Ronald Reagan (1981 – 1989)

Ronald Reagan is the first President I really remember. I mean, during the election of 1976, I have a recollection of walking down the street by my house with my sister, singing a political jingle to the tune of the Oscar Meyer commercial along the lines of “Jimmy Carter has a way of messing up the U.S.A.” But that’s dim, mists of time kind of stuff. I remember things about Reagan. And I remember really liking him. (I grew up in a Republican household if you couldn’t guess.) All the stuff I remember liking was pretty superficial. I remember during the election of 1984, there was some footage of him making a goofy face or gesture or something toward Nancy when they were at the polling place. And I wasn’t the only one. He won in 1984 by a huge margin. In retrospect — as I got older — I found that some of his policies were maybe not well thought out. And, if you listen to the vision of St. Ronald that shows up at Republican primary debates every four years, it has only a nodding acquaintance with his actual term in office.

Reagan was born in 1911 to an Illinois salesman. Among other things, during his school years, he was a lifeguard, a cheerleader, an actor, involved in campus politics, and a mediocre student. After college, he became a radio announcer. Among his gifts was improvising play-by-play narratives based on limited information he received over the wire. While traveling with the Cubs in California, he had a successful screen test and became a “B” actor with Warner Brothers. During World War II, Reagan served in a motion picture unit where he helped with the production of training reels.

He returned to Hollywood and became president of the Screen Actor’s Guild. In that capacity, he was an informant to the FBI, reporting suspected communist sympathizers to the government. From 1953 to 1962, he became host of General Electric Theater – a series of weekly dramas. This was lucrative – allowing him to earn about $1 million per year (in today’s dollars). As part of his duties, he was also required to tour GE plants and give speeches.

In 1961, Reagan created a recording for the American Medical Association warning that Medicare would mean the end of freedom in America. He warned that, if it wasn’t stopped, he and everyone else would have to tell our children what it was like in America when men were free. 1964, Reagan emerged as one of the leading spokesmen of the Goldwater campaign. He argued that, if Goldwater wasn’t elected, that would mean Americans would descend to the “ant-heap of totalitarianism.”

Having made an impression with his campaigning for Goldwater, he launched his own campaign for governor in 1966. He promised to send the welfare bums back to work and clean up the mess at Berkley. He beat Jerry Brown’s father, Pat Brown and promptly froze government hiring while raising taxes to balance the budget. Reagan floated a Presidential run in 1968 but came in third behind Nixon and Rockefeller. He stomped on the student protest movement with armed force. “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” He initially signed a pro-abortion bill; but in the late 60s, Protestant opposition to abortion — particularly in a political way — was still in its infancy. Later on, he would adopt a pro-life stance. In 1967, he signed a bill that prohibited public carrying of firearms, adopted in the wake of Black Panthers bearing arms. In 1970, Reagan was re-elected, Jesse Unruh. (Unruh first came to my attention as having said about lobbyists, “If you can’t eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money and then vote against them you’ve got no business being up here.”) Reagan did not run for a third term and was succeeded by Jerry Brown in 1975.

Reagan ran a substantial campaign for President in 1976 but was narrowly defeated by Gerald Ford in the primary. Ford was defeated by Carter, and — as a former two-term governor of a large state who had been a near miss in the primary — he was primed for the election in 1980. During his 1980 campaign, he went to the county fair about 7 miles from where civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier and gave a speech advocating “state’s rights.” Regardless of Reagan’s personal feelings, “state’s rights” in the South has been the rallying cry of slavers and segregationists. Carter’s presidency was a tough period for the U.S., and Reagan’s mix of sunny and tough charisma was appealing when compared to what felt to many to be Carter’s weakness.

On his first day in office, Carter signed an order granting unconditional amnesty to Vietnam era draft dodgers. It was a time of high inflation. By 1980, inflation hit 18%. The government was in deficit each year of his administration, going from about $680 billion in debt to $900 billion. The Carter administration was fiscally conservative, vetoing a number of spending bills as the capital gains tax was lowered to 28%. A number of deregulation initiatives were begun in the airline, trucking, rail, communications, and finance industries.  The defense budget was cut by $6 billion. Carter had campaigned as an outsider and generally took that approach when he got into office — leading to a strained relationship with Congress, controlled by his fellow Democrats.

The energy crisis sparked by the OPEC boycott in 1973 had Carter’s attention. He believed the energy crisis was a clear and present danger and took some controversial measures in response.

Carter set oil and natural gas price controls, had solar hot water panels installed on the roof of the White House, had a wood stove in his living quarters, ordered the General Services Administration to turn off hot water in some federal facilities, and requested that all Christmas light decorations remain dark in 1979 and 1980. Nationwide, controls were put on thermostats in government and commercial buildings to prevent people from raising heater temperatures in the winter above 65 °F (18 °C) or cooling in the summer below 78 degrees Fahrenheit (26 °C) through 1980.

His calls to the American people to carpool, follow the speed limit, and set thermostats lower were not well received.

Internationally, Carter was instrumental to the signing of the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel which helped reduce tensions in the Middle East somewhat. However, it also created problems of its own. Under Carter, Cold War sensibilities were blunted. Part of his administration wanted to give human rights priority — supporting those countries that treated their people well and withholding support from those countries that did not. However, there were more traditional Cold Warriors in the administration who favored supporting countries that were seen as strategically valuable in opposing the Soviet Union regardless of their human rights record.

Negotiations had been ongoing prior to the Carter administration to transfer the Panama Canal to Panama. However, it was under the Carter administration that a deal was brokered to surrender the canal to Panama in 1999. The treaty was opposed by a majority of the American public and by the Republican Party. A common argument against the treaties was that the United States was transferring an American asset of great strategic value to an unstable and corrupt country led by an unelected but popularly supported General. Strom Thurmond reasoned that we paid for it, we built it, and so we should keep it. Opponents pointed out that “it was built within Panamanian territory therefore, by controlling it, the United States was in fact occupying part of another country and this agreement was intended to turn back to Panama the sovereignty of its complete territory.”

Iran, along with Saudi Arabia, had been strategically central to the U.S.’s influence in the Middle East, and that was due to the support of the Shah of Iran. He had been restored to power when the Eisenhower administration engineered a coup that toppled the elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh. He was good for the U.S., but at home he was regarded as an autocrat and a kleptocrat. He was overthrown by the Iranian Revolution, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. When the Shah sought asylum in the U.S., the Carter administration initially refused, in January of 1979 but relented in October and allowed him to get medical treatment. This gave Iranian militants a pretext for seizing the U.S. embassy in November 1979. They held 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days. The Iran hostage crisis came to dominate the last part of the Carter administration. Negotiations for the release of the hostages was completed during the Carter administration but they were not released until the day of Reagan’s inauguration.

The Iranian revolution and the abrupt reversal of Iran’s close relationship with the U.S. emboldened Iraq which invaded Iran. The U.S. would provide support to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Carter had challenges from the left of the Democratic Party who supported Senator Edward Kennedy. Kennedy challenged Carter in the 1980 primaries, but Carter won 60% of the delegates in the primaries. Despite this, Kennedy refused to drop out prior to the convention. Carter won the nomination and went on to lose the election to Ronald Reagan by 10% of the vote (51% to 41%) with Independent John Anderson winning 6% of the vote.

Indiana Bicentennial 12 (1981 – 2016)

This, my friends, is the home stretch. We have one month until Indiana’s Bicentennial, and one year since I started writing this series. I’m a little off track on the national scene history versus the Indiana history. Because he had two terms, Governor Bowen jumped ahead of my traditional 16 year blocks. So, we left out President Carter. I’ll say a little about him, and then probably not have too much to say about our more recent Presidents and governors because we all lived through those years. Even though the heading says 1981 – 2016, I’ll have to back up and discuss the Carter era nationally. The years for my governors and Presidents got off track.

Jimmy Carter (1977 – 1981)

James Earl “Jimmy” Carter is, by most accounts, one of our best ex-Presidents. His record of compassion, dignity, and public giving is truly remarkable. His record as President, during his term in office from 1977 – 1981, is less glowing. His term in office is fading into the mists of the past, but I’ll still occasionally hear Republicans making sneering remarks about his Presidency. I don’t have scientific data for this, but I expect such folks still think Chappaquiddick remains politically relevant.

Carter was born in 1927 to a family who had lived in the South for a long, long time. Thomas Carter had immigrated from England to Virginia in 1635. Jimmy’s father was a successful local businessman in Plains Georgia, and his mother was a nurse. Jimmy was allowed to use a section of his dad’s farmland to grow, package and sell peanuts. The Depression hit the region hard, but the family benefited from New Deal programs, and his father became a local leader.

Carter obtained a spot in the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis and graduated 60th out of a class of 820. Among other posts, he became a submarine officer; including service on a nuclear submarine. In 1952, Carter was involved with efforts to clean up an experimental nuclear reactor that partially melted down. That experience “shaped his views on atomic energy and led him to cease development of a neutron bomb.”

In 1953, Carter’s father passed away, and the family business became his. Carter was honorably discharged from the navy and returned to Plains. While his father had died relatively wealthy, after payment of debts, taxes, and division among heirs, Jimmy was left with comparatively little. Still, with his scientific and technical background, he was able to improve and expand the peanut business. Eventually it became quite successful.

The Warren Court’s decisions in Brown v. Bd. of Education and Baker v. Carr, proved to be influential in Carter’s political life. The former inflamed racial tensions in Georgia with school desegregation and the latter changed the Georgia political districting system and opened up a state senate seat that Carter won. Carter was a staunch supporter of JFK but was relatively quiet about civil rights issues at first. But, as time wore on, he spoke somewhat more in favor of them. Still, in 1970, as he was running for Governor, Carter courted both the black vote and the George Wallace vote. “He implied support or dislike of private schools depending on the audience. The appeal to racism became more blatant over time; Carter’s senior campaign aides handed out a photograph of his opponent Sanders celebrating with black basketball players.”  After using racism to win the election, he began speaking against Georgia’s racist politics. He declared in his inaugural speech that ‘the time of racial segregation was over. No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever again have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity for an education, a job, or simple justice.’”

His style as governor was indicative of problems he would have as President. His reluctance to engage in backslapping or trade political favors caused the Georgia legislature to find him difficult to work with. He remained tough to read on civil rights: on the one hand,  expanding the number of black state employees, judges, and board members as well as hanging portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr. and two other prominent black Georgians in the capitol building even while co-sponsoring an anti-busing resolution with George Wallace at the National Governor’s Conference.

Carter pretty immediately began working toward the Presidency – engaging in some ultimately unsuccessful maneuvers during the 1972 Democratic Convention and then, following McGovern’s loss, seeking out positions that would give him more national exposure. Carter started as a darkhorse, but with Watergate, his position as an outsider became an asset. He became a front runner after winning the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. He was well positioned to pick up the South when George Wallace proved to be a spent force.

In the North, Carter appealed largely to conservative Christian and rural voters; he had little chance of winning a majority in most states. He won several Northern states by building the largest single bloc. Carter’s strategy involved reaching a region before another candidate could extend influence there. He had traveled over 50,000 miles, visited 37 states, and delivered over 200 speeches before any other candidates announced that they were in the race.

He had favorite son status in the South, was a workhorse in the North, and garnered media approval early, leading to a victory in the Democratic primary. He chose Walter Mondale as his running mate, and ran against Gerald Ford in the general election.

As I mentioned in the last installment, I’m surprised Ford did as well as he did with Watergate, the pardon of Richard Nixon, high unemployment, and high inflation. Carter won by 2% of the popular vote and 57 electoral votes.

Otis Bowen (1973 – 1981)

Otis R. “Doc” Bowen was born in Rochester, Indiana in 1918 and attended the local schools before getting his undergraduate and medical degrees at Indiana University. He served in the Medical Corps during World War II, stationed in the Pacific and accompanying troops ashore during the invasion of Okinawa in 1945. Bowen returned to Indiana and began practicing medicine in Bremen, Indiana as a general practitioner. In 1952, he was elected Marshall County Coroner, elected to the Indiana House of Representatives in 1956, lost by four votes in 1958, and re-elected in 1960. He rose to minority leader of the House by 1965 and helped engineer a Republican return to the majority in 1966 and became Speaker of the House.

In 1968, Bowen lost the primary race to Whitcomb, but in 1972, he won the Republican nomination. He would run against Matt Welsh who was attempting to return to the governor’s office. Bowen beat Welsh handily, with 1.2 million votes to Welsh’s 900,000. It’s probably worth mentioning a few statistics at this point. The election saw a turnout of 60.8% of the voting age population. The percentage had been dropping pretty steadily since 1960 when it had been 76.9%. According to the 1970 census, Indiana’s population was 5.2 million people — up 11.4% from 1960. The white population was 92.83%, the black population was 6.88%, the foreign-born population was 1.6%, 60.87% lived in urban areas versus 39.13% in rural areas. (Source: James Madison, The Indiana Way).

One area Bowen pursued in the House and again as governor was property tax reform. He believed that schools and local government needed a broader tax base but wanted to avoid big rate hikes on homeowners and businesses. Bowen imposed a property tax freeze but doubled sales taxes and permitted local government to impose income taxes, particularly where the income taxes would be used as a substitute for property taxes. So, in a sense, he shifted taxes from ownership to income and consumption. Obviously there is going to be a lot of overlap in taxpayers, but there are winners and losers when government makes that sort of shift. And, in fact, local government and schools were limited in their ability to impose taxes. School funding shifted away from the local governments and toward the state. Schools protested that the state was underfunding them. Bowen’s property tax freeze, sales tax raise, and limitations on local government would be echoed 30 years later during the Daniels administration.

For the most part, Bowen enjoyed Republican majorities in the General Assembly to assist him with his legislative agendas, though this was complicated for a time after the election of 1974 when Watergate and the national electoral mood sent Democrats to the Indiana House. Republicans regained control in the 1976 national bicentennial year. One of Bowen’s proudest accomplishments was upgrading the Indiana state park system, including creation of the White River State Park in Indianapolis and addition of Potato Creek and Wyandotte Woods and more than 40 nature preserves. “He also oversaw completion of Indiana’s interstate highway system, merged several road agencies into the Department of Transportation, [and] adopted 911 as the statewide emergency telephone number[.]”

As a doctor, Bowen  took some interest in the state’s medical education. He pushed for doctors to be trained at branch campuses of IU and put an emphasis on teaching general practitioners. He was also able to have legislation adopted that limited physician liability.   Bowen vetoed several gambling measures.

During Bowen’s term, on January 24, 1977, Indiana became the 35th and last state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Because the amendment did not receive the necessary 38 state ratification, it did not become part of the Constitution.  (Here is an interesting account written by Beth Van Voorst Gray about ratification in Indiana and her perspective as Principal Secretary of the Indiana Senate and an advocate for the ERA.)  The amendment itself was fairly simple, the meat of it reading, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Phyllis Schlafly is given a lot of credit for stopping the ERA’s momentum and preventing it from being passed into law. She and her supporters exploited fears “lurking in the minds of many people: girls/daughters going to war, unisex bathrooms, nullification of rape laws, and the like.” The proposed amendment had passed Congress with a deadline for ratification, failed to meet that deadline, and died.

Speaking of Constitutional amendments Bowen was able to take advantage of the recent state constitutional amendment and serve for two terms instead of the one term that had been the limit since the 1851 Constitution. He was re-elected easily — with about the same vote margin as he received against Matt Welsh in 1972, this time his Democratic opponent was Larry Conrad. At the end of his term, he considered running against Birch Bayh for the Senate seat that Dan Quayle ultimately captured. However, his wife was sick, and he declined the opportunity. His wife, Beth, died on New Year’s Day, 1981.

Bowen served on the faculty of the IU School of Medicine and then, in 1985, was chosen by President Reagan as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. In that capacity, he sounded the alarm on the AIDS epidemic — something the Reagan administration was criticized for being slow to address. Bowen said that, if progress was not made in dealing with the disease, within a decade, we might be dealing with a death toll in the tens of millions.

Bowen was also able to champion legislation that covered the costs of catastrophic illnesses for Medicare recipients, but the act was repealed when higher income seniors objected to paying a higher surtax to fund the program, and Congress repealed the act.

Governor Bowen lived until the age of 95, and passed away in 2013.

That brings us to the end of Indiana Bicentennial 11. Next time, we’ll head into the 80s and 90s with the 12th installment.

In the late 60s and 70s, the General Assembly did extensive research (h/t Indiana Law Blog) into amending Indiana’s constitution. (There was also a Judicial Committee that worked concurrently on revision to the judicial article of the Indiana Constitution. The working committee was headed by former governors Welsh and Handley. Handley would die in 1972 before the work was complete.

The Constitutional Revision Commission had considered the possibility of a constitutional convention but ultimately rejected that idea and decided to pursue a series of amendments instead. The Commission  endorsed, among other things, 1) an amendment that would allow a bill to address multiple subject matters when it was for the purpose of codifying Indiana law or revising the codifications; 2) an amendment that would have the governor and lieutenant governor run as a team — eliminating the possibility of a split ticket; 3) an amendment setting the voting age at 18 and setting the residency requirement at 30 days living in the precinct; 4) legislative (rather than Constitutional) policymaking in favor of home rule for local government; 5) an amendment that repealed the 61 day, biennial session limitation and allowed the General Assembly to set the length and frequency of its sessions by law; 6) an amendment that allowed the governor to serve two consecutive terms; 7) an amendment extending the terms of Secretary, Auditor, and Treasurer of State to four year terms;  8) providing for the method of selection and length of term of the Secretary of Public Instruction to be set by law; 9) revising the Militia article to account for changes in the time — for example the use of the federally funded National Guard as the state militia.

It was this period of reform, I believe, when the General Assembly created the Indiana Legislative Services Agency in the late 1960s. I worked for the agency from 1996 – 1999. While I’m obviously not shy about sharing my opinions these days, I took seriously — as I believe most who work there do — the charge that LSA was to be a nonpartisan arm of the General Assembly. We strove to identify problem spots with legislation and/or constitutional issues without imposing our views of what policy ought to be pursued or whether legislation was good or bad. This professionalization of legislative drafting, (in my very biased opinion) led to an improvement in the quality of the legislation (again — leaving aside the policies pursued.) The Indiana Code is, by and large, well written; particularly when compared against, say, the United States Code which is sloppy and unnecessarily confusing.

Additionally, there was a Judicial Commission that studied and advocated changes to the judicial article of the Constitution. Some of the changes were not adopted, but the appellate courts were altered to have the judges and justices selected by a judicial nominating commission that sent choices to the Governor for appointment. The Commission was also active in advocating legislation that would consolidate and expedite operation of the trial courts. It also addressed the transition away from justice-of-the-peace courts, replacing it with a system of small claims courts and traffic courts.

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In 1976, Whitcomb ran against Senator Lugar for the U.S. Senate seat but was defeated. He returned to the practice of law for a time, but in 1986, recently divorced and retired, Whitcomb took up sailing — in his 70s. He traveled from port to port, and just kept going. “In 1995, while attempting to sail around the world, his ship hit a reef in the Gulf of Suez and sank. He was rescued and returned to the United States.”  In 2000, Governor Whitcomb bought a secluded cabin in the Hoosier National Forest and continued to live there until he was 98 and passed away on February 4, 2016.

Edgar Whitcomb (1969 – 1973)

Governor Whitcomb was born in 1917, in Hayden, Indiana. He enrolled in IU Law School in 1939, but went to fight in World War II before his studies were complete. He was an aerial navigator in the Pacific and was captured by the Japanese. While a prisoner, he was tortured. He escaped once but was recaptured, then escaped again.

[H]e escaped a second time and was hunted for several more days but was able to evade his pursuers. He escaped by swimming all night through shark-infested waters to an island unoccupied by the Japanese army. He was eventually able to secure passage to China under an assumed name where he made contact with the United States Army and was repatriated in December 1943.

Whitcomb finished out the war doing bombing runs in a B-17 Flying Fortress. Whitcomb gave an account of his war experience in the best-selling 1958 book, “Escape from Corregidor.”

After the war, Governor Whitcomb returned to law school and graduated. In 1950, Whitcomb was elected to the state Senate where he served for three years. In 1954, he resigned to pursue his law career in North Vernon (later Seymour and Indianapolis). In 1966, Whitcomb was elected to the office of Secretary of State for Indiana.

In 1968, Whitcomb ran against future Governor Otis Bowen and future Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz. Bowen enjoyed the support of several large counties and was able to beat the other two candidates. The general election was fought on tax policy and national issues. Republicans were the beneficiaries in these issues and, after two down cycles, returned to power. During redistricting, the legislature had to honor the Warren Court Baker v. Carr court case which adopted the one-person, one-vote principle. As the population shifted from rural areas to urban areas, legislative districts hadn’t been shifting to keep pace. The result was that rural voters were over-represented. With the Baker v. Carr decision, the legislative Republicans had to redistrict in a way that shifted representation from rural areas to urban areas.

The situation created by the new development caused a split in the party between the urban and rural Republicans. Urban Republicans and their representatives tended to favor increasing government provided services and spending, while the rural Republicans tended to favor reduced spending and more limited government. Whitcomb found himself in party with the rural Republicans, while Bowen, who had become speaker of the house, grew to become a leader among the urban members.

Whitcomb was aligned with the rural Republicans while Bowen, who had become Speaker of the House, was aligned with the urban Republicans. Whitcomb vetoed a number of House spending bills which contributed to the rift. One consequence of the division was that Bowen was able to have one of his people take the state party chairman’s position which was seen as a snub of Whitcomb. In retaliation, Whitcomb directed political contributions to a fund he controlled which caused the state party financial hardship.

Governor Whitcomb sought to address the state’s budget problem without raising taxes in a way that had gotten his recent predecessors in trouble. He was able to adopt efficiency measures and auditing techniques that reduced expenses and increased revenues. His resistance to tax increases put him at odds with his fellow Republicans — so much so, apparently, that party leaders enlisted President Nixon to try to sideline Whitcomb with an offer to become Ambassador to Australia. Whitcomb declined and finished out his term.