Before the Storm (24 page)

He was still a liberal. But his remarriage in 1952 to the daughter of a conservative, politically connected Chicago surgeon (whose Phoenix vacation home the couple visited each Easter) and his work negotiating with studio chiefs were beginning to change that. That year he worked for Democrats for Eisenhower. The entrepreneur, not the union, the government, or the crusader for social justice, moved ever closer to the center of his moral imagination. In 1955 he became a charter subscriber to
National Review.

TV and politics had doomed him; now they saved him. In 1954 General Electric was looking for an attractive, smart, straight-arrow actor who could think like a salesman to take a demanding double job as actor-host of TV's weekly
General Electric Theater
and as a motivational speaker for G.E.'s hundreds of thousands of employees in 125 separate facilities across the country, making everything from light bulbs to locomotives. The fact that
General Electric Theater
was produced by Reagan's talent agency, MCA—an agency that SAG president Reagan had helped to receive a blanket waiver of a union rule that talent agencies could not produce television programs—helped his chances. But it had to be said that Reagan was a natural for the job.

G.E. was an unusual company. It had always considered communicating a precisely calibrated corporate image as much a part of the company's business as making the products it sold—as much inside their 125 plants as outside them. The image G.E. hoped to convey was of a company that was an indispensable
cog in America's well-being. In the 1930s and 1940s, when G.E.'s top brass was liberal (one executive chartered Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration), that meant that the company backed the New Deal vision of a strong welfare state and a vigorously enforced Wagner Act (G.E. was among the few big manufacturing companies to avoid labor strife in the 1930s by simply offering the CIO a national contract). But when a 1946 strike shuttered every electrical plant in the country, that vision began changing. New management came in and hired a man named Lemuel Boulware to a new post: vice president for employee and community relations. Boulware was a marketing expert. The key to successful labor relations, he believed, was to “achieve ultimately the same success
in job marketing
that we had accomplished in
product
marketing.” A crucial part of the task was explaining how free enterprise created a virtuous circle harmoniously joining labor, management, customer, and community. In this scheme, Bouwarism (as labor leaders, with a shudder, pronounced it), unions were but irritants, as was the welfare state. The United States, he would lament in the many addresses in which he spread his gospel to business leaders, “is well down the road to a collectivist revolution.”

Reagan was an integral component in the Boulwarite system. The actor, crackling charm, would walk the floor of the yawning thirty-acre plants—squinting a little because he couldn't wear his contact lenses for the smoke and dust—shaking hands and chatting up the workers. Then he would speak to an assembly. “Today,” he would say, “there is an increasing number who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without automatically coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they would seek the answer to all the problems of human need through government.” Lem Boulware couldn't have said it better.

On Reagan's first tour, his handler was approached because a convention speaker had canceled at the last minute, leaving several thousand teachers waiting in the town armory. “Let's give it a try,” Ronnie said gamely. He performed famously. After that, nearly every factory stop was followed up by a freelance appearance before some civic or business group or another.

Reagan stepped up his outside political work after resigning from his SAG responsibilities in 1960. He still hadn't bothered to change his party registration. But he was aghast enough at John F. Kennedy's convention acceptance speech to be moved to write Richard Nixon a letter. “Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's
bold new imaginative program
with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish hair cut it is still old Karl Marx.” Nixon, delighted, appended a note to his staff: “Use him as speaker wherever possible. He
used
to be liberal.” In 1960 Reagan ended up running Democrats for Nixon in California. And after Nixon's loss, Reagan's disillusionment took him in the same direction as
it did so many of his southern Californian neighbors—to the right. When he wasn't on the road for G.E. or on the set, he spread the gospel in front of any audience that invited him. His family hardly saw him. “The inescapable truth is that we are at war,” he would say, “and we are losing that war simply because we don't or won't realize we are in it. We have ten years. Not ten years to make up our mind, but ten years to win or lose—by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free.”

In Orange County that kind of talk was making Reagan a hero. He was like them—a Midwestern transplant, from small-town Illinois. He almost belonged more to them than he did to Hollywood.

 

It was first said in the nineteenth century that California was “America, only more so.” Orange County was California, only more so. It had been the commandment to Americans after World War II to go forth and multiply. Orange County listened, and exploded. The government said to fight Communism. Orange County listened, and went berserk.

California had always been a territory of booms and busts. Orange County's boom came during World War 11. Opening up to the Pacific, possessed of a mild climate, southern California was the perfect place for defense installations. As in Phoenix, the aircraft manufacturers followed. Unions were weak. Venture capital was abundant. And when the jet and missile age arrived in the 1950s, it turned out that southern California had a competitive advantage: unlike more established companies back East, which preferred safe construction contracts, the tinkerers in California welcomed long-term research and development deals. New York State lost 34 percent of its share of the Defense Department's procurement between 1950 and 1956; by 1965 California would have almost a quarter of the Defense Department's prime contracts and 41 percent of NASA's. Aerospace accounted for a staggering 10 percent of all personal income in the state of California and perhaps a quarter of its economic growth. And Orange County, the formerly rural area south of Los Angeles—whose municipalities were so eager to play host to the War Department that the town of Santa Ana leased the U.S. government a 412-acre former berry ranch for a dollar a year—did best of all. Orange County's population, 100,000 in 1940, approached a million by 1960. Washington had called forth a new suburban civilization in southern California. Orange County was its hub.

Real estate speculators turned ranches into subdivisions virtually overnight—an entire municipality, Irvine, from a single orange grove. Men who got a taste of the Sunshine State as Pacific Theater veterans flocked back after the war to settle there with their families; all you had to do was visit a real estate office at the edge of some former citrus grove, point to a site on a tract map,
and lay down a $200 down payment (less if you were a veteran), and you'd bought yourself a house. But with mortgage debt a constant, silent presence, the new homesteaders were not keen on squandering their precious salaries, their only assets, on high taxes to help out the other guy. In 1959 Orange County congressman James Utt reintroduced an effort to add a “Liberty Amendment” to the Constitution—which would repeal all federal income, estate, and gift taxes and ban all government enterprises that competed with the private sector. Utt likened the federal government to a “child molester who offers candy before his evil act.”

Orange County had always been a Republican stronghold. As in the rest of southern California suburbia, much of the county's population hailed from Taft's Midwest (every year a massive “Iowa Day” celebration was held in L.A.'s Griffith Park). The first time a Democratic President carried the county was 1932, the last 1936. That was two times too many for Raymond Cyrus Hoiles, publisher of the
Santa Ana Register,
who said the world would have been better off if Franklin D. Roosevelt had never learned to read or write. Hoiles's editorials railed against the government stake in what he called “tax-supported schools, roads, and parks”—and called for an end to child labor and pure food and drug laws. As for the area's racial attitudes, in 1954 a Korean-American Olympic Gold Medal winner was able to purchase a home in Garden Grove only after an outcry in the international media, and the Magnolia District's first black teacher was forced to quit after a year when she couldn't find housing. Orange County tended to draw people who found such politics amiable. Once there, they often moved further to the right.

New postwar migrants, unmoored from the familiar Main Streets of their youth, burst the churches of conservative preachers like “Fighting Bob” Wells at the seams. Many were fundamentalists and Evangelicals of a new kind: they mixed politics with religion, a diversion much more associated with liberal clergymen. (“Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners,” as the young pastor of the Lynchburg, Tennessee, Thomas Road Baptist Church, Jerry Falwell, put it.) When fundamentalists and Evangelicals were political they weren't necessarily conservative: the Southern Baptist Convention endorsed
Brown v. Board of Education,
and the Reverend Billy Graham called Martin Luther King's Montgomery bus boycott “an example of Christian love.” But Joe McCarthy's 1953 charge that prominent Methodist bishop G. Bromley Oxnam was a Communist—and the ensuing claim of McCarthyites that perhaps 5 percent of Protestant clergymen followed the Soviet line—boosted the right-wing radio “parachurches” of Billy James Hargis, Carl McIntire, and Edgar C. Bundy; a 1960 Federal Communication Commission ruling that encouraged networks to sell air time to religious broadcasters as a public service—and Evangelical
terror of the possibility of a Catholic U.S. President—helped even more. Orange County church vestibule tables were thick with publications the radio hosts produced, like
The United Nations, A Smoke-Screen for Communist Aggression
and
Disarmament, An Invitation to Communist Takeover.

Disarmament may or may not have been an invitation to Communist takeover. It certainly was a threat to the southern California economy. A 1961 issue of
Orange County Industrial News
admitted that its growth projections presumed “that there will be no agreements on disarmament or on limitation of nuclear weapons”—although their dependency on government contracts didn't increase their love for Washington any more than it did the nineteenth-century Arizona merchants who had been put in business by the Indian Wars. “Show me one, just one, from Southern California who helps make policy at Washington!” the mayor of Los Angeles seethed in a speech to Orange County service clubs as the crowd whistled him on. It was a curious relationship. The trade journal
Missiles and Rockets
expected Kennedy to penalize California contractors because the state went for Nixon. In fact, it was to Kennedy that they owed their continued good fortune. Eisenhower worried that high military budgets would superheat the economy toward recession; Kennedy's Keynesian economic advisers proposed a virtuous circle: grand designs abroad put money into workers' pockets, vouchsafing economic growth at home. Southern Californians might not be working in Washington, but their money certainly was. North American Aviation, where James Wallace started his career, paid its D.C. lobbyist $14,000 a month, an executive's salary, just for part-time work.

As for the internal security paranoia, in Orange County, hundreds of engineers went home from working on top secret defense projects to children who could not know what their fathers had done at the office that day. The example was Los Alamos: it took only one disloyal American to hasten catastrophe. Local business leaders developed complete dossiers on the two thousand southern Californians identified as having once been Communist Party members. They had two million index cards for suspected—as Robert Welch coined it—comsymps. James Wallace was an ordinary representative of his community.

 

Another was Walter Knott. Orange County residents loved to tell his story: An itinerant day laborer from one of the poorest families in Pomona, at age thirty-one Knott managed to rent a forlorn berry plot in Buena Park. His wife, Cordelia, sold delectable berry pies from a roadside stand; then, noting the increasing traffic from yachters on their way to the harbors at Newport Beach and Balboa, she convinced her wary husband to let her have a try at selling chicken dinners. Cordelia's savory cooking and homey kindness brought customers
back again and again; a banker offered Knott a loan to open a restaurant. Knott refused the debt but built the restaurant anyway.

He did well as a restaurateur. But in true Orange County fashion, it was technology that made him rich. Painstakingly, over the course of three years, Knott had been nursing a new hybrid: a cross between the loganberry, blackberry, and raspberry, marvelously fat and juicy, that a certain Mr. Boysen had invented, then abandoned when he found the prickly bramble too difficult to cultivate. Knott had the entrepreneurial spirit to persevere. “Boysenberries” yielded Knott a Depression-era fortune. In 1940 he expanded the restaurant and opened a restored Western ghost town, a tourist monument to the pioneer spirit that had built the West—and to the entrepreneurial pioneers like himself who kept it great. Through the years an abandoned schoolhouse was shipped from Kansas, a hotel from Arizona, and rolling stock from around the country to build a working railroad line. In 1951 Knott moved in an entire abandoned Mojave Desert silver mining town in which he had once toiled as a day laborer. By the 1960s Knott's Berry Farm was drawing seven thousand visitors on a busy weekend and was the region's second biggest tourist attraction, behind Disneyland. Knott shared the welfare-capitalist business philosophy of Barry Goldwater and Herb Kohler: his employees had profit-sharing, health insurance, and a generous retirement plan; he also headed the fight for a California right-to-work law in 1958.