Three decades before the White House, Ronald Reagan was being assembled in plain sight. This episode traces the apprenticeship most highlight reels skip: the New Deal Democrat who became FBI informant "T-10," the B-list actor who turned a corporate speaking tour into a political movement, and the lapsed Midwestern kid who would one day broker the marriage of the Republican Party and white evangelical America. In postwar Hollywood, where Reagan, as Screen Actors Guild president, simultaneously fed names to the FBI and lent SAG's institutional cover to the blacklist. His October 1947 HUAC testimony was polite; the private file was not. Careers ended on the strength of "fraternal" reports. Then in 1954, General Electric Theater, and eight years on the GE plant circuit under Lemuel Boulware, the hardline VP who handed Reagan a reading list of Hayek and Hazlitt and turned his pep talks into a portable free market gospel. Corporations were buying preachers and performers to sell their "anti-union, low regulation" gospel. By 1962 GE had cut him loose, but "The Speech" was finished and in 1964 it launched Goldwater and, with him, Reagan himself. Finally, the wedding of cross and capital. Reagan, never a churchgoing adult, became the indispensable broker between corporate donors and a politically homeless evangelical electorate. In Dallas, August 1980, he closed the deal with one line: "I know you can't endorse me, but I want you to know I endorse you." That coalition outlived him still runs our country. In Part 2 we talk about the longterm staggering impact of Reaganomics. References Balmer, R. (2021). Bad faith: Race and the rise of the religious right. Eerdmans. Cannon, L. (2000). President Reagan: The role of a lifetime. PublicAffairs. Crespino, J. (2007). The new right and the southern strategy. Journal of Southern History, 73(4), 895–924. Critchlow, D. T. (2005). Phyllis Schlafly and grassroots conservatism: A woman’s crusade. Princeton University Press. Dochuk, D. (2011). From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain‑folk religion, grassroots politics, and the rise of evangelical conservatism. W. W. Norton. FitzGerald, F. (2017). The evangelicals: The struggle to shape America. Simon & Schuster. Hancock, A. (2004). The politics of disgust: The public identity of the welfare queen. New York University Press. Kohler‑Hausmann, J. (2017). Getting tough: Welfare and imprisonment in 1970s America. Princeton University Press. Kruse, K. M. (2015). One nation under God: How corporate America invented Christian America. Basic Books. Levin, J. (2019). The queen: The forgotten life behind an American myth. Little, Brown and Company. Mittelstadt, J. (2005). From welfare to workfare: The unintended consequences of liberal reform, 1945–1965. University of North Carolina Press. Nadasen, P. (2005). Welfare warriors: The welfare rights movement in the United States. Routledge. Nickerson, M. M. (2012). The Reagan administration’s response to the gender gap. Journal of Policy History, 24(1), 115–140. Perlstein, R. (2020). Reaganland: America’s right turn 1976–1980. Simon & Schuster. Reagan, R. (1986, February 15). Radio address to the nation on welfare reform [Speech transcript]. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/radio-address-nation-welfare-reform Rich, C. G. (2020). The “welfare queen” goes to the polls: Race‑based fractures in gender politics. Georgetown Law Journal, 108(4), 1–67. Shilts, R. (1987). And the band played on: Politics, people, and the AIDS epidemic. St. Martin’s Press. Sick, G. (1991). October surprise: America’s hostages in Iran and the election of Ronald Reagan. Times Books. Troy, G. (2009). The great communicator: Media and the Reagan image. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 39(3), 458–470. Unger, C. (2024). Den of spies: Reagan, Carter, and the secret history of the treason that stole the White House. Mariner Books. Wilentz, S. (2008). The age of Reagan: A history, 1974–2008. HarperCollins.
