Reagan supported the New Deal, but later came to believe that agencies like the Works Progress Administration, which put people to work building roads, bridges, and other projects, was undermined bureaucracy– and specifically, federal welfare workers who discouraged able-bodied men from working because they were already being taken care of by a welfare system.
Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, but spent most of his youth in nearby Dixon. Reagan’s father was an Irish-Catholic and an alcoholic. His weakness with alcohol was not hard times drinking but “good times” drinking.
Why did Whittaker Chambers’ 1952 work, Witness, appeal to conservatives?
What was the job that Reagan wanted after high school that– had he gotten it– would have resulted in his never leaving Illinois?
Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan—although both Republicans—were fierce opponents who generally disliked each other and refused to work together in the 1950s and 1960s.
Reagan had very little success in acting. He played in only a few B films during his career, and never landed a major motion picture deal.
In the early 1930s, Reagan was a sports announcer for a radio station first in Davenport, and then in Des Moines, Iowa. It was in this job that he began to learn about airtime delivery and cadence and giving his words more emotion.
The founder of National Review in 1955, and the author of the popular God and Man at Yale (1951).
How was the family transformed in the post-WWII era?
Which the following is TRUE about Harold Bell Wright’s That Printer of Udell’s (1903)?
Which film did Reagan believe to be the finest picture he ever appeared in? It was also his only film in which there was talk of an Academy Award.
This conservative vice president and labor strategist at General Electric championed free market fundamentalism, lower taxes, and limited government. He was also a staunch anti-communist, and became a mentor and father figure to Reagan.
Virtually all postwar conservatives, including Reagan, held two core beliefs: that flawed human nature was an unchanging mixture of both good and evil, and that an objective moral order existed, independent of humanity.
This 1953 work offered a sweeping account of conservative tradition, noting that it was rooted in the “moral imagination” of Edmund Burke and his defense of tradition, order, and “permanent things.” It also offered a definition of conservativism, insisting that a conservative was someone convinced that “civilized society requires orders and classes, believes that man has an evil nature and therefore must control his will and appetite,” and accepts that “tradition provides a check on man’s anarchic impulse, and maintains a belief in a divine intent that rules society as well as conscience.”
In his 1955 essay “The Pseudoconservatives,” historian Richard Hofstadter identified several reasons for the presence of conservatives in the post-World War II era. Which of the following is NOT one of those reasons?
Which of the following is true about Reagan’s early speeches such as “Encroaching Control” and “America the Beautiful”?
This 1950 book argued that liberalism prevailed so completely in American life that conservatism might be viewed as forever illegitimate, and that liberalism was not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.
This traditional conservative was an English professor at the University of Chicago, who, in 1948, published Ideas Have Consequences. Overall, he argued that the West had abandoned its belief in absolute and eternal truths and had placed its faith in relativism, rationalism, and human perfectibility. The result was that secularism and pragmatism had eroded the moral foundations required for free, democratic societies.
In his Omnipotent Government (1944), this Austrian-born economist argued that Nazism was not a product of capitalism but of government control.
Which of the following is NOT true about the John Birch Society?
Ronald Reagan was a staunch Democrat in his youth. Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt was his hero.
This Democrat from Iowa was a liberal who broke with Democratic President Harry Truman in 1946. He charged Truman with arrogance and incompetence in the realm of foreign affairs, and insisted that the U.S. was responsible (in part) for the Soviet distrust of the West. In 1948, he bolted the party and ran as a Progressive candidate for President.
Which of the following is true about the postwar American economy?
In his 1944 work, The Road to Serfdom, this Austrian-born economist argued that economic planning leads to dictatorship. “Economic control,” he wrote, “is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends.”
This author of A Choice Not An Echo (1964), was a key figure in grassroots conservatism, possessing a talent for translating conservative ideas to grassroots activists and motivating them to achieve goals. A critic of “me too Republicans,” this conservative activist mobilized the grassroots on behalf of Barry Goldwater in the Republican presidential primaries of 1964.
Which of the following is true about Reagan in the late 1940s and early 1950s?
While President Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961) was the first Republican elected President since 1932, he was not especially popular with many “far right” conservatives. Why?
Which of following is NOT true regarding Barry Goldwater in 1964?
The Reagans were a wealthy Republican family that did not experience the economic hardships of the Great Depression.
Reagan cast his first vote for President for this man:
Identify and explain the different strands of postwar American conservatism. Using the Pemberton text (chapter 3), why did conservativism thrive in the United States by the late 1960s and early 1970s?