Saylor.org HIST212: "The 1980s The Reagan Era"

In this lecture, we're going to be focusing on the decade of the 1980s in the United States. We're going to look at the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and we're going to use Ronald Reagan as a figure who, in many ways, his life embodies many of the important political, social, and economic trends all the way from the New Deal era of the 1930s up until the important changes that take place during his presidency in the 1980s. One of the important things we're going to talk about is how Reagan's presidency, eight years in office from his election in 1980 until he leaves office in early 1989, in many ways changes the language of politics in the United States and really redefines a conservative critique of how government should operate. Reagan is really a very important figure and a very important part of this kind of re-conceptualization of government, re-conceptualization of the role of government in society, and an important change that continues to affect the United States well into the present era. The language that Reagan and his advisors and his intellectual supporters develop to policies in the 1980s remains the language that many conservatives who have supported his policies use in the present era. So Reagan really redefines the conversation on the role of the government within society, on the role of the government within communities, on the relationship between governments and states, and so forth. We'll be talking about those two aspects of his presidency in life and how that has a broader impact on the decade of the 1980s. Ultimately his foreign policy was a direct reflection of policies that were put into place beginning in the 1930s with the New Deal state. His foreign policy was a direct reflection of the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union that had developed after 1945 and was certainly continuing in the 1980s. And ultimately his election in 1980 was a response to the political crisis that we talked about in the last lecture, the political economic crisis we talked about in the last lecture in the 1970s. So Reagan is a very liminal figure, a very important figure to look at as a way of examining these broader events and broader trends taking place in American history. Before we talk about Reagan's presidency, it's important to talk a little bit about Reagan the man. And Reagan again this sort of embodiment of a 20th century man, a man who really grew up and was involved and lived his life during many of these very important transitionary periods in American history. Reagan's born in 1911, he's born in a relatively small town in Illinois. And so he grows up sort of in the small town life for a number of years. Has a difficult childhood, his father had worked in a variety of positions both in the various towns in Illinois, briefly in Chicago, and it's not the strongest childhood. Ultimately his father loses his job during the Great Depression and Reagan has to sort of try to help support his family. He works in a number of occupations, he actually takes a WPA job during the New Deal, he then works in radio for a little while, and finally he decides in the late 1930s to go to Hollywood to try his luck in the movies. And as it turns out, Reagan is very successful. He is able to secure a movie contract and works for quite a few years and works in a number of different Hollywood pictures over the years and becomes well known within the Hollywood community, becomes a well established member of the Hollywood community. To the point where in 1947 he actually is elected to the president of the Screen Actors Guild, the SAG, the group that represents all Hollywood actors. And this role as a union president is very important to him and Reagan is certainly influenced by the era of the New Deal, he's somewhat liberal in his youth, but as he gets older and spends more time in Hollywood, he starts to become more conservative, especially after World War II. Reagan doesn't serve overseas in World War II, he serves in a number of support roles in the United States, primarily having to do with making movies, propaganda movies that were supporting the war or movies for the army, educational movies for army troops. But during and at the end of the war, especially as the Cold War begins to develop between the US and the Soviet Union, Reagan definitely becomes more conservative in his politics. But especially in the early 1950s, he is a very important Hollywood conservative. He's very supportive of efforts by HUAC, we discussed the House Committee on Un-American Activities in a previous lecture, their efforts to investigate communists and socialists in Hollywood. And so Reagan is very willing to testify before HUAC's investigative committees that ultimately lead to blacklisting of the Hollywood 10, these famous screenwriters, producers, directors who are seen to have communist affiliations. So Reagan definitely becomes more conservative during the late 40s and early 1950s. He also works for a number of years for the General Electric Corporation and doing General Electric Theater, and as the official corporate spokesperson in a way for General Electric, this large powerful US corporation, which requires him to spend a lot of time touring General Electric facilities, learning more about the company. And certainly his work as a GE spokesperson gets his name out there, becomes well known by being the host, this television host of the GE Theater, certainly also gets his name out there as sort of a representative of corporate culture and corporate politics in the United States. And in some ways Reagan helps use this as a springboard to move into politics and ultimately become a Republican. He runs for office in California in 1966, the governor, the gubernatorial race in California, and he's elected governor in 66, and kind of a conservative reaction to all the social unrest and kind of political unrest that was coming about as a result of the Vietnam War and sort of the student protest movements and all the other things that were going on both in California and nationwide in the late 60s. Reagan serves two terms as California governor and ultimately steps down in 1975, decides not to run for a third term in office. In 1976, he runs for president of the United States, kind of springboards off of his success in California. He runs against Gerald Ford in the US in the primaries, in the Republican primaries, and Gerald Ford, as sitting president, has a slight advantage over Reagan. So ultimately Reagan fails to win the Republican primary. Ford goes up against Jimmy Carter and loses that election, but Reagan decides not to let his loss in 1976 stop him, and in 1980, once again, he runs for president, and he's much more successful in 1980 because Carter's presidency had been quite disastrous, and Carter, while meaning in many respects, had struggled under a lot of things that were in some cases outside of his control, had also made some kind of poor decisions, and Americans in 1980 were extremely frustrated because the economy was absolutely in shambles, the American foreign policy was kind of a mess, America was not looking so good, and they sort of took this out on Carter, and in really, in many ways, a landslide election, they turned against Carter and they went with Reagan. Reagan had a very strong appeal to especially middle-class conservatives. This is really where he shined, especially in the South and the Midwest, and really, Reagan supported these so-called Reagan Democrats in many cases, people who were socially liberal in some ways, but were economically conservative, and felt that Reagan was a far more successful candidate than perhaps Carter was to fix the economy and to fix a lot of the economic and social problems that were going on in the United States. This was also part of the broader realignment and white backlash against democratic policies in Vietnam, and especially the Great Society and civil rights, that led to a stronger Republican presence in the South and in parts of the Midwest that had traditionally been more democratic strongholds. So Reagan really benefits from this realignment. He offers hope, and he offers hope in the wake of this sort of disillusion and crisis of the 1970s. Reagan, by this point, is older, he's a well-established guy, he's grandfatherly in some ways, and so Americans liked him because he offered a very positive, glowing perspective on that America's best days were still ahead, America's best days were not behind it. As a result of this, he has a positive outlook, he has a very positive message, and he wins a great deal of support from these middle-class conservative Americans, whether or not they were Republicans. In his campaign, he promised in stagflation, in this stagnant economy, in this inflation that was just killing American savings, that was killing American businesses, and that was just causing all sorts of problems, promises to restore America's place in the world. He's going to make America a country that can hold its head high, a country that's not embarrassed and not ashamed of what it does. And ultimately, to restore confidence, both domestically and internationally. And so it's a very powerful, very positive message that he's promoting. Reagan wins the election in 1980 and assumes office during a period of, again, still crisis, this crisis of the 70s that had continued into the early part of the 1980s. Economic crisis, there's a recession, inflation, money essentially is becoming worth less and as a result, Americans have less money to work with in their daily lives because their wages aren't going up to match this double-digit inflation, upwards of, in some cases, 16-18% inflation every year. So he's dealing with this economic crisis. He's also dealing with the legacy of Vietnam, this sort of Vietnam syndrome or Vietnam effect that I mentioned in the previous lecture. Also the legacy of Watergate, this legacy of extreme distrust in political leaders. And he also assumes a political crisis that had come about under Jimmy Carter, the Iran hostage crisis. During the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Iranian revolutionaries had taken Americans hostage who had been in the embassy and Carter had been trying very hard to negotiate their freedom and had not been successful and Reagan comes into office and almost immediately the hostages are freed. For this, Reagan had almost nothing to do with it in a sense, but it's a huge win as he comes into office. So, in many respects, for him, his first term in office is a response to these crises. In many ways, for Reagan, he's championing a conservative revolution against this sort of New Deal state that had been created under Franklin Roosevelt and expanded later under the Democrats in the 1960s, Kennedy, and later Lyndon Johnson, and articulating a claim that government programs in a way did more harm than good. That policies like welfare and various other sort of social programs where the government was essentially providing a social safety net or giving welfare support to poor Americans were in fact harming those people, that in fact they would be more successful if they didn't get government handouts and they went out and found a job. This is sort of one of Reagan's broader critiques of the New Deal state is that the government shouldn't be everything to everyone. The government shouldn't provide a handout to every person, that people had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make their own lives successful as opposed to expecting the government to provide a handout. Domestically, I'm going to talk a little bit about Reagan's domestic policy and then we'll talk a little bit about his foreign policy. His domestic policy was really about redefining the role of the state, kind of as I just mentioned. One of the big things he pushes for, he and the Republicans in Congress pushed for early on is a continuation of policies that Jimmy Carter had initiated of deregulation, deregulating American industries. The argument being that American industries were being choked by government rules and regulations and that if you had fewer rules and regulations, American industry would be much more successful. Jimmy Carter had begun the process of deregulation of the U.S. airline industry. Airlines were very heavily regulated. They were very restricted in what they could charge people for airline tickets. They had to submit these very detailed tariffs to the U.S. government if they wanted to raise rates and justify why they raised rates. Carter and then Reagan in his deregulation argues that in fact prices will go down, service will go up, and people will receive a better value if the government steps out of the picture. Reagan's legacy, of course, is deregulation, but he doesn't start it. Carter's really the one who starts to bring about deregulation. Reagan and Republicans in office in the 80s focused on deregulation in a number of areas in particular. Banking. Also, the savings and loan industry. Savings and loan, which were these thrift savings organizations, which were really intended more as community savings banks. Deregulating things like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, who were seen to be so restrictive in all these crazy rules and regulations that they had for businesses that businesses spent so much time trying to comply with these rules that they didn't have time to make money. All these efforts to reduce government regulation of businesses. Also Reagan is very strongly against labor unions. Of course, ironic since he had been the president of a labor union, the Screen Actors Guild, but Reagan in his conservative shift in the 1950s starts to see labor unions as part of the problem. Labor unions impede businesses from being profitable. They impede businesses from being more flexible. He takes a strong stand when in 1980 a federal labor union called PATCO, which was a labor union that represented air traffic controllers, threatens to go on strike in 1981 and wants higher wages. Reagan argues strenuously that this will shut down the airline industry, this will shut down travel if all these air traffic controllers go on strike, and essentially tells them that it threatens them. If they go on strike, he will take action. While PATCO goes on strike, Reagan essentially uses an executive order to abolish the union and uses military air traffic controllers in place of civilians until new civilian air traffic controllers can be hired. He basically kills the union, destroys it, it's gone. This is a lesson for many that Reagan was going to be very conservative and that he wasn't going to put up with what he saw as these liberal or democratic organizations who were interfering with economic prosperity. Another policy that Reagan's advisors pushed very strongly for was a theory that was called supply-side, and often times termed trickle-down, this is how it often becomes known, supply-side or trickle-down economic theory. The idea behind this was that if you reduce the tax burden on the upper classes, if you reduce the tax burden on people with money or businesses, that more of that money will then trickle down into the economy. There was a push to restructure the U.S. tax code, reduce the tax rate on the upper classes which was actually quite significantly high, the upper levels of the tax rates for some people were talking about 60-70% and maybe perhaps even higher in places. There was a significant reduction in the tax rate for the upper classes and people who were making upwards of $250,000 a year or $1,000,000 a year and those rates are dropped down to around 30-35%, so 80-70% down to 35%, that's a significant savings in your tax bill every year. The argument was that most of that money would then be spent, rich people would want to spend that money because they didn't need to have to save it because they were rich already, they'd want to spend that money on things that would be luxury items, but the people who made those luxury items would make money, they would in turn spend the money for their employees and their employees would spend that money, so ultimately that money would trickle down into the economy. There's some question whether that really happened, oftentimes rich people in fact did just put that money in the bank or they put it in investments and they didn't really just go out and spend a lot of money on luxury items, so there's certainly some question whether supply-side economic theory was really successful that Reagan and many of his supporters and conservatives argued that it was. In turn though, Reagan argued that if you allow for supply-side economics to do its job and there's more money in the economy so people have access to more money, the other side of that is that the government needed to cut funding for social programs, that too much government money is being spent on social programs. And Reagan sort of uses this story that he talks about a number of times and that's really never been shown to be accurate of people on welfare driving Cadillacs, people on welfare using scams to collect multiple welfare checks and then basically living like rich people even though it's tax money coming from the government. And so Reagan argues that there's too much money being spent on these sort of great society social welfare programs and welfare reform needs to happen, there needs to be this process of deinstitutionalization, people are just becoming too used to living on welfare and then the idea was that you had multiple generations of people who had never had a job, they just lived on welfare their whole lives. So Reagan pushes very strongly to change the rules for welfare, to change the system of how welfare functions. He of course argued strongly that social security needed to be protected, old people needed to have their social safety net when they retired but at the same time there needed to be a reduction in the amount of money spent on various welfare programs and other sorts of social educational programs, programs to provide food stamps, things like all these sorts of programs that needed to be slashed because the government was spending too much money on them. Last point to mention about Reagan's kind of social policies is that Reagan was dealing with a lot of sort of public-private issues during his administration. Debates over abortion become very powerful during the 1980s and whether or not the government should play a role in restricting access to abortions. Religious matters become a major source of tension during this period, whether or not the government should be supporting kind of religious charities or other religious organizations in the role that very conservative Christian organizations should have in advising political officials. Reagan and many of his advisors were very strongly conservative bent. So all these sorts of issues of public and private matters play out during Reagan's administration. One of the impacts of his supply-side policies, and we'll come back to this when we talk about foreign policy, is that it starts to generate increasing debt by cutting taxes, by sort of cutting the amount of money that government spent on social programs, though that was certainly less than the amount of money that was cut in taxes, and through his foreign policy decisions, we'll talk about in just a minute, we begin to see an increase in government debt. In other words, the government was spending more money than it was taking in in taxes and was essentially having to take out loans from other countries, oftentimes private individuals, to cover that operating shortfall. So this is a period where people start to worry because increasingly the Japanese were buying U.S. debt, and there becomes this great fear in the 1980s that pretty soon Japan's going to own the entire country because it's buying all the debt, much like today their fear about the Chinese purchasing U.S. debt. So people during the 1980s become far more concerned about the national debt. It was growing exponentially, and it seemed like it was growing out of control, and how were we going to stop this debt crisis that was developing? Well, Reagan's foreign policy in many ways contributed to that debt crisis. It was in a sense a response, as I mentioned earlier, to this Vietnam syndrome, this fear that the U.S. commit itself to being a strong power in the international stage, and the U.S. was fearful about committing troops to military actions around the world, of rebuilding its military strength in the wake of the Vietnam War. Reagan argues strongly that in order to be a powerful nation, you have to have a powerful military, and America needed to get over its Vietnam syndrome, and needed to instead embrace a strong military, and be much more aggressive against the Soviet Union. The only way to ultimately defeat the Soviet Union, he argued, was to be aggressive against the Soviet Union, and take a strong hard line against them. Reagan pushes for new aspects of containment. He really revives the Cold War, which had been somewhat settled during this era of detente of the mid-1970s. He pushes for support of anti-communist authoritarian regimes. Even if they didn't support civil rights, even if they abused their people, as long as they were anti-communist, he was okay with that. There's a lot of support for South Africa during this time period, because they were seen as a strong bulwark of capitalism against the threat of communism in Africa, even though South Africa had apartheid, and was absolutely engaging in horrible practices towards the African population, the non-white populations in South Africa. Support for dictators in Latin and South America, who were anti-communist, but were also abusing human rights of their citizens, and other things like that. Reagan's also willing to engage in lots of clandestine operations. The CIA and the US military engage in a lot of clandestine operations during this decade. There are a number of scandals that come about as a result of this. The most infamous one during this period being the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the US government Congress in 1984 banned aid to the Contras in Nicaragua, which was a freedom-fighting group that was extremely violent, and in some ways almost terroristic in their practices. But Reagan's administration wanted to provide aid to the Contras, and they arranged in 1985 to sell arms to Iran, who was an enemy of the United States, which was almost in a way after the Iranian Revolution, was seen as a direct threat to the United States. They arranged to sell these arms to the Iranians through covert channels, and then skim off part of the profits to support the Contras in Nicaragua. Many laws were being violated as a part of this activity, but it was sort of an example of this broader commitment to supporting anti-communist forces throughout the world. In Reagan's relationship, we can say the same in Afghanistan. There was a great deal of support during the 1980s for the Mujahideen, the anti-communist Islamic freedom fighters in Afghanistan, which of course also has very powerful consequences for the United States in the decades that follow. One of Reagan's direct policies, direct engagements against the Soviet Union, was to engage in a new form of arms race, essentially to end detente, and to focus on a policy called the Strategic Defense Initiative. Oftentimes a lot of people nicknamed this policy Star Wars, because the idea was that they were going to launch satellites and other systems into space that would make it impossible for the Soviet Union to ever launch nuclear weapons by missile against the United States. They would essentially shoot down all these missiles. The idea was that they were going to build this system, and it would give the US an edge in the Cold War, because if suddenly the Soviet Union couldn't attack the United States anymore using missiles, it would make the US a much more powerful adversary. This really quite frightened the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union engaged in a huge arms race in order to build up a massive stockpile of nuclear missiles and nuclear warheads to try to defeat this Strategic Defense Initiative that Reagan talked about. The Strategic Defense Initiative was mostly propaganda. The tests that were shown publicly were oftentimes faked. A lot of the technology didn't actually work very well, but what it did do is it scared the Soviet Union into spending huge sums of money to try to match the United States' efforts on military spending. Reagan also earmarked lots of money for re-expanding the US Navy, expanding the US Army, and the Soviet Union tried to keep up, and just struggled to keep up. Reagan also engaged in public diplomacy, going to places like Berlin and giving speeches here at the Brandenburg Gate about how the Soviet Union needed to end the division of Eastern Europe, needed to bring down the wall in Berlin that was divided east from west, needed to open up the parts of Eastern Europe that were under extremely tight communist control. So Reagan really does a full-court press against the Soviet Union on matters of opening up Soviet society, of ending the Cold War, of essentially admitting defeat, and admitting that communism was wrong and was not a good policy. All this military spending, in addition to all these domestic policies, contributes, as I said, to a huge, huge national debt. The debt during this time period grows exponentially, from about $997 billion, with a B, all the way up to $2.8 trillion, with a T. A massive increase in the national debt, and of course today it's much higher than that. Reagan admits that one of his great disappointments is that the US debt went as high as it did during his administration. But ultimately, his policies are very successful in destabilizing the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union essentially spends itself almost into bankruptcy trying to keep up with Western and especially American practices. So certainly, as we'll talk about in the next lecture, the Soviet Union becomes increasingly unstable during this period, much of that having to do with the conservative policies that Reagan pushes during his eight years in office during the 1980s. Ultimately, to assess Reagan's terms in office, and why he has such an important role within this broader conversation that begins under his administration and continues to the present day, is that Reagan spoke to the 80s generation. He really communicated well with people in the 1980s. He sounded like he really understood their concerns, he understood their problems. He understood that economically the United States was in trouble, and that needed to be fixed, it needed to be solved. He understood that people had lost confidence in the US's place in the world, and the US needed to become a strong, powerful nation again in order to assert that it was a superpower and that it could challenge the power of the Soviet Union. At the same time, he harkened back to an older generation. He was grandfatherly. He had grown up in the Depression. He had grown up in the 1950s, in the early era of the Cold War. For many people, he was a strangely calming figure. He was a figure who inspired confidence. By being a part of this earlier 1930s, 1940s, 1950s era, and being part of that era, gave him a lot more credibility, a lot more credence in what he pushed in the policies, the economic and domestic and international policies that he pushed. Reagan was very successful because he really was somebody who was in the right place at the right time, to be a very powerful figure in US politics. To really shift the conversation in politics away from the crisis of the 70s to a conversation more about the relationship of the government with the society, the relationship economically with the role of the government, and also the relationship between the United States and countries throughout the world, especially the Soviet Union. This was really ultimately what Reagan's important contributions were during his period in office in the 1980s.