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Nine. Back to the Future
- University of Missouri Press
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322 nine Back to the Future Ronald Reagan swept into power amid a flamboyant display of wealth and privilege—a “bacchanalia of the Haves,” as one bemused observer noted. Throughout those first days of January 1981,“vanguards of a new era”filled the capital, “bearing special inaugural plates with names of corporations that had leased them.”A Utah Republican explained that a person’s own limousine gave one a “sense of pride and accomplishment,”an enthusiasm for the Republican leadership. Going the limousine riders one better, a group of Indiana Republicans arrived in the capital aboard a private railroad car (presumably rented) once owned, it was said, by J. P. Morgan. Mink coats lined hotel racks at the numerous preinauguration parties. Georgetown brunches found beds covered with expensive furs. “At a blacktie -and-boots Texas party,”a “perfumed herd of thousands drank beer and wore emeralds.” Nancy Reagan’s inaugural gown, it was claimed, cost twenty-five thousand dollars. When the joyful display of calculated vulgarity was over, the General Accounting Office (GAO) discovered that the inaugural bill presented to America’s taxpayers came to $16.3 million.This was twice the amount officials in the new administration had claimed and five times that of the Carter inauguration . Moreover, the GAO concluded that much of the Pentagon’s military support for the inaugural activities “was without proper legal authority.”1 Few who possessed the power to complain really cared. (One who did was Barry Goldwater. “When you gotta pay two thousand dollars for a limousine for four days, seven dollars to park, and two dollars and fifty cents to check your coat at a time when most people in this country just can’t hack it, that’s ostentation.”) The country’s wealthy and powerful were poised to feast on a second great barbecue.Years before a prominent literary historian remembered the first such orgy. During the Gilded Age following the Civil War: Congress had rich gifts to bestow—in lands, tariffs, subsidies, favors of all sorts; and when influential citizens made their wishes known to the reigning Back to the Future 323 statesmen, the sympathetic politicians were quick to turn the government into the fairy godmother the voters wanted it to be. A huge barbecue was spread to which all presumably were invited. Not quite all, to be sure; inconspicuous persons, those who were at home on the farms or at work in the mills and offices, were overlooked; a good many, indeed, out of the total number of the American people. But all the important persons, leading bankers and promoters and business men received invitations.There wasn’t room for everybody and these were presumed to represent the whole. It was a splendid feast. If the waiters saw to it that the choicest portions were served to favored guests, they were not unmindful of their numerous homespun constituency and they loudly proclaimed the fine democratic principle that what belongs to the people should be enjoyed by the people—not with petty bureaucratic restrictions, not as a social body, but as individuals, each free citizen using what came to hand for his own private ends, with no questions asked.2 With but one exception, Reagan’s America was the Gilded Age redux.“The party of self-enrichment,”critic Lewis Lapham would soon write,sang “hymns to Mammon.” Money, he added, had returned as the nation’s “civil religion.”3 The exception, however, was striking. For all their follies and excesses, the best of the Gilded Age robber barons had helped build a national culture.The men and women of Reagan’s America all too often proved to be simple skimmers, out to rake the profits of someone else’s creation, sweat, and labor. They,of course,did not see it that way,especially the youthful True Believers. Spirited and idealistic, one of them remembered, they saw the “flow of money in America and they said ‘See those taxes you put on families? Cut that money, lower that amount, leave them more money for shoes and the mortgage and vacations.’ They looked at where freedom was and what it did to people and where freedom wasn’t, and what that did, and they wanted to help the guerilla fighters who were trying to overthrow the Communist regimes that had been imposed on them.” Presidential speechwriter Peggy Noonan recalled seeing young men in the White House mess “who were always just in from the bush or back from the border. They...