My Favorite President

When I was a teenager, George Harmon came to town with the crazy idea that a small, liberal arts school, like Millsaps College, could host a business school modeled after the famous Harvard School of Business. Not everybody in education thought he was entirely sane. For one thing, it was a Methodist school, and Methodists aren’t exactly known for their trailblazing. They make good coffee, though.

At that time, Millsaps and Mississippi Methodism in general were mainly known for their part in the “race troubles” that plagued us a decade before. All of Education in Mississippi carried scars from that battle. By 1980, when it started to be time to discuss where I would go to college, or if I would go to college, it was becoming clear that Millsaps professors, and even some Millsaps students, had files in the sealed State Sovereignty Commission papers. By “sealed,” I meant that, if you knew the right people, they would sniff around for you. Although it would be twenty years before the files were made public, even ten years after the commission was closed, people worried about its impact on their lives.

When the files were opened, we learned that the State Sovereignty Commission might have been more intimidating (as was their purpose) had they not been such idiots. My father’s file was virtually non-existent, and my Uncle’s file mainly involved a traveling minister and bible salesman who claimed to work for him but didn’t.

My dad bought into Harmon’s vision and enlisted his regular gang of Charlie Deaton, Rowan Taylor, and Robert Wingate to help make it happen. Not everybody in Jackson thought it was a great idea. Some people at Trustmark thought it was a terrible idea and had real concerns about Millsaps expanding their debt to make this pipe dream happen. As the Mississippi Republican Party was coming out of its cocoon, Jack Reed joined in with the team pushing for a business school in Jackson.

My father had an idea that I had a head for business and would be a businessman like him. I tried to make him understand that I saw myself more as a creator/artist type, but that might not have been all that convincing because I took every opportunity I could to spend time with him. Most of that time was spent listening to his ideas about business and the economy. We discussed my taking part in the still-new Millsaps School of Business. It was so new that it hadn’t yet been named the Else School of Business.

It was a golden time to be interested in business. The Reagan years brought on the “Yuppie” phenomenon which followed the “Preppy” phenomenon. When the Vietnam War ended, kids my age were looking for ways to define themselves, and rediscovering conservative ideas was part of it.

Most of my peers in the freshly-named Else School of Business developed their ideas about American Capitalism and the Free Market system from Forbes Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. While I read those things too, my perspective on American Capitalism and the Free Market System came from a lifetime of sitting at my father’s feet and listening to stories about him and my uncle and their involvement in the US Chamber of Commerce.

The difference was that, while my peers were learning about the biggest businesses in the world, my perspective was from a small business member of the US Chamber of Commerce. My father made it clear that there were big businesses in Mississippi, but none of them were from Mississippi. Our best interests lie with the Small Business people who live here, bank here, and invest in Mississippi.

One person he held up as an example was Richard McRae, who was in our church. By Mississippi standards, McRae’s was a really big business, but compared to larger retailers around the country, they were scrapping survivors. Daddy made me see the difference between somebody like Richard McRae living in Mississippi, going to church in Mississippi, banking in Mississippi, eating out, buying property, and supporting the arts in Mississippi as opposed to people like Sears and JCPenney, who were his competition.

One of my father’s heroes was Teddy Roosevelt. Among other things, Roosevelt was the first “trustbuster” in America. The massive business trusts, he reasoned, destroyed competition by starving out the small businessman, and competition is the only way the free market could contain inflation.

As a child, I mainly knew about Roosevelt from the Teddy Bear Story, as most good Mississippi children do, but as I became a man, understanding Roosevelt’s position on the economy was a gift from my father. It even expanded to his cousin Franklin, even though he was a Democrat.

When Ronald Reagan came along, The United States suffered from crippling high interest and inflation rates. I liked Jimmy Carter because as a Southerner, he was one of us, but I didn’t understand him, and I didn’t think he had a plan to solve either inflation or rampant interest rates. Even though I was still technically a child, I worked for my father every summer, and we lunched together every day he was in Mississippi and not drawn to a business-oriented luncheon elsewhere.

My father tried to explain to me the economic principles behind inflation and interest rates, and how to apply the different theories of Carter, Reagan, and the other republicans. By this time, the term “Voodoo Economics” had already been used to describe Reagan. Daddy explained that Reagan’s plan to reduce inflation was to apply free market principles and increase competition. Part of that plan was to reduce or eliminate both incoming and outgoing tariffs, reasoning that tariffs reduced and even eliminated the impact of competition, and competition kept prices low.

Regan’s plan to reduce interest rates was important to my father. Even though he was on the board of the institution that held his home mortgage, he was still paying a rate of almost ten percent. Most Mississippians had it worse. Regan planned to reduce the deficit, thereby reducing government borrowing, freeing up more credit for the consumer market, and bringing interest rates down.

Voodoo Economics was a term to describe Reagan’s trickle-down plan for taxation. We didn’t discuss that much. My father didn’t think he could get Congress to agree to the tax cuts. Congress did agree to the tax cuts, though, and they even agreed to many of the expenditure cuts Reagan wanted, but his appetite for raising military spending was insatiable, and the promised rise in tax revenue as his tax plan “trickled down” never materialized. While parts of the Reagan plan were working, other parts were not.

Unable to reduce the deficit and reduce government spending, Reagan took some bad advice and eliminated some of the safe banking regulations enacted after the bank failures during the depression. One of them was regulations on interstate banking. He figured that removing the barriers to bank competition would work like free trade did with business competition, and interest rates would come down.

Interest rates did come down, but crazy things started happening. Previously undreamed of financial practices sprang up, like a thing called “Junk Bonds” which were every bit as bad as they sound. Institutions that had existed for generations in protected markets were suddenly in serious trouble, and as Ronald Reagan left office, America entered into the Savings and Loan Crisis that changed banking in America forever, or at least forever so far. The budget wasn’t balanced, but mortgage rates were lowered, and a new type of student loan was introduced that would come back to bite us twenty-five years later.

I still insist that I don’t really have a head for business, but all those hours of listening clearly stuck with me. I still count Reagan as one of my political heroes, even though his legacy is tarnished, and Teddy Roosevelt is still my all-time favorite president. We’re in kind of a crazy political moment where I don’t think Reagan or Roosevelt would recognize the party they built, or put up with what’s going on.

I'd feel a lot better if I could have one more lunch with Daddy and his crew to explain all this to me. You go through life with these proud ships sailing alongside you, and then one day, after you get used to the storms, you look around and realize you’re sailing alone. They taught me who my favorite president should be, though. That’s a place to start.