Where did New Deal Democrat Ronald Reagan come up with all of those free-market ideas that he espoused once entering the political arena in the 1960s? John Fund investigates for National Review Online.
Another person who got hooked on FEE’s materials was a middle-aged actor named Ronald Reagan. The story is fascinating, as detailed in the 2006 book The Education of Ronald Reagan, by Thomas Evans.
From 1954 to 1962, Reagan worked as the host of CBS’s top-rated General Electric Theater and served as General Electric’s official spokesman. For weeks at a time he would tour GE’s 139 plants, eventually meeting most of the 250,000 employees in them. Reagan himself estimated that he spent 4,000 hours before GE microphones giving talks that started out with Hollywood patter but ended up as full-throated warnings about Big Government. “GE tours became almost a post-graduate course in political science for me,” he later wrote. “By 1960, I had completed the process of self-conversion.”
Evans, a lawyer who served in the Reagan administration before turning amateur historian, identified Reagan’s mentor at GE as Lemuel Boulware, the man behind both the company’s PR efforts and its labor-negotiation policy. Boulware believed that at the start of contract talks, GE should make an offer it viewed as fair to stockholders, workers, and customers and then stick with it, allowing for almost no changes. This “take it or leave it” approach was so successful (strikes became almost unknown at GE) that it entered the lexicon of labor relations as “Boulwarism.”
But Boulware also believed that the policy would work only if executives went over the heads of union officials and educated the workers directly about why they had a stake in GE’s prosperity. Evans notes that “a worker who learned that GE’s profit margin was much smaller than he had been led to believe or that union officials had not been truthful with him” was unlikely to join a picket line or insist on over-the-top demands. Thanks to his outreach to workers, and his surveys of them, Boulware was “reputed to understand blue-collar workers better than anyone in the country.”
Boulware’s efforts included an elaborate campaign to educate GE’s workers as well as the public on the moral and economic benefits of free enterprise. He encouraged workers to form book clubs and read free-market texts published by FEE, especially Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson and Wilhelm Ropke’s Economics of the Free Society. He also encouraged his managers to read William F. Buckley Jr.’s brand-new National Review.
Boulware’s free-market message so penetrated GE’s work force that Reagan, his traveling ambassador, quickly saw how important it was for him to become familiar with what the workers were reading. Over time, his own reading and his conversations with GE workers had an effect. By the late 1950s, Reagan was lambasting those “who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without automatically concluding the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.”
