Ronald Reagan was the 40th president of the United States and the only one born in Illinois. He was also the only president to live in Chicago as a youth.
Abraham Lincoln, born in Kentucky, practiced law here but always went home to Springfield. Ulysses S. Grant, born in Ohio, never got closer than Galena, which at one time rivaled Chicago, with its location near the banks of the mighty Mississippi and thriving lead mine.
Reagan was born in Tampico. His family moved around a lot, living above a store on the South Side of Chicago, then Galesburg and Monmouth before settling in Dixon, where Reagan went to high school.
He graduated from Eureka College in 1932 with a degree in sociology and took an interest in broadcasting. Feeling the lure of Hollywood, he moved west in …
What? Why are we going over the particulars of Reagan’s life? Because it’s February. Black History Month! I think with our nation being whipsawed by Trump 2.0, we might have forgotten that. A time when we can examine the rich heritage Black people have brought to this country.
Reagan’s first movie was “Love is in the Air” with June Travis. The movie took three weeks to film, and Reagan received $200 a week. It was well received: The Hollywood Reporter called Reagan “a natural” and he should have been, given he was playing a radio announcer, a job he had been doing in real life for years.
OK, OK, Ronald Reagan is not technically a Black person. But if I’ve read the current political mood correctly, that’s OK. Black History Month, which I previously saw as a chance to look at important parts of the past often overlooked in America’s rush to celebrate whiteness, is now being viewed by some as a genocide against white history.
If corporations can leap to scrap their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs to curry favor with, or at least not provoke wrath from, the Trump administration, then surely I can use February to celebrate a president who was the oldest in American history when he left office — 77, but still a year younger than Trump was when he started his second term. Three weeks ago.
Besides, I believe Reagan is a key figure in explaining what is going on right now. He didn’t invent animosity toward the federal government — that goes back to the founding of our country and Southern states passionate about preserving slavery.
But he did perfect it, ushering in the age where Republicans realized, if you can’t directly advocate against people you despise — immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ — you can kneecap the government that supports them.
That is why our shadow king, Elon Musk, is running around, ripping down parts of the federal government. You can include scientists, doctors and impartial law enforcement officers among the ranks of the despised now.
They call that “efficiency,” though how it is efficient to destroy programs that help Americans, so we can give money back to rich people as tax breaks, is a mystery.
That it mainly hurts white Americans — most people in poverty are white — doesn’t matter. That’s a point that doesn’t get understood about racism. Sure, it hurts the victims, big time. But it also hurts the racists themselves. When federal courts demanded that public swimming pools be integrated in the 1960s, small Southern towns filled in their public pools rather than let Black residents — their neighbors — swim in them. They’d rather their own children swelter than share the pool.
Remember that dynamic; it explains a lot. You can draw a line from the shuttered pools to next week’s move to eliminate the Department of Education. If deploying national standards means we’re to learn actual American history, then there shall be no standards at all!
History is a bad place, often. To get an idea just how bad, let’s return to Reagan’s biography. Those of more tender sensibilities — a state sadly encouraged by the left as well as the right — will be protected from the worst of it.
Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, believing that companies should be able to do whatever they like, unencumbered by the interference of government — another belief as current as tomorrow. He opposed the 1965 Voting Rights Act on constitutional grounds. He was also an unashamed racist. There is a 1971 tape from the Oval Office that has him yukking it up with Nixon, chuckling over slurs about African United Nations delegates.
That this same Ronald Reagan would go on to be elected president, twice, and become the adored godhead of the Republican Party before Donald Trump completely blinded it with his golden glory, well, it might be a shock. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise.