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Ronald Reagan and the Rise of the Radical Right Ronald Reagan and the Rise of Religious and Secular Conservative Politics in America 1960 - 1980 1960 and its subsequent decades proved to be a remarkable time for the world in general, but very specifically for America. The first Roman Catholic president was elected; the birth control pill was introduced, and we confronted the question of nuclear war. We also saw the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement and the Womens Rights Movement as we learned first-hand and up close and personal about civil disobedience and political assassinations. During this period, the conservative right was an anti-communist movement that promoted conservatism in government; increased military spending; withdrawal from the United Nations and reducing government funded social programs. They viewed the student demonstrations against the Vietnam War as a communist plot, as were the Civil Rights Movement and the Womens Rights Movement. Conservative Americans called the changes that we sought, and the questions that we asked, un-American and un-patriotic.
Eisenhower had disappointed the conservative right. William Buckley charged that he had done nothing for the Republican Party and nothing to develop a Conservative Republican philosophy of government and had, in fact, left the New Deal policies of FDR intact. The election of Kennedy had been a move away from the status quo of the Eisenhower years. He established the Commission on the Status of Women and appointed Eleanor Roosevelt the chair.
The Supreme Court issued its ruling banning prayer in public schools. The FDA approved the sell and marketing of the birth control pill. The Equal Pay Act, the first major legislation against sex discrimination was passed and other initiatives for combating sex discrimination were being discussed. The Berlin Wall was build and American pilot Frances Gary Powers was shot down in the U- 2 spy plane incident. Perhaps most disturbing of all to the conservative right was the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis.
The New Right looked at American society and saw a disappearance of personal morality, the absence of chastity and sobriety, the shirking of responsibility, and a loss of national strength and stature in foreign policy. The seeds for todays New Right conservative political movement were planted in 1964 with Senator Barry Goldwater's failed presidential campaign against President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Goldwater challenged the Republican Party and the nation to return to traditional conservative principles and values. His landslide loss both angered and energized radical conservatives much the way that Bill Clintons victory would in 1992.
Following Goldwater's defeat, William F. Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), which had been established in 1960, took off with a renewed dedication and sense of purpose. New conservative organizations like the American Conservative Union were created to promote grassroots conservative lobbying and public education. Also out of the ashes of Goldwater's defeat, came several men who would grow the radical conservative movement and create and implement the strategy that would defeat the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA); elect Ronal Reagan Governor of California and President of the United States, and take control of the Republican Party.
These men included, Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips, Paul Laxalt, Taft Schreiber, Jules Stein, Henry Salvador and Ronald Reagan. Paul Weyrich started out as an aide to Colorado Senator Gordon Allow and is generally credited with moving the rights agenda away from communism to domestic social issues as the battleground for political control of America. He founded the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, a powerful conservative think tank, and he is the point of convergence between the secular and the religious right. He was a key organizer of the Moral Majority in 1979 and the Christian Coalition in 1989 where he continues as an active strategist.
Weyrich also runs the Free Congress Foundation (FCF) which he founded with Richard Viguerie, an old friend from his days in Buckley's YAF. The Free Congress Foundation does everything from training future leaders in Eastern Europe to running National Empowerment Television. Richard Viguerie, who calls himself politically Christian, began his political career working for Buckley's YAF in Washington, D. C.
He hand copied Goldwater's campaign donor list and launched a highly lucrative conservative direct mail fundraising business. He went on to become the resident expert and among the first to discover and develop Direct Mail as a political tool which has raised millions of dollars by focusing on anti-ERA, anti-Choice messages to generate Christian and conservative contributions. Viguerie's first big client was Alabama's segregationist governor and third party presidential candidate George Wallace. Viguerie used Goldwater's list and raised millions of dollars for Wallace and then walked away from the campaign with Wallace's list of angry whites to add to his Goldwater list.
Howard Phillips is a skilled grassroots organizer and with his YAF compatriots, Weyrich and Viguerie, form the New Rights trinity. Phillips and Viguerie founded the Conservative Caucus in 1974 and later helped start the Moral Majority with Weyrich and the Reverend Jerry Falwell. He now heads the U. S.
Taxpayers Party that he founded in 1992. Together Phillips, Weyrich and Viguerie are the secular players who turned the religious right into a political force in the 1970 s and 1980 s by forming an unholy alliance with Christian extremists and leading attacks on abortion rights, womens rights and gay rights. Another new conservative voice was also discovered when B-movie actor, television host and General Electric spokesman Ronald Reagan gave his A Time For Choosing speech in support of Barry Goldwater on network television one week before the general election in 1964. The Speech, as it became known, was a half hour of emotionally charged defense of Goldwater's ultra-right-wing politics and American conservatism in general. You and I have a rendezvous with destiny, Reagan said that night. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man and earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
The Speech helped raise $ 8 million in small contributions for Goldwater and elevated Reagan into the national political spotlight. Reagan began his political life as a Democrat and a union activist. In 1941, his then wife, actress and Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Board Member, Jane Wyman arranged to have him appointed to a board vacancy. Reagan remained on the board and on March 10, 1947 was appointed to complete the unfinished term of President for actor Robert Montgomery when Montgomery resigned to become a film producer. That October the House Un-American Activities Committee began holding hearings investigating the film industry.
Reagan was a friendly witness and testified before the committee willingly (Moldea 71 - 72). In DARK VICTORY Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob, published in 1986, author Dan E. Moldea writes, President Ronald Reagan's professional lifes acting career, his personal financial fortune, and his rise in politics has been interwoven with and propelled by a powerful, Hollywood-based entertainment conglomerate named MCA. For nearly fifty years, Reagan has benefited both personally and financially from his association with this sixty-two-year-old company formerly known as the Music Corporation of American well as, from his close association with the firms top executives: Jules Stein, Lew Wasserman and Taft Schreiber (). Stein and Schreiber were conservative political operatives. Stein was a Chicago ophthalmologist who founded and served as MCAs Chairman of the Board, Lew Wasserman as President, and Schreiber as Vice President.
Wasserman had been Reagan's primary Agent and had secured MCAs first million-dollar studio deal for him in 1942. MCA had a history of anti-trust violations dating back to 1946 when a federal court in Los Angeles ruled against the company for holding a virtual monopoly over the entertainment business. A motion picture executive was quoted as saying, A studio cant exist for any time without some contact with MCA. I would say its impossible to operate without them. Jack Warner (the head of Warner Brothers Studios) tried it. He couldnt hold out for long ().
The company continued to be the subject of Justice Department investigations and other legal challenges over a fifty year period, up to and including the Justice Departments of Robert Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. In 1952, during his fifth term as SAG President, Reagan engineered the passage of a blanket waiver exempting MCA from SAG rules prohibiting a talent agency (MCA) from also engaging in film production. MCA was the only such firm to have been granted such a favored status, which gave them the ground floor in the brand new business of television production. In 1953, under Reagan, SAG forced its membership -- and those applying for membership to sign loyalty oaths.
During this ugly period in American history author Dan Moldea writes MCA had remained passive while clients like Arthur Miller were red-baited and blacklisted in the entertainment industry (). They also asked for contract releases from some of their blacklisted clients, such as screenwriter Nedrick Young. Moldea writes, Another screenwriter, Milton Gelman, who as also a former agent, said, If MCA had gotten together with William Morris and said, Were going to pull all our shows off the air, they could have broken the whole goddamn operation to begin with. The sponsors would have had nothing to show. But everyone ran scared. (Moldea 75). It was also during this time that Reagan's politics were transformed from self-proclaimed liberal and a Democrat to a conservative, anti-communist Republican.
His marriage to Democrat Wyman had ended in divorce in 1948, and he was now married to Nancy Davis, an actress and daughter of a Chicago physician Dr. Loyal Davis, an ultraconservative and anti-communist. Reagan allied himself more and more with the interests of business, and with the producers and studios. He moved away from working actors and started associating with other anti-communists like Robert Montgomery and George Murphy, with the powerful studio executives like Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer and MCAs Jules Stein and Taft Schreiber.
Documents released through the Freedom of Information Act show that Reagan, the president of SAG, was an FBI informant against Hollywood communists, and was the subject of a federal grand jury investigation focusing on his possible role in a suspected conspiracy between MCA and the actors union. According to Justice Department documents, government prosecutors had concluded that decisions made by SAG while under Reagan's leadership became the central fact of MCAs whole rise to power (159 - 160). According to Moldea's book Dark Victory, Reagan found himself with a career on the skids and in serious financial trouble at the end of his fifth term as SAG president in 1953, but was saved by MCA with jobs in Los Vegas and occasional television appearances. That same year MCA, with SAGs blanket waiver, entered into television production. One of their first deals was with General Electric Company to sponsor a series of weekly half-hour dramas, General Electric Theater. The show was the flagship program of MCAs new production business.
They gave Reagan the job as host, program supervisor and occasional star of the prime time network show. General Electric paid Reagan $ 125, 000. 00 a year, or $ 2500. 00 per show, plus a generous expense account and MCA paid him a very fancy sum at the same time, but the amount was never disclosed. Over the years Reagan's GE salary grew to $ 169, 000 a year, a 25 % ownership of the show and GE installed a $ 5, 000 all-electric kitchen in his home. Justice Department documents and several government sources believed that the preferential treatment Reagan received from MCA was a payoff for services rendered while Reagan was the president of the Screen Actors Guild (109).
In 1959, Reagan ran again and was elected to the SAG presidency under the guise of leading the actors in an impending strike against the studios, even though he was producing episodes for GE Theater. According to SAG by-laws, producers, even if they are primarily actors, are disqualified from serving on the SAG executive board. Previous board members such as Robert Montgomery, Dick Powell, James Cagney, Franc hot Tone, John Garfield, Harpo Marx and Dennis O Keefe had resigned when they began producing in order to comply with the conflict of interest rule. Reagan refused to do so. The Reagan led actors strike lasted six weeks and the new contract was so unsatisfactory to the membership that it has since been called The Great Giveaway (Moldea 142).
The 1960 contract negotiated under Reagan required the actors to forfeit all of their claims to residual payments for television showing of movies made prior to 1960. In return for this huge concession, the studios promised to create a pension and welfare plan for actors with a one-time initial contribution of a mere $ 2. 65 million. In the future, actors would be entitled to six percent of all future gross sales of theatrical movies to television after the producers deducted their distribution costs, which sometimes were as high as forty percent (). Reagan and his chief negotiator John Dales said that they had negotiated the best deal and that they had gotten ninety percent of what we asked for (142). The actors felt that they had been sold out. At the time, actor and Reagan friend Bob Hope said, The pictures were sold down the river for a certain amount of money, and it was nothing.
See, I made something like sixty pictures, and my pictures are running on TV all over the world. Whos getting the money for that? Were talking about thousands and thousands of dollars, and Jules Stein walked in and paid...
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