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1. 1 2018-08-15T07:48:35-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5 1960s Phil Ethington 1 Decadal Tag vistag 2018-08-15T07:48:36-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5

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• 1 2018-07-23T21:32:42-07:00 The Rise of Ronald Reagan, the Politician, 1940s-1980s 9 plain 2021-04-20T12:30:09-07:00 Ronald Reagan found his first political network in the Hollywood movie industry itself in the postwar years.  The most influential was the song-and-dance man George Murphy, who starred in  style="font-size: 13px;">Broadway Melody of 1938,  style="font-size: 13px;">Broadway Melody of 1940< and Busby Berkeley's For Me and My Gal< (1942).  Murphy preceded Ronald Reagan as President of the Screen Actor's Guild from 1944-1946. Reagan served from 1947-1953, the very peak years of of the anti-communist repression in the United States.  Reagan, as SAG President, helped to enforce the Blacklist, something he always denied.  Reagan's last film was The Killers (1964), a crime thriller co-starring Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin.  In this last film Reagan still plays the leader, but in a twist that defied the pattern of his entire career, he plays an underworld crime boss.  We might read this as a portent that his sunny, simplistic good-versus-evil persona as Governor Reagan and President Reagan, would also provide a mask for the Reagan Administration's CIA, which worked the real underworld to defy US and international laws.  Or that there was always an iron-fisted, repressive side of Reagan, as when he managed the Blacklist from 1947-1954.
  With his decades of acting the part of leaders, war heroes, and law enforcement officials, Reagan, once he set his mind  to it in teh fateful year of 1964, easily assumed leadership of the grass-roots plain-folk populism of the Goldwater movement. But primarily which he gave, on 27 October--the week before the election--what came to be known as "The Speech."  The Speech (actually titled "A Time for Choosing") became a landmark in American political oratory, showcasing his ability to frame the negatives of the New Right (anti-Civil Rights; anti-Abortion; Anti-Communism; Anti-government regulation) as positives: (Color-Blind Egalitarianism; Pro-Life; Free Enterprise; Jacksonian freedom from regulation).  Unlike Goldwater, for whom The Speech was given, and equally unlike Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan presented the New Right in an optimistic vision of the future of humankind.  Reaganism is this concoction: A hard-right turn toward global military domination, militarization of urban policing, empowerment of corporations; morally-repressive religious regulation of behavior; wrapped in a cheerful, Disney-esque patriotism, a mass-mediated image of back-to-basics, plain-folk democratic populism and small-government western-frontier rural nostalgia.
  
  By the time Reagan made that definitive leap, in 1964, from actor-propagandist to actor-politician, he had already made friends with representatives of Southern California's leading industries: oil and aerospace. Representing the riches of oil when Reagan launched his political career was Henry Salvatore, his most pivotal political backer, who made millions in petroleum exploration, with the company he had founded in 1933, Western Geophysical. When Salvatore sold Western Geophysical to Litton Industries in 1960 he turned nearly full-time to politics. A founding shareholder in William F. Buckley's National Review, he was also a major patron of the free-enterprise think-tank, The Heritage Foundation.  Salvatori was Ronald Reagan's campaign finance director for the 1966 run for Governor, and in 1969 he managed Sam Yorty's re-election campaign for LA Mayor against African-American challenger Tom Bradley in that race-charged campaign.Note
  
  Another pillar of Reagan's power in California was Caspar "Cap" Weinberger, a major figure in the California Republican Party.  Weinberger was a key architect of Reaganism, from international to domestic policy.  Weinberger, a San Franciscan naive educated at Harvard College and Harvrad Law School, then Cambridge, served on General MacArthur's intelligence staff. Politically ambitious, Weinberger was elected to the California State Assembly in the 1950s, Reagan appointed him Director of the California State Department of Finance, where from *** to *** he attempted to execute Reagan's promise to shrink government. That led to his appointments under Presidents' Nixon and Ford at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where he won the nickname "Cap the Knife."
  
  After spending five years as Vice President of Bechtel, the world's largest contractor of nuclear power plants, Weinberger returned in 1981 to a political career as President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Defense, where he masterminded the Reagan military buildup and the "Reagan Doctrine" strategy of "Rollback" of territory held by the Communist Bloc.  By championing the advanced aerospace technologies in his command of the militaristic Reagan budget, Weinberger was the perfect Defense Secretary for Southern California, which dominated military contracting in the 1980s.
  
  With spymaster William P. Casey at the helm of the CIA, Reagan's international policy was highly indebted to the Nixon-Kissinger world system, and was easily as bellicose.  Giant military-industrials, led by Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas​, got a fresh blood transfusion to expand their production of advanced weapons systems like the Stealth bombers and fighters.   
  
  Regarding mass constituencies of voters, Ronald Reagan exceeded Nixon's accomplishment in American electoral re-alignment.  Reagan, with his performed Christian piety (noting that he was never a churchgoer) and his alignment on moral policies, made a happy home in his administration for the Religious Right, which came of political age a few years after Nixon's resignation. Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, and Pentacostals came together in 1979 under the leadership of Jerry Falwell to form the Moral Majority.  While a great base of evangelical populism had been inscribed into  Southern California since the 1930s, the movement as a whole was also very southern.  Falwell's home hose of worship, the Thomas Road Church; his Lynchburg Christian Academy; and his Liberty University, were based in Virginia, while Pat Robertson, the leading Televangelist for the Religious Right, was based in Dallas, Texas.  Reagan, himself effectively channeled the movement from its centroid in Orange County, and Southern California environs, through the Sunbelt/Gunbelt, to the White House.
  
  Reagan genuinely embraced most of the major issues that bonded the Religious Right: ""He was a strident anti-Communist, he denounced the decline of the family, he praised the 'old time religion,' and he criticized the permissiveness of the sixties generation.  He questioned the validity of evolutionary theory and supported the teaching of creationism in the public schools." (Sutton 2013: 22)  A major proponent of school prayer, Reagan opposed the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, rounding-out his moralist credentials.
  
  Reaganism swept the U.S. political system on the framework that Nixon had built, but the actor-ideologue Ronald Reagan upgraded Nixon's message of fear-and-reassurance with a caring and reassuring message for the grass-roots patriots, still resentful of the "Vietnam Syndrome" (the experience of defeat).  Despite his sunny charm, Reagan was every bit as militaristic as Nixon.  Reaganism continued the militarization big-city police departments, led by the LAPD.  Reaganism's political base was outside of, and against those cities.  The rise of Reaganism matched the rise of suburbia to dominance: the territorial donuts surrounding America's great cities, where the largest block of of voters now lived:  suburban, exurban, and rural legislative districts.  Those districts came to dominate both state and national legislatures, with more representation than either urban or rural districts.  In this footprint of legislative power, it was easy to mobilize white voters against the cities with both negative images of inner cities and positive images of a homogenous American moral patriot in control of their schools and free from excessive taxation.
  
  Reagan himself was not a cynical racist like Richard Nixon.  In fact, Reagan the man was remarkably fair-minded and tolerant in his personal beliefs.  But Ronald Reagan the governor and president cheerfully fronted for the national Religious Right, and in so doing, tolerated--as Nixon had--the white racism that had fled the Democratic for the Republican party in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.  Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Church refused to welcome non-white members until as late as 1969.   Falwell, who supported George Wallace's segregationist presidential campaign in 1968, defended the right of conservative Christian educational institutions like Bob Jones University to deny nonwhite admissions and maintain rules prohibiting interracial dating.  The magic moment for Reaganism arrived when he addressed the 1980 Moral Majority conference in Dallas as candidate for the U.S. presidency: "I know this is a nonpartisan gathering--and so I know you can't endorse me--but I only brought that up because I want you to know  that I endorse you."
  
  The Reagan administration took full advantage of the mass media based in Southern California.  The 1981 Inaugural was produced by Walt Disney Corporation; his policies were tie-ins with blockbuster movies (Star Wars); and he was supported by the huge media empires of the Televangelists.  Televangelism raised millions for an emerging mass politics increasingly dependent on high-priced mass media.  Prior to the Internet, media markets were highly concentrated in a handful of broadcasting and cable news corporations.  It took millions of dollars to pay for access to millions of voters and consumers, a condition that favors media-mogul-politics, a role that William Randolph Hearst pioneered.
  
  The whole complex of New Right mass media got a huge boost from the rapid rise of Hearst's greatest successor, Rupert Murdock (b. 1931), who had built a media empire in Australia, expanded it to Britain, and then to the US in the 1980s.  He took U.S. citizenship in 1981 and acquired the old Fox brand, 20th-Century Fox, then Metromedia group, to create the Fox Broadcasting Company.  Through his global holding company, the News Corp, Murdock constructed an American right-wing media empire . Murdock's brand has media continuity with the age of Hearst: sensational, tabloid, right-wing, and often manufactured news.