Even in death, Ronald Reagan is never out of the news. His diaries immediately soar to the top of the bestseller list, passing numerous other books on the man along the way. Republican presidential candidates trip over themselves to invoke his name. The president of Poland flies to the 40th president’s library to pay one of his nation’s highest posthumous tributes. Last month featured a spate of articles on the 20th anniversary of his Brandenburg Gate address.
Yet, what once again escaped notice in this latest round of Reagan books and news was the anniversary of two moments unnoticed even by the most rabid Reaganites; both are important, interesting markers of the man and his presidency, and both happened around this time 25 and 50 years ago – and at the same place, a tiny college in western Illinois.
When conservatives think of Ronald Reagan and his alma mater, Eureka College, they might conjure up a vague image of an idyllic campus amid the plains of the Midwest, where the one-day president, circa 1930, studied some economics. Nothing jumps out as especially memorable about Reagan and Eureka.
Quite the contrary, Reagan made two significant speeches at Eureka long after he graduated: in June 1957 and May 1982. The speeches were very revealing of what he saw as the great animating force of his political life: his goal of undermining atheistic, expansionary Soviet communism. One can draw a straight line from these speeches to Reagan’s ultimate legacy.
When the alum of the Class of ’32 spoke as Eureka’s commencement speaker on June 7, 1957, he was famous for his work in movies and television; his then highly rated weekly show GE Theatre was watched by millions. Not the typical actor, Reagan came to make a strong political statement on the great struggle that he saw confronting America.
Citing a possibly apocryphal story about the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Reagan told Eureka’s graduating seniors about an unidentified man allegedly in the state house in Philadelphia that day. “Were my soul trembling on the verge of eternity, my hand freezing in death,” he dramatically quoted the stranger, “I would still implore you to remember this truth: God has given America to be free.” Reagan employed a line he would repeated throughout his career: “This is a land of destiny and our forefathers found their way here by some Divine system of selective service gathered here to fulfill a mission to advance man a further step in his climb from the swamps.”
Where he went from there was remarkable. Here, said Reagan, in this “destiny,” in this “truth,” was “the first challenge to the people of this new land, the charging of this nation with a responsibility to all mankind. And down through the years with but few lapses the people of America have fulfilled their destiny.”
Reagan determined that God had not only chosen America to be free, but gave the nation that freedom with a larger responsibility to all mankind. Reagan trusted that he, too, held that responsibility and would fulfill that destiny.
Reagan translated all of this into the Cold War struggle. “Today we find ourselves involved in another struggle,” he told Eureka’s upper classmen. “The Cold War,” he explained, “isn’t really a new struggle at all. It is the oldest struggle of human kind, as old as man himself.” This was a “simple struggle between those of us who believe that man has the dignity and sacred right and the ability to choose and shape his own destiny and those who do not so believe.” He characterized the struggle as an “irreconcilable conflict” between “those who believe in the sanctity of individual freedom and those who believe in the supremacy of the state.”
He wasn’t finished. In the next line came words of “evil” that would presage his Evil Empire language decades later: “(A)nd make no mistake about,” said Reagan, “this is an evil force.” He informed his youthful audience that they were “fighting against the best organized and the most capable enemy of freedom and of right and decency that has ever been abroad in the world.”
The commencement speaker certainly had the audience’s attention, as he would 25 years later when he returned for another commencement address, this time on May 9, 1982, and this time as president of the United States, committed to waging battle against the Soviet menace in a way he could only talk about before.
Handing little Eureka some big publicity, Reagan made a big prediction, insisting that the “course” Soviet leaders had chosen would “undermine the foundations of the Soviet system.” He identified the ingredients setting the stage for that unraveling: “The Soviet empire is faltering because rigid centralized control has destroyed incentives for innovation, efficiency and individual achievement.”
Notably, when Reagan said such things, most observers thought the Soviet system was not faltering.
He said more, insisting that America and its allies not help the Soviet economy as it approached this terminal phase: “(T)he Soviets must not have access to Western technology … and we must not subsidize the Soviet economy. The Soviet Union must make the difficult choices brought on by its … economic shortcomings.”
Reagan told his alma mater that the Soviet elite held power so tightly because, “as we have seen in Poland,” they “fear what might happen if even the smallest amount of control slips from their grasp. They fear the infectiousness of even a little freedom.”
And, indeed, it was the infectiousness of that freedom that made its way throughout the Communist Bloc, eventually sealing American victory in the Cold War.
In retrospect, it should not be surprising that Reagan chose Eureka for these major pronouncements – unforgotten as they are.
As a young man, Reagan “wanted to get into that school so badly that it hurt.” This was in large part because of the spiritual draw of the college; its incorporation of religious values into all aspects of a student’s experience. Those who most influenced Reagan – including an influential pastor and the pastor’s son – had gone there. It was a Disciples of Christ college, the denomination of his mother. “Everything good that has happened to me,” he said later, “started here on this campus.”
Reagan seemed to try to pay back Eureka, leaving the unheralded college with its own moments in history. It is not Reagan’s fault but ours for not recognizing what he left there not in the early 1930s but in 1957 and 1982. It was there that the tiny college’s most famous alum laid some footprints in the sand, speaking to us today about where he was headed in the pages of history.
(Paul Kengor is author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperPerennial, 2007) and professor of political science and director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College in Grove City, Pa.)
