Big Tent by Mallory Factor

Author:Mallory Factor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780062290670
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-03-17T23:00:00+00:00

THE CONVERSION OF REAGAN

It is important to keep in mind that in his early adult life, Reagan was a self-proclaimed liberal. On occasion he would even describe himself as a former “bleeding-heart liberal.” It may have been the result of his strong religious background; his mother was extremely devout, the kind of lady who would visit the jails, take food to prisoners, and help neighbors, and was constantly engaged in charitable works. Reagan followed that path as a young man. He was inspired by the idea that everyone should be his brother’s keeper. It took him a while to realize that when government is involved, far from helping you be your brother’s keeper, the government often strays outside its own realm, more likely to become your brother’s master and yours, too. That change in his approach to government and politics began to take place in the 1950s.

Even before that, however, his experience in Hollywood started him thinking about the contradictions of liberal philosophy. It began with his election as president of the Screen Actors Guild during the late 1940s. The Screen Actors Guild is one of several unions in Hollywood, including those representing cameramen, stage managers, grips, and other workers in the motion picture industry. Reagan was the leader of SAG at a time when the Communist Party USA, the internal Marxist party in this country, tried to take over the unions as a means of controlling the movies for propaganda purposes. Ronald Reagan led the actors and other union leaders in resisting the communists. It was a bitter conflict, with strikes, intimidation, and violence. But eventually the communist threat was defeated and industrial peace was restored to Hollywood.

That was how Reagan came to appreciate the reality of the threat of communism and began his thinking of how to overcome that threat. That education was invaluable; at the same time that he was encountering communism as a domestic threat, he was reading about the international aspects of communism. It happened that the lawyer for the Screen Actors Guild, a friend of Reagan’s, was an avid researcher and writer on international communism. He would pass along books like The Treaty Trap to Reagan, who would devour this information. Both his reading and his experience were seen to contradict his former liberal views.

In the 1950s, Ronald Reagan became the host of a popular television program called General Electric Theater. Part of his contract required that he visit General Electric plants during the week. Being a movie star—he’d starred by that time in fifty-one movies and was now a television star—he was quite popular. Over the course of ten years, he visited 137 GE plants, and during that period he talked with both workers and managers about their problems and concerns. He also read much of the material that GE was providing to its employees, including educational material on politics and free enterprise. This continued Reagan’s education about communism, socialism, the market system, and the threats to our political and economic systems. It

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