on the genre. One term coined to describe this influence is the “Great Commoner Complex”, whereby presidential biographers struggle to represent their subjects as ordinary human beings, while still portraying them as America’s definitive agents of history and representatives of their age and country. This complex is detectable in these biographies of Reagan. Wills and Morris approach Reagan as a flawed and complex character, compelling but often unremarkable, yet write his life as an exploration of national history and identity. One term coined to describe this influence is the “Great Commoner Complex”, whereby presidential biographers struggle to represent their subjects as ordinary human beings, while still portraying them as America’s definitive agents of history and representatives of their age and country. This complex is detectable in these biographies of Reagan. Wills and Morris approach Reagan as a flawed and complex character, compelling but often unremarkable, yet write his life as an exploration of national history and identity. as America’s definitive agents of history and repre-
sentatives of their age and country.xxii This complex is detectable in these biographies of Reagan. Wills and Morris approach Reagan as a flawed and complex character, compelling but often unremarkable, yet write his life as an exploration of national history and identity. Rogin sees Reagan as a confused and pathetic figure, but whose unlikely rise to the presidency describes America’s own pathology. Paul Kengor explores the development of Reagan’s personal faith, but understands it primarily as an influence and product of history. However, beyond the generic representation of the president-to-be as a symbol of national identity and history, these authors all put forward a representation of Reagan unique to him, as a symbol of American mythology – of the construction and communication of American identity. In Wills, he is a symbol, of national fable and of American storytelling; for Rogin, he embodies national illusion and fantasy. Morris’s Reagan embodies the ambiguity and vitality of America’s self-imagination through memory and drama. In Kengor’s work, Reagan is emblematic of the continuity, communication and application of America’s exceptionalist, missionary ideology. In each case, this symbolism is most vivid in the representation of Reagan’s childhood, where his young life is recounted, remembered and revised as a prologue to the twentieth century
For a more detailed analysis of the association of i. Reagan with American mythology, see Johnson, Roger, “Ronald
Kengor, Paul, God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual vii. Life (New York: Regan Books, 2004), p. Viii.
Reagan and the Mythology of American History”, Thesis (Dphil)
Wills, Garry, Reagan’s America: Innocents at
gan (London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1999), p. xxviii. xvi.
Ibid, p. 672. Morris, ‘Online Newshour: Reading Reagan’ (Octo-
(University of Sussex, 2010).
viii. Home (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1987), pp. 1-4.
xvii. ber 4, 1999), http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/white_house/
Nadel, Ira Bruce, Biography: Fiction, Fact and ii. Form (London: MacMillan, 1984), p. 9, 176-8.
Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home ix. (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 448-459.
july-dec99/reagan_10-4.html (accessed November 27, 2006).
Casper, Scott E., Constructing American Lives: Bi-
iii. ography and Culture in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 19. Ibid, pp. 68-76. Also see Marcus Cunliffe’s discusiv. sion of Washington as the “Copybook Hero”. Cunliffe, Marcus,
x.
Wills (2000), pp. 1-19.
Ibid, p. 43; Wills,’ Ronald Reagan: The Politics of xi. Symbolism’ (review), The Journal of American History 71(2) (September, 1984), pp. 423-4. Rogin, Michael, Ronald Reagan: The Movie and
George Washington: Man and Monument (New York: Mentor
xii. Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of
Books, 1958), pp. 17-20.
California Press, 1987), p. 22.
v.
See campaign biographies Edel, Leon, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica
vi. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984), p.161.
xiii. xiv. xv.
Ibid, p. xiii.
Maslan, Mark, ‘Telling to Live the Tale: Ronald xviii. Reagan, Edmund Morris, and Postmodern Nationalism’, Representations 98 (Spring 2007), p. 65. xix. xx. xxi.
Kengor (2004), p. Ix. Ibid, p.2. Ibid, p.34
Altschuler, Glenn C. and Rauchway, Eric, ‘Presixxii. dential Biography and the Great Commoner Complex,’ American Literary History, 16(2) 2004, pp. 363-74.
Ibid, pp. 5-6. Morris, Edmund, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Rea-
Roger Johnson received his DPhil in American Studies from the University of Sussex in 2010, with the thesis “Ronald Reagan and the Mythology of American History”. He continues his research into Reagan and American memory, and maintains a blog on the subject, Gipperwatch (http://gipperwatch.blogspot.com/)