The Midwesterner

Dixon, Illinois

"If I’d gotten the job I wanted at Montgomery Ward, I suppose I would never have left Illinois.” That’s the first sentence in Ronald Reagan’s autobiography, An American Life. It was 1932, the Depression gripped the country, and Reagan had returned to Dixon (working over the summer as a lifeguard) after graduating from Eureka College, 100 miles away.

Montgomery Ward was opening a store in Dixon, a town of roughly 10,000, and wanted a local athlete to run its sporting goods department. Reagan, having played football at Dixon High School and Eureka, figured he was perfect for the job. He didn’t get it, and instead went into radio in Iowa, then movies in Hollywood, and .  .  . you know the rest.

Reagan became a Westerner, or at least that was his image, which often depicted him on horseback. In his second movie, Sergeant Murphy, he was a cavalry trooper (Sgt. Murphy was his horse). He starred in Westerns in the 1940s and 1950s before hosting the television show Death Valley Days. His statue in Rapid City, South Dakota, has him in a cowboy hat and Western gear. Even in Dixon, Reagan’s boyhood home, he’s riding a horse in one of the town’s two statues of him.

But Reagan the Westerner was mostly for show. The more we learn about him, the more we realize his values, his outlook on life, his embrace of leadership, his political style, and, to a significant extent, his political ideology were shaped by the first 26 years of his life in Illinois hamlets like Dixon, Tampico, and Eureka. Reagan was, first and foremost, a small-town Midwesterner at heart.

“There wouldn’t have been a President Reagan without his upbringing in the Midwest,” says Craig Shirley, who’s written books about Reagan’s presidential campaigns in 1976 and 1980. Somewhere around 1,000 books about Reagan have been published, and several of his biographers, especially Lou Cannon and Anne Edwards, have emphasized the Midwestern influence. The academic community, however, has been slow to catch on.

For a “Reagan and the Midwest” seminar in January, Eureka College put out a call for scholarly papers on the subject. The response was underwhelming. Only seven academics submitted proposals. All seven were accepted, and the authors discussed them at the Eureka seminar. One dealt, interestingly enough, with Reagan’s experience at Eureka. “I don’t think it is stretching things to say that Eureka made Reagan and, in turn, Reagan made Eureka,” wrote James H. Capshew of Indiana University.

It is stretching things, but it’s also true that Eureka was enormously important to Reagan. He visited the school a dozen times after graduating, served on the board of trustees for 18 years, and was a major donor. “Everything that has been good in my life began here,” Reagan said at the Eureka commencement in 1982. It was at Eureka that, as a freshman, he spoke in support of a student strike (“When I walked off the stage that night, my life had changed,” Reagan wrote in his autobiography) and that he cultivated the love of theatrics and acting that his mother had instilled in him.

Eureka, in turn, has magnified its association with Reagan, adopting the task of promoting the “Reagan legacy” through a Reagan Forward initiative. The school’s president, David Arnold, was instrumental in creating the Ronald W. Reagan Society in 2008, run by John Morris of nearby Peoria, a Reagan admirer but not a Eureka grad. Morris attended George Washington University partly because it’s three blocks from the White House, where he worked as a volunteer during Reagan’s final year in office.

At the Reagan conference, Devan Bissonette of Delta College in Michigan noted that “part of [Reagan’s] remoteness dated back to his childhood” in the Midwest. Reagan certainly thought so. He was nine when he moved to Dixon and “a little slow in making really close friends,” he wrote. “In some ways, I think this reluctance to get close to people never left me completely. .  .  . I’ve been inclined to hold back a little of myself, reserving it for myself.”

The most ambitious paper was delivered by Jon Peterson of Ohio University. “Reagan’s anticommunist pronouncements, which shook the Cold War world, were rooted in ideas of good and evil that came from his mother and his Midwest upbringing,” he wrote. This is a new assertion about Reagan, so far as I know, and one worth taking seriously.