Re: Reagan and prejudice, we have to recover some context. Reagan’s father refused to let his children see “Birth of a Nation”–the W.D. Griffiths film, honored in film schools for its technical skills, but full of images of ape-like Negroes carrying on in Reconstruction-era legislatures and attacking virginal white women, until they are routed by the heroic Ku Klux Klan. The Great War of American memory when Reagan was born was still the Civil War; lynchings were not unknown outside the Deep South (Edmund Morris has a lurid description one in Wilmington, Delaware, in Theodore Rex). Speaking of the Klan, it had a major revivial in the twenties–based on anti-Catholicism, as much as racism–and its sympathizers prevented Al Smith from winning the Democratic nomination at the 1924 convention. World War II, of course, was fought primarily (in Europe) against the Nazis, no comment necessary.

Yes, Communism infected the corpse of a major nation in 1917, and had sympathizers world-wide. But for the first 33 years of Reagan’s life, bigotry and prejudice, in their modern malevolent forms, were certainly among the worst things in the world, here and abroad.