Reagan: The Life (5 page)

Reagan had the good luck to be in college during the first two years of the depression but the bad luck to graduate, in June 1932, when conditions were worse than ever. He recalled the Christmas Eve of his senior year; he and Neil were at home when Jack received a special-delivery letter. Jack read the letter and muttered, “
Well, it’s a hell of a Christmas present.” He had lost his job. Reagan sent Nelle money during his last semester to help with the grocery bill, and he resolved anew not to wind up like Jack.

He returned to lifeguarding for his postgraduation summer, but this bought him barely two months. Come autumn, he’d have to compete with the many other unemployed for a permanent job. He knew what he wanted to do; he just couldn’t figure out
how
to do it. His love for movies had only grown, as had his appetite for the applause that kept his anxieties at bay. He had followed the careers of
Tom Mix and
Mary Pickford, and he imagined himself on the screen beside them. “
By my senior year at Eureka, my secret dream to be an actor was firmly planted,” he remembered. But he kept it secret lest his friends and acquaintances consider him egotistically odd. “To say I wanted to be a movie star would have been as eccentric as saying I wanted to go to the moon,” he explained. “If I
had
told anyone I was setting out to be a movie star, they’d have carted me off to an institution.”

To disguise his dream, he charted a path he considered more conventional.
Radio was a newer medium than movies, with the first regular broadcasts postdating the war. But it caught on quickly, and soon radio sets—typically large consoles, often in handsome wood cabinets—had become a standard feature in middle-class households. Sports broadcasts were an early staple of programming; for many Americans the age of radio began when the Radio Corporation of America, or RCA, aired the 1921 heavyweight boxing championship fight between
Jack Dempsey and
Georges Carpentier. Soon the voices of sports announcers were almost as familiar as the faces of Hollywood movie stars.

Reagan spent his teens listening to radio stations broadcasting from Chicago; their signals covered Dixon and much of the rest of northern Illinois. He supposed that sports radio could be a step on his road to
the movies; at least it was in the field of public entertainment. And its announcers enjoyed the fame he sought. So he decided that after his last season as a lifeguard ended, he would try to find a job in radio. He bade farewell to
Margaret Cleaver, who herself was departing to take a teaching job in a distant Illinois town, and headed to Chicago.

He arrived with high hopes. Chicago had lots of stations and, presumably, room for at least one more announcer. Yet several fruitless visits to stations produced nothing. A kindly woman in one of the offices told him why. “
This is the big time,” she said. “No one in the city wants to take a chance on inexperience.” He should go out to smaller cities and towns and interview with stations there. “They can’t afford to compete with us for experienced talent, so they are often willing to give a newcomer a chance.”

Reagan returned to Dixon and talked his father into lending him the family car, a worn Oldsmobile, for a small-town tour. Davenport, Iowa, was just across the Mississippi River from Illinois, seventy-five miles west of Dixon. A series of futile visits to radio stations there made him think the Chicago woman had simply wanted to get rid of him. Eventually, he found himself at station
WOC. The program director told him he had arrived too late; the station had had an opening but had filled it just the day before. Reagan’s frustration overcame his usual politeness. He stalked out of the office saying, in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “
How the hell can you get to be a sports announcer if you can’t even get a job at a radio station?”

Something about Reagan appealed to the program director, who followed him out into the hall.
Peter MacArthur was a blunt-spoken Scotsman with arthritic knees; his two canes clacked on the wooden floor while his brogue demanded, “Hold on, you big bastard!” Reagan stopped. “What was that you said about
sports
announcing?” MacArthur inquired. Reagan replied that he wanted to be a sports announcer someday. “Do you know anything about football?” MacArthur asked. Reagan said he had played in high school and college. MacArthur offered him an audition. He took Reagan to an empty sound studio and put him in front of a microphone. “I’ll be in another room listening. Describe an imaginary football game to me and make me
see
it.”

Reagan hadn’t been expecting this, but he wasn’t going to miss the first opportunity his job search had yielded. He recalled a game Eureka had won in the last seconds. He knew the action and the players’ names, and he launched in. “Here we are in the fourth quarter with Western State University leading Eureka College six to nothing.” He added color:
“Long blue shadows are settling over the field and a chill wind is blowing in through the end of the stadium.” Eureka didn’t have a stadium, only bleachers, but Reagan guessed MacArthur wouldn’t know the difference. He proceeded to the decisive final play. In real life Reagan had missed his assigned block in the secondary, but the ballcarrier got through anyway to score the tying touchdown. In Reagan’s retelling, he obliterated the linebacker, creating the crucial opening for the game-tying score. The extra point sealed the victory. Reagan described the delirious fans, recapped the outcome, and closed: “We return you now to our main studio.”

MacArthur clattered in from the control booth. “Ye did great, ye big SOB,” he said. “Be here Saturday, you’re broadcasting the Iowa-Minnesota Homecoming game. You’ll get $5 and bus fare.”

The game day came. Reagan discovered that he wouldn’t be alone in the press box; a veteran announcer would share the duties. Reagan called the first quarter, the other man the second, Reagan the third. He expected to hand off the microphone again for the fourth quarter, but MacArthur phoned Reagan’s partner and told him to let the new fellow finish. Reagan concluded that he had passed his live test.

MacArthur offered him $10 a game for Iowa’s three remaining home games. Reagan was thrilled to accept and delighted to be a high-profile sports announcer. The Big Ten was the best football conference in the country, and to call its games was a remarkable feat for someone so new to the business.

Unfortunately, his job terminated with the season’s end. Basketball and other winter sports had nothing like football’s following, and the station had no work for him. MacArthur said he’d keep him in mind for the following season, but he couldn’t make any promises.

R
EAGAN COULD NOT
have lost his job at a bleaker time. The depression had prompted thousands of jobless, often homeless veterans of the war to march to Washington to petition for early payment of the pension they had been promised, lest they expire before they reached the statutory age.
Herbert Hoover, the self-made millionaire whose precrash election had seemed confirmation of the business-oriented policies of that Republican era, grew alarmed at their presence. He envisioned a Bolshevik revolution toppling America’s capitalist democracy, and he ordered the army to drive the petitioners away. The operation, headed by Chief of Staff
Douglas MacArthur, who shared Hoover’s red fears, proved a tragic fiasco
as the soldiers scattered the pitiful vets, burned their makeshift shelters and many of their meager belongings, and, in the process, killed the baby daughter of one of the protesters. The country recoiled at Hoover’s overreaction;
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic nominee for president, turned to his friend
Felix Frankfurter and declared, “
Well, Felix, this will elect me.”

It, and the deepening depression, did just that. Reagan was one of the twenty-three million Americans who in November 1932 voted for Roosevelt, and with them and more than a few of the sixteen million who voted for Hoover, he looked to the new president to stanch the economy’s bleeding. But Roosevelt wouldn’t be inaugurated until four months after the election, as inaugurations occurred in March in those days, and it wasn’t clear the country could survive until then. The banking system staggered under the weight of stock losses and bad loans; its distress caused depositors to fear for the security of their deposits. Few deposits were insured, and the depositors raced to withdraw their funds before the banks collapsed. These “runs” precipitated the very result the depositors feared; dozens, then scores, then hundreds and thousands of banks closed their doors. The entire financial structure of the United States teetered at the edge of an abyss.

As if the moment weren’t fraught enough, Roosevelt was nearly assassinated just weeks before he was to take his inaugural oath. The deranged gunman missed Roosevelt but killed a member of his traveling party, the mayor of Chicago. The incident intimated that Hoover had been right in declaring democracy in danger, if perhaps wrong about the direction from which the danger came.

Reagan didn’t record his reaction to Roosevelt’s instantly famous inaugural address, with its reassurance that America had nothing to fear but fear itself. Nor did he comment directly on the initial measures Roosevelt adopted to stem the bank panic. But after Congress, convened in special session at Roosevelt’s summons, rubber-stamped an emergency banking bill sent from the White House to the Capitol, Reagan listened with rapt attention as Roosevelt explained the measure to the American people. A radio man himself, Reagan heard the master radio performer of his political generation deliver the first of what came to be called
Fireside Chats. Reagan listened and learned. “
His strong, gentle, confident voice resonated across the nation with an eloquence that brought comfort and resilience to a nation caught up in a storm and reassured us that we could lick any problem,” Reagan recalled. “I will never forget him for that.”

Roosevelt’s bold action and calming words saved the banks, and the president turned to the other challenges facing the country. He sent fifteen major bills to Congress during the hundred days of the special session, and the legislature approved every one. The aim of the
New Deal, as Roosevelt’s program was called, was relief for suffering individuals, recovery for the economy, and reform to prevent a recurrence of the depression. The sum was an enormous expansion of government authority over the private sector and of government responsibility for the welfare of the American people.

Conservative Republicans were appalled. The virtues of individual initiative and personal responsibility that had formed the bedrock of the republic were in danger, they said. American self-reliance had long held Leviathan, the insatiable beast of big government, at bay. But in the frenzy of the moment the Democrats had unchained the beast, whose appetite would grow with the eating.

Some Democrats were sobered, too. Southern conservatives, Democrats by virtue of bad memories of the Civil War and Reconstruction, chafed at the takeover of the party of Jefferson and Jackson—skeptics of big government both—by its northeastern liberal wing. For the moment they heeded the demands of party solidarity, but they remained unconvinced of the New Deal’s virtues.

Yet Reagan was in awe. The poor kid from the struggling family was thrilled that a patrician like Roosevelt had taken the part of ordinary people. “
I soon idolized FDR,” Reagan remembered. “He’d entered the White House facing a national emergency as grim as any the country has ever faced and, acting quickly, he had implemented a plan of action to deal with the crisis.”

T
HE
R
EAGAN HOUSEHOLD
benefited directly from the New Deal. Democrats in Dixon weren’t numerous, and Jack Reagan was one of the most visible. He was still unemployed and for this reason was delighted to accept a job helping administer federal relief. Reagan visited Jack’s office when he was in town. “
I was shocked to see the fathers of many of my schoolmates waiting in line for handouts—men I had known most of my life, who had had jobs I’d thought were as permanent as the city itself,” he remarked later.

Reagan’s own unemployment was of shorter duration than that of many of Jack’s clients. In early 1933, Pete MacArthur at
WOC tele
phoned to say that one of his regular announcers had quit; did Reagan want the job? Reagan said he did, and he left for Davenport the next day.

He discovered that regular programs posed a different challenge than football games. At the games, Reagan chiefly had to report. He elaborated and embellished, to be sure, but the story unfolded in front of him. In the regular programs, by contrast, he had to create stories. He played recorded music and read advertisements, but he had to craft a narrative that held the disparate parts of the show together. He had to convey his personality and develop a rapport with listeners.

It didn’t come easily. By his own admission he was stiff and uncomfortable. He nearly got fired, but the man he was supposed to train as his replacement had second thoughts about entering the entertainment world; he thought his current job, teaching, provided greater security. Reagan got a second chance. He asked for and received coaching to improve his on-air performance, and he gradually learned to feel more comfortable in front of the microphone.

Meanwhile, though, the parent company of WOC decided to consolidate operations and fold WOC into a more powerful station, WHO, in Des Moines. Reagan and the other Davenport staffers were told they could keep their jobs if they were willing to move to Des Moines.

Most were, including Reagan. The depression still blighted the land, notwithstanding Roosevelt’s efforts at relief and recovery, but the radio industry surged forward. The Davenport station had broadcast at 1,000 watts, limiting its range to the environs of Davenport; the Des Moines station broadcast at 50,000 watts, sending its signal across much of the Midwest—and at night, when the signals bounced off the ionosphere, across the country. One result of the switch to more powerful transmitters was the industry consolidation Reagan experienced; another was the deeper penetration of radio into American homes and American lives. Radio stations broadcast music, with bands and orchestras performing live in radio studios. They broadcast drama, from highbrow plays by distinguished playwrights to the popular detective series
The Shadow
and the comedy
Amos ’n’ Andy
.