Reagan wins Republican nomination

When the Texas delegation to the Republican presidential nominating convention flew into Detroit late last Saturday night, the pilot announced over the public address system that the temperature in Detroit was 68 degrees. A great cheer and Texas holler engulfed the plane. Sixty-eight degrees seemed like a plunge into an icy pool because the Texans – as also the delegates from Arkansas and Oklahoma and Missouri – were emerging from what, even for people whose normal summer high is 90, was a heatwave more infernal than most of them had known in their lifetime.

For almost a month now, Texas has been afflicted every day with burning sun and temperatures anywhere from 106 to 115 and, since we're at these comparisons, I ought to say that Texas is over 800 miles wide, that's about from London to Warsaw. This atrocious heat, a high pressure system that gives no sign of breaking as I talk, spread east to the Carolinas, then up into the Midwest and now to the north-east and, after seeing on the telly one night people collapsing in Oklahoma City, next night we were watching ambulances arriving at hospitals in St Louis with similar victims.

In all, close to 900 people have died, most of them old folk from what had to be deduced as heat prostration. The death toll for cattle and chickens runs, of course, in their many, many thousands and so, I'm afraid, will the bankruptcies of farmers who've seen their spring land turn into an elephant's hide.

From all sorts of climates, the Republicans came into Detroit, from Anchorage, Alaska, a balmy 50 degrees and Memphis, Tennessee, a balmy 108, from cool New York, 95, Salt Lake City, 88 and cooler San Francisco, 63, from hazy Maine and the Nevada desert.

The Republican party didn't exist until 1854 and held its first convention two years later. It's man lost but at its second presidential convention it came up with a raw-boned country lawyer and certainly a winner, since his name was Abraham Lincoln. For the rest of the nineteenth century, the Republicans, through all the enormous growth of this continent, usually came up with the winning presidential candidate. For 72 years, from 1860 to 1932, the country elected a Republican president 14 times against the Democrats four and, even then, the Democrats didn't field four different winners – Grover Cleveland got in twice and Woodrow Wilson twice.

So, for 72 years, only two Democrats ever went into the White House. The Republicans, for most of this long stretch, had the imagination and the reforming zeal, the eye for change and the ambition to master it. They were the progressives, as the Democrats were the well-trained, sometimes corrupt, city machine politicians. I need hardly say that by the 1920s, the Republicans, so long in power, had turned into the conservative party, a nationwide alliance of captains of industry, tillers of the soil and the comfortable middle-class who suspected all reformers as rockers of the boat.

And then came Franklin Roosevelt and his four terms, an unprecedented 13 years in office, seemed at times to doom the Republicans to being the perpetual or perennial opposition. Roosevelt survived and prospered partly because as an immensely artful politician he was able to impress on the country an image of the Republicans which was, to say the least, over-simple and highly lurid, as smart, greedy big businessmen lusting for profits, allergic to change, sentimentally nostalgic for what Roosevelt called 'the horse and buggy days.' And this caricature was vivid enough, in a time of deep Depression, to put Roosevelt in the White House twice. Then Hitler on the rampage and then the Japanese put him back again twice.

Since then, since the Second War, the Republicans, while broadening and humanising the old image and managing to conquer what was once the solidly Democratic south, the Republicans have laboured to wipe out the brand that Roosevelt imprinted on them and they're still at it. And Reagan himself has gone round the country not merely this year, but for many years saying over and over and I quote, 'We are not the party of big business and the country club but the party of main street, the small town, the shop keeper, the farmer, the cop on the beat, the guy who sends his kids to Sunday school, pays his taxes and never asks anything from government, except to be left alone.'

It sounds like a speech from a Warner Brothers movie of the 1930s when Pat O'Brien was the cop on the beat, Frank McHugh was the guy who sent his kids to Sunday school and Allen Jenkins was the guy who asked to be left alone by everybody.

Those Warner Brothers movies had immense appeal in the days of the Depression. The appeal of a small town paradise lost. What Mr Reagan is saying is that it's a paradise that can be regained. He's all the more convinced of it, he's all the more concerned to have it happen because he speaks with the passionate bigotry of a convert. Throughout his twenties and thirties, he was a glowing disciple of Franklin Roosevelt, the man whose stigma he's now so eager to shed. Reagan was a Democrat, a fervent New Dealer and what Westbrook Pegler called 'a bleeding heart liberal.' He believe wholly in the power of the federal government to do good and he scorned the Republican suspicion that any Communists hid in the labour unions.

Well, after the Second War, he became the organising live wire of the Screen Actors' Guild and he discovered two things, both of them soured him. One was the tendency of a growing government bureaucracy to grow and multiply its kind, the more people get on to the public payroll, the more generous they are with the government's – that's to say with the taxpayer's – money. The other surprise was the steady, and at times ruthless, infiltration of the Screen Actors' Guild by Communists masquerading as liberals. Reagan had a traumatic time fending them off. In the end, he was thoroughly disillusioned about big government and the liberal trend.

Reagan loves homespun simplicities and there's no doubt that they have a bitter-sweet appeal to the America of the farms and the small towns, especially to men who came from there and turned into millionaires. But, you'll say, and rightly, how many Americans live in small towns? It's become difficult to say since small towns overlaid the next small town and, together, became the petticoats or suburbs of a big city. But there is one statistic that is relevant and dramatic and is not going into reverse.

A hundred years ago, 54 per cent of all American workers were farmers of one sort or another. By 1930, farm machinery had become so effective that the farming population was down to 21 per cent. Today, more food than ever is being produced from the land and the people who sow and harvest it are less than seven per cent of the working population.

Since the turn of the century, the trek from the farms and their neighbouring small towns to the big cities has been continuous and it was at the high tide of this exodus that the Democrats, seeing millions gone to the cities and finding no jobs there, became the party of what Roosevelt liked to call 'the common man' or 'the forgotten man'.

In the past 20 years, there's been an ebb tide, a flow of city dwellers not back to farms or villages, but to the suburbs which now are suburbs on the motorways. In fact, more Americans now live in suburbs than in cities or small towns and it's in the suburbs that the Republicans claim their most dependable constituency, for these are people who find the central cities too harsh or too competitive for living in, if not for working in, and they are the people in their millions to whom the ideal of Main Street, the shopkeeper, the farmer, the cop on the beat, the guy who sends his kids to Sunday school, is a vision of America all the more poignant because it's just out of reach.

The famous Currier and Ives prints of old rural America sold in the millions not when the scenes they pictured were there to be seen, but when they'd gone for good in the burgeoning of industrial America and the mechanised farm.

So, for all the seeming naiveté of Reagan's visionary picture of the paradise he'd like to regain, he is on to something that touches the hopes and the hearts of many frustrated Americans who've seen the Carter administration expanding the bureaucracies it swore to contract, increasing the dependence of the poor, the blacks, the dispossessed, on the government by way of welfare, a dole training programme, subsidies and the rest.

The Democrats say that free enterprise alone cannot provide the jobs, the homes, the education, the medical services, that government and the federal government, no less, must be the essential back up. Not so, says Ronald Reagan, but that's before he has the chance in November to prove he's right or to recognise ruefully that self-help and self-interest may not be enough.

Well, as you've seen, the Republicans met, theoretically to do what nominating conventions have done since the first one was held in 1832, to debate together, to propose candidates for the presidency and then to call the roll of the states as often as it takes to have one man emerge with a clear majority of the votes. In fact, they came to attend the coronation of Ronald Reagan, for all the preliminary shuffling and infighting is done now in the primaries and this year, in the primaries, an unprecedented 31 million Americans, about a half of all those who will vote in November, made their choice.

On the Republican side it was overwhelmingly Ronald Reagan and the convention met to endorse or ratify the primary choice.

There was one moment of bursting nostalgia. The last man to pray for a return to the values of that old Main Street America was mercilessly defeated in 1964 and, when he came to the podium this time, a great warm-hearted cheer embraced him. He was Barry Goldwater, the grand old man of the party who is, by the way, only one year older than the grand new man, Ronald Reagan, which introduces the most serious, immediate problem that Reagan had to solve.

Who would be his vice-president? Who would be the vigorous man standing at the ready when, and if, the first 70-year-old in American history moved into the White House? On the agony of that problem and the mix-up of its solution, we'll talk next time.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.