Ronald Reagan was a Communist: Yes, the president was once a union leader

I received a video link from a big-time pro union fellow who thought somehow I would be devastated to learn that the Great Ronald Reagan had been president of the Screen Actors Guild, early in his career. He wrote to me, “Your hero used to be a union leader. The idol of the Republican Party was an actual leader of a union. Do you still hate unions?” Well, the answer to this guy is…………….YES! Here is that video: 

Click the link,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWvGMPhBVSI&feature=channel_video_title

 

 

 

This guy exhibited all the reasons why I dislike unions so much in his statement. People like him are stuck in a fixated emotional level of social development, and they will always stay in a kind of stagnate existence because of it. This person believes that because at some point in Ronald Reagan’s life, when he was a young man still unwise to the ways of the world, the fact that he was a union leader would somehow erase all the good the man did as a “Great Communicator” at the end of his life, or that by somehow me finding out about it would invalidate my claims against unions because “my hero” once supported unions so because Ronald Reagan is my leader, I should support unions too.

Here’s the issue, and the big difference between a guy like me, and a guy like this union person, who is very similar to most of the type of people who join a union or even a political party……..I read. Most of them do not.

I did know about Ronald Reagan’s early life because I read about him in the great book Dutch, by Edmund Morris, the very controversial book about Reagan that many Reagan supporters despised because it took away many of the myths about the man and focused on his real talent, which was “communicating,” and I learned all about the communist phase of his life. Reagan when he was an actor in Hollywood wasn’t much different from someone like Matt Damon is now, a naive, idealistic guy who has a decent intellect, but became wealthy and popular at a young age and lacks truly hard work in his life. Reagan coming from the Midwest had plenty of common sense, but becoming an actor and hanging out with starlets and all the powerful people in Los Angeles did go to his head. Communism was migrating into the United States in the 20’s and 30’s and it was the new fad in Hollywood, much like it is today. And Ronald Reagan loved it; he even applied to join the Communist Party of the United States. Reagan’s friends were communists, and even though his wife Jane wasn’t very interested in politics, she did go with the flow of communism because that was what people talked about at dinner parties, so she was too.

And the unions that formed at the time were heavily infected with communists. Several of the entertainment unions took a page of activism directly from the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution of 1917. At the Warner Brothers lot set designers had suddenly become aggressive mobs turning over cars and protesting over pay. Reagan was the reluctant leader of these mobs and was a sympathizer.

It was when Reagan had to go to England to film a movie at Elstree Studios that the impact of socialism, which leads to communism shocked him to his Midwestern core. Karl Marx had done much of his work while in London and it is also in London that Keynesian economics was being experimented with. The result was a landscape of culture that had an oppressive sameness to it, and was a dreary environment for the very imaginative young Ronald Reagan. It was during this film at Elstree Studios that Reagan decided that communism was the great evil of the world.

Reagan came back to his Hollywood friends a changed man; it was so noticeable that his wife lost interest in him leading to their eventual divorce. Reagan stayed on as the President of the Screen Actors Guild but had lost interest in the politics of communism. As Reagan’s acting career came to an end due to his age, he used his position within the guild to stay in the loop and carry him to the next phase of his life, politics.

Reagan had a very strong sense of right and wrong and he did name the communist sympathizers during the McCarthy hearings within his union, because he saw that communism was a serious threat to the United States and felt it was his obligation to the security of the country. That doesn’t make him a traitor; it makes him a person who had been sick and had healed through growing knowledge and understanding. By allowing his mind to expand with new information he grew as a person who eventually was able to go from a union president to a President who stood against the unions in the air traffic control controversy where he fired them for trying to strike.

 

The reason Reagan was so good was because he grew in intellect and political theory unlike this guy who sent me that video, as though “Union Brother Reagan” should always behave like a fool with limited perspective like the rest of his brothers and sisters stuck in a communist funk. The assumption was because Reagan turned against the union, he was somehow a trader.

This is another reason why unions always fail. They behave with this tribe-like behavior which limits personal growth. Since their focus is on group oriented, collective behavior they are doomed to fail as individuals and their thoughts will remain fixed on a period of their lives which had their last explosive development, and for many of them that will be high school. I know many adults who are 40 and 50 years old who are still as mentally immature as they were when they were 15, 16, and 17 years old. That is because they stopped growing as people and are “stuck” emotionally in that time period.

In my own life there isn’t a single human being on planet Earth that I’d consider my “leader.” There is no voice that could call to me and demand my time and attention for some task outside of my individual desires. This does not mean I can’t work with people toward a common goal, because I do in many ways, but that form of collaboration is completely foreign to the mind of the “union” type who is “stuck” in some archaic form of thought which belongs to the mentality of a child. Most of my friends are 20 and 30 years older than I am because I relate to those people more than most people my age, because through a life-time of living they have grown to understand what’s important and what’s not, and how to think for themselves instead of some collective group of fools stuck in some static thought pattern craving communism.

This is the triumph of Ronald Reagan, he made the journey from a small-town, clean-cut Midwestern kid, to a Hollywood movie star, a communist leaning union leader, then “learned” that communism was the path of decline and adjusted his thinking which cost him friends and a wife, and to a large extent his career as an actor. But Reagan took what he learned and rebuilt himself as an advocate of capitalism, becoming a spokesman for GE, then Governor of California, then the communist fighting President of the United States. It was the journey of a complete human being who halfway through realized that he was on the wrong path, so he made the corrections and became a great person who helped preserve the United States of America during a tough period of the cold war.

Great personalities aren’t necessarily born straight out of their mother’s womb. Such assumptions are the thoughts of fools hoping for a savior to rescue them from a mundane life because the fool is too lazy to save themselves. Great personalities are forged from the fires of life, through a lifetime of experience that learn which ideas of theirs are good, and which are bad to arrive at a place where it is wisdom that rules, not the diatribes of some mad politician fixated on a set of ideas created by the minds of infantile children.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com