American Experience

Historian Robert Dallek on Reagan's Childhood Experience in Dixon, Illinois

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ROBERT DALLEK: Reagan grows up in 1920s Dixon, Illinois and it's the heartland of America. It's a time when Americans are particularly drawn to this small town world, because it's beginning to pass. It's beginning to be eclipsed by the rise of American cities. For the first time in the 1920s more Americans begin living in cities than in small towns, or in rural areas, and so as this slips away, Americans tend to value it all the more, and it becomes romanticized, and exaggerated, its virtues become exaggerated in some ways. And Reagan imbibes those values. He romanticizes his childhood, remembering the quality of life there as something so appealing, so comfortable, so attractive. It couldn't have possibly been as attractive and comfortable as he depicted it, but it was part of the romantic notion that not only he had, but millions of Americans shared, you see. And I think this was part of Reagan's effectiveness, his political genius, if you will: his capacity to share with the mass of the society, so many of the romantic notions that we've had about American life, about American politics, about American culture, and this, I think, partly comes out of that experience of the 1920s in Dixon, Illinois.

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