"There Are Great Days Ahead"

At his alma mater, Reagan puts forth a traditional vision

It has been more than half a century since Ronald Reagan lived in the flat, folksy precincts of north central Illinois. For the residents of his principal home town, absence has surely made the heart grow fonder. On his 73rd birthday last Monday, Reagan made his first stopover as President in Dixon (pop. 15,700). "I've never seen this town so happy," said Mayor James Dixon, a Democrat and great-great-great-grandson of Dixon's founder.

The President had a White House-catered lunch (salad, soup and pork) with First Brother Neil at one of their several boyhood homes and then flew to Eureka College, both brothers' alma mater. There, in the Reagan Physical Education Center, before virtually the entire 516-member student body, he inaugurated TIME'S Distinguished Speakers Program. Twice a year, TIME will sponsor an address by one of its cover subjects at a college of his or her choice. The President began with four warmup jokes about his age ("the 34th anniversary of my 39th birthday"). In the course of 25 minutes Reagan discussed "the changes that have happened to America in the 50-odd years . . . since I left this campus." He quoted five historical figures, from Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald to Pope Pius XII, and alluded to a dozen contemporary conservatives, from Economist Milton Friedman to Philosopher Jean-Marie Benoist. He also reiterated some familiar proposals--for a line-item budget veto, a balanced-budget constitutional amendment, and tax reform so that the system can "be understood by someone other than an army of green-shaded accountants." Following are excerpts from his remarks:

What struck me when I was thinking about what I wanted to say here today [was] the ease, the unknowing grace with which my generation accepted technological and political changes that so radically transformed our world.

Can you imagine our sense of wonder when, one Sunday afternoon, down by the river in Dixon, we heard the sounds of radio for the first time? Yet it took only a few years for that sense of wonder to dissolve. By 1932, my graduation year . . . the Depression years were upon us, and over those radio sets, now sitting in every parlor, came the rich, reassuring tones of Franklin Roosevelt. All of us who lived through those years can remember the drabness the Depression brought. But we remember too how people pulled together--that sense of community and shared values, that belief in American enterprise and democracy that saw us through. There seemed a certain logic to arguments that national Government should take onto itself new and sweeping prerogatives. Many of us could not see the enormous and oftentimes harmful political changes that this expanded role for the Government would bring. As I look back, the rapidity of that political change was as astonishing as the change brought by technology.

In the Depression years and their aftermath, we forgot that first, founding lesson of the American Republic: that without proper restraints, Government the servant becomes quickly Government the master. I call it an American lesson, but actually it's much older: Cicero believed that the budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, the public debt should be reduced. . . Yet even as the '50s and '60s went by, and more Americans shared my concern, Government grew like Topsy. In the '70s, federal spending tripled, taxes doubled and the national debt reached al most a trillion dollars. . .

Throughout World War II and most of the postwar era there was still basic agreement on the moral imperative of defending freedom and the self-evident differences between totalitarian and democratic governments. But that broad consensus began to break down in the '60s and '70s. Partly in response to the Viet Nam tragedy, an era of paralyzing self-doubt ruled out just and legitimate uses of American power, even acts of self-defense.

We've changed this. We've tried to bring a new honesty and moral purposefulness to our foreign policy, to show we can be candid about the essential differences between ourselves and others while still pursuing peace initiatives with them. For us, human freedom is a first principle, not a bargaining chip. . .

For most of my adult life, the intelligentsia has been entranced and enamored with the idea of state power, the notion that enough centralized authority in the hands of the right-minded people can reform mankind and usher in a brave new world. [Now, however,] the cult of the state is dying; so too the romance of the intellectual with state power is over. Indeed, the excitement and energy in the intellectual world is focused these days on the concerns of human freedom.

This counterrevolution of the intellectuals was [presaged] by one of the most vivid events of my time. It involved, coincidentally, an editor of TIME magazine, Whittaker Chambers, [the late former Communist] who in public testimony in 1948 named former high U.S. Government officials as spies . . . [Later] Chambers would write that faith, not economics, is the central problem of our age, and that "the crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God." Chambers' story represents a generation's disenchantment with statism and its return to eternal truths and fundamental values.

It is still the great civilized truths--values of family, work, neighborhood and religion--that fuel America's progress and put the spark to our enduring passion for freedom. With these values as our guides, the future can be even more breathtaking than the last 50 years, because it will hold out not only the promise of sweeping improvements in mankind's material conditions but progress in the spiritual and moral realm as well. And that's why I hope that 50 years from now, should TIME ask you for your reflections, you'll be able to recall an era exciting beyond all of your dreams. Believe me, there are great days ahead for you, for America and for the cause of human freedom.