Ronnie and Nancy Read Online Free PDF Page A

do-gooder, a Bible-thumper, a teetotaler. He was a bit of a clown; she was a bit of a saint.
    But they also had a lot in common, starting with their immigrant rural roots and their mutual desire to transcend those roots and make something of themselves. Both Jack and Nelle were amateur actors, autodidacts, and stylish dressers who stood out in the series of small Midwestern towns where Jack went from job to job and Nelle fixed up rented home after rented home. Both felt a need to be different, which expressed itself in Nelle’s poetry writing and elocution recitals and in Jack’s political views—he was an outspoken Democrat in solidly Republican rural Illinois. There was a whiff of bohemianism in their insisting that their sons call them Nelle and Jack, not Mother and Father. Both loved an audience; Jack’s preferred venue was Early Ronnie: 1911–1932
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    the saloon, Nelle’s the church. Jack liked to joke: “Jesus walked barefoot . . .
    but then, He didn’t have to deal with our Illinois winters, now did He?”7
    One of Nelle’s mottos was “To higher, nobler things my mind is bent.”8
    The Reagans were strivers, joiners, dreamers—they wanted more out of life for themselves and their sons. Her bourgeois yearnings were matched by his “burning ambition to succeed,” to use his son’s phrasing.9
    In this they were hardly alone in early twentieth-century Main Street America, where Horatio Alger heroes were lining up for membership in newly constructed country clubs. Upward mobility has always been the great American motif; the self-made man and his social-climbing wife are all-American archetypes; the house on the hill is still the American dream.
    But Jack and Nelle never made it. They never even owned a house until their son bought them one in Hollywood. As the Great Depression descended upon the Farm Belt in the late 1920s, and Jack’s drinking became more and more of a problem, the Reagans were reduced to taking in boarders, and Nelle retreated further into religion. There would be good years in business and happy days at home, but Jack would never achieve his dream of financial independence and respectable status. As a family friend candidly put it, “Jack always wanted to be ‘cut-glass Irish’; at best he was ‘lace-curtain,’ but that never had a way of registering with him.”10
    The O’Regans came from Ballyporeen, County Tipperary, Ireland. Jack’s grandfather, a poor potato farmer, left home during the famine of the 1840s and lived in London for a few years, where he worked as a soap-maker and Anglicized the family name before crossing the Atlantic. Nelle’s grandfather, a Wilson from Renfrewshire, Scotland, fought against the British in Canada during the Mackenzie Rebellion in the 1830s. Both families settled in the flat, fertile farm country of northwestern Illinois sometime before the Civil War. Illinois was on the frontier then—the last Indians had been driven out of the state only in 1832, after the Black Hawk War—and it was still possible to stake a claim to undeveloped land and homestead it. That is what both the Reagans and Wilsons did near the small Mississippi River port of Fulton in Whiteside County, about one hundred miles west of Chicago.11 During this time Illinois came to be known as the Prairie State, and by 1860 it led the nation in wheat and corn production. But neither the Wilsons nor the Reagans prospered.
    Jack Reagan was born in Fulton on July 13, 1883, and lived in a two-room farmhouse until he was orphaned at the age of six, after both his 1 8
    Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House parents died of tuberculosis. He was raised by an aunt and uncle who had opened a general store in the new railroad town of Bennett, Iowa. He left school after the sixth grade to help out in his uncle’s store during the depression of the 1890s. Around 1899 he returned to Fulton to work as a general clerk at J. W. Broadhead’s Dry Goods Store.12 According to Anne Edwards