Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [16]
Although they belonged to different churches, Jack and Nelle shared a strong belief in religious and racial tolerance. While the Disciples of Christ had an anti-Catholic slant, the “brotherhood of man” was very much part Early Ronnie: 1911–1932
2 7
of their creed. Jack once slept in his car rather than stay in a hotel that did not accept Jews. He would not let Neil and Ronald see D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation when it came to town in a revival, because, as he put it,
“it deals with the Ku Klux Klan against the colored folks, and I’m damned if anyone in this family will go see it. The Klan’s the Klan, and a sheet’s a sheet, and any man who wears one over his head is a bum.”57
Dixon had twelve black families. They were not allowed in the town’s hotel, beauty salons, or barbershops, but they could eat at its luncheon-ettes and go to the movie theater, though they had to sit in the balcony.
Neil would sit in the balcony with two of his black high school friends, and Nelle thought nothing of having them over for dinner. Yet this was a town where the Ku Klux Klan had staged parades and burned crosses,58
and where Ronald remembered a race riot that began when, as he put it,
“a Negro bum slashed a white bum.” As Reagan biographer Lou Cannon tells it, “The whites who ostensibly had been living in peace with the Negro community in Dixon now advanced on Negro homes and terrorized the inhabitants. Reagan recalls whites hurling Negro children onto freight-train boxcars and the screaming youngsters being carried hundreds of miles away in fear and panic.”59
Still, no historic figure was more venerated in this Illinois town than the man who freed the slaves. On June 28, 1924, the Telegraph announced:
“The life of Abraham Lincoln will be acted on the Dixon Athletic ground by 600 people for four nights starting July 9th. Besides the actors there will be 100 horses and two bands in the spectacle. The pageant is being given by Dixon Post No. 12, American Legion. . . . The vast epic of Lincoln’s life will be unfolded in 24 memorable scenes [with] large groups of dancers for the six beautiful ballets that are part of the spectacle. But it is not a ‘high brow’ affair. There is nothing that a child cannot grasp and fully enjoy. The story is as simple as the life of the backwoods boy who got to be president. ” Neil and Ronald played Union soldiers.60
At dawn on Easter Sunday, 1926, fifteen-year-old Ronald led his church’s annual Sunrise Prayer Meeting on the Hennepin Avenue Bridge. By then he was already teaching Sunday school in the morning and occasionally leading the Christian Endeavor prayer meetings on Sunday nights. He was a sophomore at North Dixon High and had fallen in love with his classmate Margaret Cleaver, one of Reverend Cleaver’s three very proper daughters.
Margaret insisted on keeping things on a just-friends basis until their senior 2 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House year. The popular minister became something of a surrogate father for the teenage Ronald and even taught him how to drive.
Reagan later noted that Margaret was like his mother, “short, pretty, auburn-haired and intelligent.” She was the brightest girl in their class, down-to-earth, sure of herself, and rather serious. She terrified Neil, who said she “spat tacks.”61 Ronald tried to hide his father’s drinking problem from her, but, as he later wrote in his post-presidential memoir, An American Life, “one day when I was out with Margaret, she brought up Jack’s drinking; it was during one of the times when he had gone off the wagon, and somebody had given her a vivid account