Recently, an editor for Media Matters named Terry Krepel took me to task for articles I had written about the negative impact that the policies of Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had on blacks in the United States. As well, he chided me for pointing out that FDR named a Klansman—Hugo Black—to the U. S. Supreme Court.
“Nowhere does Kline offer evidence that Wilson or Roosevelt (or Black, for that matter) were any more extreme in their racial views than that of the general white population in the United States at the time,” Krepel writes. Okay, pal, you’re on. Here’s the first installment.
Although the rules of that era require more study, so do the men and women who took exception to them. One could argue that they truly define American exceptionalism at its best.
As it happened, at the time that New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt was plotting his first presidential campaign, a young man named Ronald Reagan, born when Wilson was still governor of New Jersey, was playing football for a small college in Illinois for a coach named Ralph McKinzie. One of Reagan’s teammates was a lineman named William Franklin Burghardt.
“In 1931, the Eureka team traveled by bus to play undefeated Elmhurst,” veteran political reporter Lou Cannon recounted in his book Governor Reagan. “McKinzie left the bus and went inside to check the team into a hotel.”
“This took so long that Reagan left the bus to find out what was happening. He found the coach arguing with the hotel manager, who told McKinzie that the hotel wouldn’t accommodate Burghardt and the team’s other colored player – and neither would any other hotel in town.”
“McKinzie didn’t know what to do. The coach thought the entire team should sleep on the bus, but Reagan said that would embarrass the black players because everyone would be discomforted. He had a better idea, Dixon was nearby, Reagan told McKinzie, and Burghardt and Jim Rattan, the other black player, could come home with him.”
“Are you sure?” McKinzie asked. “Reagan insisted that the players would be welcome at his home and McKinzie provided the cab fare to Dixon,” Cannon wrote.
Coincidentally, Reagan was born in February—Black History Month. One of Reagan’s Hollywood cronies, more liberal than he, has an interesting memory of a telling incident involving the future president that took place long after the Eureka-Elmhurst game was played.
“While at Warner Bros. he belonged to an excellent golf club that had the virtue of being close to the studio,” producer Armand Deutsch wrote in his memoir, Me and Bogie. “He enjoyed it and loved the game.”
“Once, in his ignorance, he proposed a Jewish friend for membership. The action was scoffed at and derided. When the name was posted, as required, some members threw darts at it.”
“Ronnie took the paper down and put it in his card case. He showed it often through the years to people as he expressed his outrage. He resigned immediately.”
“I had the opportunity of learning early on that he is a man of strong, steadfast views.” Reagan was still alive when Deutsch’s memoir was published in 1991.
Again, don’t expect vignettes such as these to make their way into history courses, especially since, unlike much of what is there, they actually are true and verifiable. But above all, they are inspirational.
Dare we say it, they show words and deeds worthy of emulation. They remind us that Ronald Reagan not only gave great speeches, he did great things.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
