Nation: Reagan the Historian

Maybe his sense of apocalypse is heightened by living so close to the San Andreas Fault. During a fund-raising luncheon at his alma mater. Illinois’ Eureka College. California’s Governor Ronald Reagan applied a truculently ominous—// extremely loose —interpretation of history to the condition of the U.S. “The young men of Rome began avoiding military service,” said Reagan, who tripped up a hit on the distinction between Spengler’s Decline of the West and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “[They] took to wearing feminine-like hairdos and garments, until it became difficult to tell the sexes apart. Among the teachers and scholars was a group called the Cynics, who let their hair and beards grow, were slovenly in their dress. The morals declined. Rioting was commonplace. And all the time the twin diseases of confiscatory taxation and creeping inflation were waiting to deliver the death blow. When they finally overcame the energy and ambition of Rome’s middle class, Rome fell.”

Some serious historians have worried about the parallels between U.S. and Roman history, but Reagan’s approach is more polemical than historical. He selected phenomena from several centuries of Roman history and touched up the facts a bit to suit his moral. Reagan really should begin research on Sodom and Gomorrah. Somewhere between the lines he might find that S. and G. flamed out just as soon as the local bureaucrats began to fluoridate the water and teach sex education in the schools.