Ronald Reagan's insane policies helped create today’s Gilded Age.
— Ben Gran
They are ideologues. I hate ideologues.
— Philip Roth
Historians credit Ronald Reagan's antediluvian notions of "big government" to the influence of the right-wing ideologue Barry Goldwater.
They've forgotten the more important influencer: Lem Boulware.
Boulware was GE's head public relations man in the 1950s.
Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of raw capitalism, Boulware insisted.
Nothing.
The PR man made sure of that by circulating right-wing books among management and publishing four in-house magazines that explained the philosophy of private enterprise; arranging continual in-house workshops on the topic; and deputizing supervisors throughout the company to act as his mouthpiece.
Boulware's libertarian influence on American businessmen was so pervasive that it endures today, when a nonnegotiable stance—such as the price of a new car—is called an instance of Boulwarism.
The paranoid Boulware believed that American workers, abetted by New-Deal era intellectuals in Washington, posed a mortal threat to the business-owning class—and made no secret of it. He rang the reactionary's alarm bell at each and every opportunity, using GE employees like Ronald Reagan as his shill.
Reagan had befriended Boulware while the Hollywood actor served as the weekly host of "General Electric Theater," one of the nation's top TV shows for over a decade.
As they toured the country hosting press junkets, Boulware took it upon himself to "tutor" the dimwitted actor (Christopher Hitchens once called Reagan "as dumb as a stump" and his deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver told me that he "babysat" the puerile president).
Like a sponge, Reagan absorbed Boulware's Hobbesian views.
America, Boulware preached, was the land of opportunity, private ownership, free markets, and low taxes.
Anyone who wished to call himself an American accepted those qualities—plus the fact that prosperity trickled down from the "beneficent" 1%.
Resistance meant you were a goddamn Communist.
Boulware's Gilded Age views were known in Chamber of Commerce circles as the "philosophy of private enterprise."
The gullible Reagan, while traveling with the wily PR man, would listen to his teachings and swallow them whole.
The actor wasn't the only one of GE's 190,000 employees to imbibe Boulware's Kool-Aid during the '50s.
Tens of thousands did.
To prepare GE's supervisors to carry his message, Boulware also circulated reprints of articles by the arch conservative William F. Buckley.
Boulware viewed his task as one of re-educating the serfs.
The simpleminded star of Bedtime for Bonzo was merely one of them.
