. Reagan’s performance was agile and, in the context of the times, admirable. He defended Hollywood, arguing that the anticommunist majority had prevented Communist propaganda from reaching the screen. Reagan argued for maintaining democratic procedure and against outlawing the Communist Party, citing Jefferson to the effect that “if the American people know all of the facts they will never make a mistake.” Though he had given names to the FBI, he declined to offer any to HUAC in public. While he acknowledged that there was a small clique inside SAG consistently “following the tactics that we associate with the Communist Party,” he couldn’t prove that any member of it was in fact a Communist. Using a technique that would later become familiar, he deflected unwelcome questioning with a rambling story about being tricked into lending his name for a concert at which the black radical Paul Robeson was to sing.
These were the hearings at which the uncooperative witnesses known as the Hollywood Ten were cited for contempt and sent to jail. As the blacklist emerged in subsequent months, Reagan made efforts to ensure fair play for SAG members. When the producers asked for cooperation with their blacklist, Reagan asked how innocent people would be protected under the policy. Unsatisfied by their answers, he reported back to SAG, criticizing the studios for involving themselves in the political views of their employees. He proposed that SAG make an official statement rejecting not only communism but also what he called the Communist tactics of ignoring majority rule. In 1947, Reagan joined the national board of Americans for Democratic Action, which he called “the only voice for real liberals.” The following year, he campaigned for Harry Truman with a speech attacking congressional Republicans for cutting social spending and passing a tax cut that favored the rich.
But Reagan’s views were in transition in the late 1940s and early 1950s, from New Deal liberal, to liberal anticommunist, to anticommunist conservative. After SAG’s other officers voted down his proposed statement as too sympathetic to communism, he moved to a position of deferring to Congress and cooperating with the producers. His hardening view reflected his additional role as a spokesman for the Motion Picture Industry Council, an organization founded to improve Hollywood’s reputation. Reagan became chairman of the organization in 1949, and it was under MPIC’s auspices that he began making public speeches defending the honor of actors. Most, he contended, were “hard-working, church-going family men and women.” He criticized the Hollywood press for dwelling on gossip and scandal. Actors, he told audiences, were outstanding citizens—more educated than average, less often divorced, and disproportionately engaged in charitable activities. Hollywood, he said, was playing a critical role in the “great ideological struggle” between democracy and communism.
Reagan argued for Hollywood’s ability to police itself, rather than having restrictions imposed upon it. His own role, meanwhile, was evolving from Hollywood advocate to one of its policemen. Reagan soon dropped any concern about protecting the rights of Communists. He now favored declaring the Communist Party illegal on the grounds that it was a foreign conspiracy. His concern was now protecting the rights of noncommunists wrongly accused. That was his rationale for proposing a “voluntary” loyalty oath for SAG members in 1950. The oath didn’t stay voluntary for long. SAG was soon requiring members to sign a statement affirming they had never been Communists or members of a group that sought to overthrow the government.
By 1952, after five years of battling Communists, Reagan was no longer much of a liberal. He was a “Democrat for Eisenhower” and an enthusiast of political hygiene. He wanted an MPIC Patriotic Services Committee to “clear” performers at the request of studios, a move that was blocked by the strong-willed president of the Screen Writers Guild, making the same kinds of arguments Reagan himself had offered in 1947. As his views evolved, Reagan applied his willful myopia to blacklisting. His dodge was that everything was open and voluntary. SAG would not defend performers whose political views had made them unpopular at the box office. If the studios didn’t want to hire such people, that was their business. In this way, Reagan helped enforce the blacklist while maintaining that no such thing existed.
Still, he occupied a middle ground. Even at the height of the Red Scare, Reagan was never a McCarthyite, making political opportunity out of exposing Communists or intentionally blurring the lines that divided liberals and Stalinists. He also took an unusual lesson away from his experience: defeating communism had been fairly easy. “In the ‘no holds barred’ fight here in Hollywood we licked the Communists without ever using the word or pointing a finger at any individual,” he wrote Orvil Dryfoos, the publisher of the New York Times, in a 1962 letter complaining about the newspaper’s characterization of him as a “right-wing oracle.”
The waning of Reagan’s screen career and Jane Wyman’s growing success both contributed to the breakup of his first marriage. After getting out of the army, he built model ships and went off to Lake Arrowhead by himself while his wife devoted herself for six months to The Yearling, a role that would lead to her first Academy Award nomination. With Jane too busy to contemplate another pregnancy, they decided to adopt a son, Michael, in 1945. Jane became pregnant again in early 1947, and in the midst of her pregnancy her husband contracted a serious case of viral pneumonia. While Ron was fighting for his life in one hospital, Jane was recovering from a premature delivery in another. Born three months early, their baby daughter died after only a few hours.
Neither wanted to face the unhappiness. While he was immersing himself in SAG and Hollywood politics, she plunged into another serious role, playing a deaf mute in Johnny Belinda, for which she won an Oscar. When Reagan got back from testifying to HUAC in Washington in October 1947, Wyman kicked him out. She described finding it “exasperating to awake in the middle of the night, prepare for work, and have someone at the breakfast table, newspaper in hand, expounding.” She wasn’t interested in politics and thought her husband didn’t take her views seriously.
Reagan agreed to a divorce, but Jane’s abandonment wounded him deeply. He spent that winter making a film in an England still beset by wartime shortages. He found it uncomfortable and depressing. “Ronnie is not a sophisticated fellow,” Nancy later said, speaking of her husband’s divorce. He hadn’t done anything to deserve rejection, he felt, and didn’t know how to handle it. What Reagan did with his divorce, essentially, was to bury it, alongside other unhappy or embarrassing episodes in his life: his father’s alcoholism, his military deferments, and informing for the FBI.
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Nancy Davis was a twenty-eight-year-old actress recently signed by MGM when she met Ronald Reagan in 1949. Though she had some talent, her ambitions were more focused on having a comfortable family life than her own career. Reagan was at that point an involuntary bachelor residing in the Garden of Allah Hotel, where he’d lived before his marriage. He later described that period as one of spending too much money in nightclubs and waking up with starlets whose names he sometimes couldn’t remember. The opportunity to have sex with many different beautiful women interested him only mildly, perhaps because of the risk of intimacy.
Ron and Nancy dated nonexclusively for more than a year. “It took him a long time, I think, to feel that he could really trust me,” she said. But by late 1950 they were engaged. She took on his interests, such as horseback riding, which she didn’t really enjoy, and SAG, where she put herself forward for the board and ultimately served for ten years. She was pregnant when they got married in March 1952. William Holden, in theory Ron’s closest friend, and in reality not close at all, was his best man at the small ceremony. Patti was born seven months later, followed by Ronald Jr. in 1958.
Reagan’s relationship with Nancy became the only deep one of his adult life. He depended on her unconditional adoration, and the only times he ever professed to be unhappy were when they were apart. People laughed about the worshipful gaze she would fix on him. Her daughter, jealous of the bond, described it as “a mild state of rapture.” But even Nancy fell somewhere short of true intimacy with her husband, whom she described as an emotional brick wall. “You can get just so far to Ronnie, and then something happens,” she told his biographer Lou Cannon. Far more skeptical of people and their motives, she came to play a central role as her husband’s prod, protector, and chief guardian of his image.
To please him, she also became more interested in politics. Nancy’s views echoed those of her conservative Republican stepfather, which were increasingly those of her fiancé as well. Reagan noted “cracks” in his liberalism dating back to the war, when he was bothered by the inefficiency of military bureaucracy. One factor pulling him further away from the Democrats was the social circle Nancy cultivated in Los Angeles. These were wealthy Republicans not involved in the movie business: Walter and Lee Annenberg, Earle and Marion Jorgensen, and Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale.
Reagan shared their objection to high taxes, which dovetailed with his SAG advocacy. Though he never quite hit the top bracket, Reagan was theoretically subject to an 84 percent tax rate on income above two hundred thousand dollars. In fact, stars such as he were able to create “temporary” corporations so they could pay the 25 percent capital gains rate instead. In 1950, President Truman proposed closing that loophole and others, while leaving in place a 20 percent excise tax on movie admissions. Reagan complained the following year in a speech at the Kiwanis International club that “no industry has been picked for such discriminatory taxes as have the individuals in the industry of motion pictures.”
But the more interesting turn in Reagan’s thinking at that time was toward a broader public philosophy, which he first articulated in a 1952 commencement address at William Woods College, a Disciples of Christ women’s school in Fulton, Missouri, the same town where Churchill immortalized the “Iron Curtain.” Entitled “America the Beautiful,” it stands as Reagan’s first fully recorded speech and the first place he developed his idea of American identity.
I, in my own mind, have thought of America as a place in the divine scheme of things that was set aside as a promised land. It was set here and the price of admission was very simple; the means of selection was very simple as to how this land should be populated. Any place in the world and any person from those places; any person with the courage, with the desire to tear up their roots, to strive for freedom, to attempt and dare to live in a strange and foreign place, to travel half across the world was welcome here.… I believe that God in shedding his grace on this country has always in this divine scheme of things kept an eye on our land and guided it as a promised land for those people.
Note the way Reagan turns the Calvinist trope into a Californian one. Instead of the wrathful God requiring inner perfection and judging the behavior of his chosen people, a benevolent deity was now rewarding his favorites by letting them live in the United States. Reagan concludes with the words “this land of ours is the last best hope of man on earth.” His paraphrase of Lincoln’s 1862 message to Congress was a line he would use repeatedly in his political career. It came to embody Reagan’s notion of American exceptionalism: a people defined by their choice to belong to a nation specially favored by God.
Where did he get his idea that the divine had a special relationship with the American people? One possible source is For God and Country, a 1943 propaganda film about army chaplains. In it, Reagan plays a Catholic priest and former college football hero whose best friends are a Protestant chaplain and a Jewish chaplain. He dies heroically in the South Pacific trying to save a wounded comrade of Native American ancestry. But it would be a mistake to dismiss Reagan’s patriotic idealism as Hollywood cliché. It’s more accurate to say that his version of the American story and Hollywood’s version of it shared the same sources in lived experience, popular culture, and political rhetoric.
In his speech at William Woods College, Reagan told several stories that underscored his skill in crafting inspiring fables. The first was about a mysterious man who stood up in Independence Hall during the debate over the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The man urged the delegates to sign because their children “and all the children of all the days to come” would judge them on the basis of what they did that day. “And no one knows to this day, although his words are recorded, who the man was nor could they find anyone who had spoken the words and caused the Declaration to be signed,” Reagan said. Another story, which he told many times subsequently, was about an American B-17 that was hit by German fire while flying back from a bombing run. The gunner was wounded and trapped. After the pilot gave the order to bail out, the last man to leave the plane heard the copilot say, “Never mind, son, we’ll ride it down together” as he held the wounded boy’s hand. “Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously awarded,” Reagan concluded.
Is it even necessary to say that neither of these things happened? They’re sentimental fictions whose origins in Reagan’s consciousness remain obscure. Like many great storytellers, Reagan cared more about the larger point than the literal truth and had minimal interest in the difference. Already in his first recorded speech, he was deducing his facts from his ideas.