Reagan: The Life Read Online Free Page A

inflicting on itself. Western civilization did survive, but barely, and American exceptionalism turned inward as it became clear that the world wasn’t ready for America’s regenerative leadership. Young Reagan adopted the widely held belief that Wilson had made a terrible misjudgment in leading America to war. Recalling the fate of the troopshe’d cheered off to battle, he reflected, “I think the realization that some of those boys to whom I’d waved on the troop train later died on European soil made me an isolationist for a long time.”
    The reaction against the Wilsonian project included a rejection of the liberalism that had carried Wilson into office. The 1920s were the most conservative decade in memory. A ban on alcohol was written into the Constitution; state legislatures outlawed the teaching ofevolution; a “red scare” swept the land in the wake of the foreign revolutions the world war spawned; xenophobia inspired a drastic curtailment of immigration and contributed to the revival of theKu Klux Klan. After nearly two decades during which the powers of government had consistently grown, Americans turned away from government toward the private sector. “The chief business of America is business,”Calvin Coolidge said, and most of his compatriots agreed.
    It helped Coolidge’s case that American business thrived during the 1920s. Theautomobile industry became a mainstay of the industrial sector afterGeneral Motors introduced annual model changes that caused motorists to view their vehicles as assertions of identity rather than mere instruments of locomotion.Electrical appliances entered millions of households, transforming daily life and creating the perception of needs where none had existed before. Real estate and housing boomed, especially in Florida and other sunny climes. Thestock market soared, quadrupling in value and creating millionaires too many to count.
    Yet the wealth wasn’t spread evenly. The cities flourished, but the farm sector languished. Commodity prices never regained their wartime levels, though farmers continued to hope they would. And when the farmers planted according to their hopes, overproduction and low prices became chronic.
    Y OUNG R EAGAN DIDN ’ T analyze the nation’s economy, but he felt the effects of the farm squeeze. While his father’s line of work was selling shoes, not corn or hogs, when the farmers who lived near Dixon and might have been Jack Reagan’s customers couldn’t sell their corn and hogs, they didn’t buy his shoes. Neil and Dutch never went hungry, but they knew the family was living month to month. They worked when they could, Dutch most regularly as a lifeguard in Dixon’s riverside Lowell Park. He liked the job, not least because it conferred a certain stature. He wore a shirt with “Life Guard” emblazoned on the chest and exercised authorityover his waterfront domain. He afterward boasted of saving seventy-seven people in several summers on the job, although more than a few of these denied needing rescue. “ ‘I would have been fine if you’d let me alone,’ was their theme,” Reagan remarked later. “ ‘You made a fool out of me trying to make a hero out of yourself.’ ” But whatever the rescue count, which he meticulously notched in a tree branch by the river, he carried an important responsibility on his broadening shoulders. And his paycheck helped cover the family bills.
    Yet lifeguarding wasn’t a career, or even a year-round job. As high school graduation approached, he had to consider alternatives. College in the 1920s was the preserve of the few; neither of his parents had attended college, nor had Neil made a start. But a girl in his class had her sights on college, and he had his sights on her.Margaret Cleaver was the daughter of the minister of the church Reagan attended with Nelle. She was pert and pretty and less enamored of him than he was of her. “She was (strange as it sounds) grown up enough to know we