The First Actor-Turned-Governor
While Ronald Reagan's presidency has inspired dozens of books, his eight years as California governor had largely been overlooked by authors until now.
"Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power," Lou Cannon's fifth book about Reagan, examines how he went from an unassuming Midwestern childhood to his first elected position — leading the country's most populous state. The book also examines how the governor's office was the perfect stepping-stone to the presidency.
Cannon visited The Early Show to discuss his new book, and he shared his opinion of the current recall election controversy in California.
Read an excerpt from "Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power":
POLITICIAN
When Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, he was dismissed as a greenhorn who gave rousing speeches but was otherwise unprepared for public life. Professionals of both parties pegged Reagan as an out-of-work actor who was trading on his celebrity status to launch a political career. Even after he was elected, legislators regarded Reagan as more of a celebrity than a politician, a perception Reagan encouraged by describing himself as a "citizen-politician" who had answered the call of duty. He often talked as if he were on loan from the entertainment industry and planned to return to his basic calling after serving, like Cincinnatus, when his country needed him.
First impressions die hard, and professional politicians treated Reagan condescendingly even after he had served two terms as governor and was well into the second term of his presidency. This was in part because politicians who rose through the ranks in orthodox fashion were reluctant to admit that a former actor could do so well at their profession and in part because Reagan worked at being underestimated. When House Speaker Thomas P. ("Tip") O'Neill, an accomplished politician, met with President-elect Reagan on November 18, 1980, he tested him by saying that his Sacramento experience was "minor league" and that legislation might not move swiftly for him in Washington. "This is the big leagues," O'Neill told Reagan, who smiled while his aides fumed. Reagan told me later that he thought he would do better if O'Neill underrated him. Six months and two budget defeats later, O'Neill was asked by a constituent in Boston what was happening. "I'm getting the **** whaled out of me," the speaker replied.
O'Neill had not been bested by an amateur. Despite Reagan's disclaimers, Jane Wyman had been right in observing that he was more interested in politics than anything else. He was elected senior class president in high school, participated in the student strike as a freshman at Eureka College, and gave frequent public speeches beginning with his days as a broadcaster in Des Moines. Reagan admired President Roosevelt, whom he credited for saving the country and rescuing his own family, and enjoyed listening to his radio speeches. He was interested in political ideas (but not the mechanics of campaigns) and discussed politics with anyone who could be drawn into conversation on a movie set. In 1942, he wrote that his interests since college had been "dramatics, athletics and politics."
Twice, in 1946 and 1952, Reagan was sounded out as a potential Democratic candidate for Congress. In 1948, he campaigned for President Harry S Truman and future Democratic stars of the Senate, including Hubert H. Humphrey. Friends in the Screen Actors Guild joked that Reagan was the "boy on the burning deck" because he spoke so frequently at union meetings. But he gave good speeches. The Guild elected Reagan president five consecutive times and later brought him back for a sixth term in which he led a successful strike against the movie producers. By any measure, Reagan was a political person. He was also, for the most part, consistent as he moved during his long lifetime from left to right across the political spectrum. The essence of Reagan's politics in both its Democratic and Republican formulations was a sentimental populism in which he expressed himself as an ordinary man who shared the values of his constituents. Reagan's heroes were, like any good populist, "the people" or the "forgotten Americans."
He stood up to the power elites — first in business, then in government and the media. The actor who in Photoplay celebrated himself as "Mr. Norm" and proclaimed "average will do it" became the politician who saw himself as the tribune of the American people. A tribune in the Roman sense of the word was a representative of the people, and Reagan envisioned himself in this role long before he became the president of the United States. He was a mirror who reflected the values of everyday Americans and was one with those whom he represented. On the eve of the 1980 presidential election, when a radio reporter asked Reagan what other Americans saw in him, he replied, "Would you laugh if I told you that I think, maybe, they see themselves and that I'm one of them? I've never been able to detach myself or think that I, somehow, am apart from them."
Reagan's belief that his bond with the people was indissoluble gave him an inner security about his politics that was more reassuring than any public opinion survey. It helped him, at various times, to escape the potentially suffocating clutches of the Communist Party, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the John Birch Society, and the Moral Majority. When a suspect group of ideologues embraced Reagan, as he said of the Birchers, they were accepting his philosophy rather than the other way around.
Reagan's temperament and habits were also suited for political life. He declined to call himself a "politician" because of an aversion to the connotations of the word rather than from distaste for politics. Politicians in America are stereotyped as glad-handing opportunists who, in Lincoln's self-deprecatory phrase, are "one long step removed from honest men." But politics often attracts honest men (and women) who, like Reagan, get along well with people but are uncomfortable with personal intimacy. As to his habits, Reagan was disciplined and organized. He read newspapers and periodicals with an eye for information that reinforced core values and beliefs, and his memory, as political ally Paul Laxalt later said, was "frighteningly" retentive. All these were useful traits in politics. Reagan's first significant political training ground was the Screen Actors Guild, which had won a four-year battle for recognition from recalcitrant movie producers three weeks before he arrived in Hollywood.
Except for a few stars, movie actors were peons in an industry operated by primitive entrepreneurs who had traditionally responded to unionization attempts by blacklisting the actors who tried to organize. But in 1933, the producers forced contract players to accept a 50 percent pay cut, enormous even by Depression standards, and created the conditions for the successful organization of the Screen Actors Guild. At the time it was formed, more than half its members made less than $2,000 a year, and many of these "day players," as they were called, worked a day a week for $15. For lesser-known actors, the Guild's success in raising the wages of the day players provided the means of survival in an industry that has never cared well or widely for its own.
Reagan wrote in "Where's the Rest of Me?" that he was recruited into the Guild by actress Helen Broderick, who heard him make an antiunion crack in the Warners commissary and gave him an hour's lecture on the merits of the union. Reagan said he then became a "rabid union man."
In Reagan's account, repeated in similar form in his postpresidential memoir, "An American Life," he was elected to the Guild board in 1938 because union leaders wanted board members representing various levels of experience. Reagan said he was "drafted to represent the industry's young contract players" and accepted with "awe and pleasure."
The board included some of the big stars of Hollywood—Robert Montgomery, Edward Arnold, Charles Boyer, James Cagney, Eddie Cantor, Cary Grant, Ralph Morgan, and Dick Powell. At union meetings, they received the young actor as an equal. Reagan was impressed by their commitment because he realized that these actors could have negotiated favorable contracts without the help of a union. He saw their participation as the selfless actions of successful men who remembered what it was like to be young and unknown. "My education was completed when I walked into the board room," Reagan wrote. "I saw it crammed with the famous men of the business. I knew that I was beginning to find the rest of me."
Like so many stories in Reagan's autobiographies, this account must be read with caution. There is no way to verify that Broderick convinced a reluctant Reagan to join the Guild. Reagan came from a prounion family and had defended labor's right to organize long before he came to Hollywood, but he may have so highly valued artistic individualism that he was skeptical of an actor's need for a union. If he had doubts, he quickly swallowed them. The records of the Screen Actors Guild show that Reagan became a member on June 30, 1937, little more than a month after he arrived in Hollywood, paying a $25 admission fee and $7.50 as his quarterly dues.
These records contradict Reagan's story about the timing of his ascension to the Guild board. They suggest that his entire account of how he became a board member is another Reagan fable with a moralistic message, in this case a story about how he was inspired by the selflessness of successful actors. Reagan became a member of the board not in 1938 but in July 1941, and then as an alternate for Heather Angel. It would have been unlikely that Reagan would have represented new contract actors in 1941; he was then on the verge of stardom. Jane Wyman was the catalyst for bringing her husband into Guild prominence. John ("Jack") Dales, executive secretary of the Guild, asked Wyman to serve as Angel's alternate; instead, Wyman brought Reagan to the union office and suggested he would make a better alternate.* The board accepted Reagan, and his union career was launched. Dales remembered that Reagan made an immediate positive impression. "He was a plain, likable guy who spoke his mind," Dales said. "There was a charm about him."
Reagan left the Guild board when he went into the Army but retained his enthusiasm for the union. In 1945, he resumed his seat on the board, this time as an alternate for Rex Ingram, and after that for Boris Karloff. Reagan did not become a board member in his own right until he was elected third vice president of the Guild in September 1946. He was by then one of the union's best-known spokesmen, and he was about to become even more prominent.
On March 10, 1947, the popular Robert Montgomery avoided a potential conflict of interest by resigning as president of the Guild because he was producing and directing a .lm in which he was also appearing as an actor. Franchot Tone, Dick Powell, and James Cagney resigned as board members at the same time on the identical grounds of having "a financial interest in the production of the pictures in which they will appear." Gene Kelly nominated Reagan to replace Montgomery; Kelly and George Murphy were also nominated. The vote was taken by secret ballot with a majority needed to win. Reagan received a majority and arrived late from a meeting of the leftist American Veterans Committee to learn that he was the Guild's new president.
By 1947, a decade after winning recognition from the studios, the Guild was a prestigious union with a strategic position in an anxious industry threatened by foreign films, the looming menace of television, and jurisdictional disputes among craft unions. Hollywood's anxieties were heightened by the fearful politics of the Cold War, which spurred investigations into alleged Communist influence in the industry by a headline-hunting congressional committee.
The Communists, no less than the committee, were fascinated by Hollywood, then the center of American popular culture. Beginning in the early 1930s, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) gave a high priority to Hollywood because party leaders believed that movies could change the social consciousness of Americans. There was nothing novel about this belief. The American Legion and the Legion of Decency, among others, feared that films had the power to subvert or corrupt moviegoers. Organized crime was also interested in Hollywood, although for more practical reasons. Taking advantage of the shared cupidity of movie producers who were at once naive and unscrupulous, mob-controlled unions entered into "sweetheart" deals with the studios. The residue of this corruption was a factor in a series of jurisdictional strikes that engulfed the .lm industry from 1945 through 1947 and became crucial to Reagan's political evolution.
The mob had moved into Hollywood in 1936 in the persons of gangsters Willie Bioff and George Browne, who were backed by the Chicago underworld syndicate headed by Frank Nitti, the successor to Al Capone, and assisted by a $100,000 contribution from producer Joseph Schenck. Bioff and Browne took over a moribund industrial union of stagehands, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), signed up several producers, and assessed each employee 2 percent of his paycheck in union dues. In six years, they raked in $6.5 million, which they divided with the Chicago syndicate. After a series of highly publicized investigations, Bioff and Browne were sentenced to federal prison in 1941 for extorting $550,000 from major studios. Bioff subsequently was murdered by a bomb set off by the starter in his car. The International Alliance lived on and prospered under the leadership of a tough-talking Nebraskan named Roy Brewer who had been brought in to clean up the union.
The Communists enjoyed two periods of influence in Hollywood. The first occurred during the Popular Front collaboration of Communists and liberals that began in 1936 and ended with the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. The second came after the German invasion of Russia in June 1941 and ended with the collapse of Nazi Germany in April 1945, when, at Stalin's direction, the Communist parties of the world ended their wartime policy of cooperating with the Western democracies. The Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), which contested with the Alliance for labor control of Hollywood, was born in this second period of liberal- Communist cooperation. It was the brainchild of Herbert Sorrell, "whose fattened nose witnessed to an early and not too successful boxing career." This was the description of Sorrell by George Dunne, a liberal Jesuit priest who reported on the labor disputes in Hollywood for Commonweal.
In Dunne's view, Sorrell was "a rare phenomenon in the moral miasma of Hollywood management-labor relations: a man of honesty and integrity." Others held a less flattering view. Dales considered Sorrell a Communist and untrustworthy, and Reagan, at least retrospectively, concurred. Sorrell was ultimately expelled from the National Executive Board of the Painters Union for having "willfully and knowingly associated with groups subservient to the Communist Party line."
The foregoing is an excerpt from "Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power," by Kelly Brownell. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from McGraw-Hill.