Reagan's America by Garry Wills

Author:Garry Wills
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504045414
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 26

HICCASP: G-Men II

… professing next the Spie

—Paradise Lost 4.948

Despite his deep engagement in the Hollywood strike that began in 1946, Reagan’s later account of it is confused when not false. This was not because of bad faith, any more than his misjudgment of President Bert Wilson’s policy had been in 1928. His grasp of particulars was sketchy because he thought them unimportant. He quickly isolated a symbolic moral point, and devoted all his energies to enforcing that. Details were left to others. He took Jack Dales with him to the A.F. of L. convention and to his session with Fr. Dunne, as he took Pat Somerset with him to testify before the Kearns Committee—staff men who could supply him with dates and documents. He had to delay his testimony to get a sequence of meetings straightened out by Mr. Somerset.1

This is not surprising. Reagan always maintained that the problems of union jurisdiction were mere quibbles, a pecking at word baskets. And, even more fundamentally, he shied from group expressions of economic interest as somehow unworthy or illegitimate. He acted—he assures us (and, surely, himself)—from a motive outside the petty tangle of competing interests. He sought only peace and equity. He did his foes the favor of thinking that they, too, acted from motives not immediately selfish or petty. They, too, were altruists of a different (and a hateful) dream. They were Communists.

He had evidence, some of it good, for thinking so. It made him careless or contemptuous of the facts disputed by people who did believe in immediate “petty” motives. I have delayed, thus far, consideration of the ulterior motives assigned to his enemies, partly out of deference to those who (like Fr. Dunne and Carey McWilliams) did believe in the immediate issues, but mainly because it is so easy for the grander charge to obscure facts once it has been introduced. That happened in Reagan’s own mind; and those who believed, with him, that Hollywood was on the verge of a Communist takeover will naturally be impatient with nice distinctions between constructing and shifting stage properties on a sound set.

The Red menace was a vivid presence in Southern California from the beginning of this century, and it was intimately linked to union activity, especially after the dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910. The combination of migrant workers and Hollywood exotics always looked explosive to California “natives,” who had arrived the day before yesterday rather than yesterday. The exploitable poor and cosmopolitan radicals, considered dangerous singly, were especially menacing in combination; and the Depression seemed to be inundating the Los Angeles area with both kinds. The introduction of sound in the movies had brought a wave of English actors and German technicians to town, and the Depression had made the newcomers harder to employ. In 1934, half the state’s unemployed—250,000 people—were in Los Angeles County.2 That was the year Irving Thalberg made his propaganda movie of bums and radicals descending on the state to take over if Upton Sinclair won the governor’s office.

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