The McReagan in the Election
McDonald’s Number One Store
(Library of Congress)
By Amity Shlaes
This essay is adapted from Amity Shlaes’s regular column “The Forgotten Book,” which she pens for “Capital Matters” as a fellow of National Review Institute.
Reports that E. coli present in McDonald’s meals have laid customers low in multiple states are sad—and convenient to the leadership of the Democratic Party. The Harris campaign is working hard to overcome the positive publicity Donald Trump earned when he manned the fry machine and served some customers at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. Rendering the story worse for Kamala Harris’s campaign is McDonald’s unwillingness—or inability—to confirm that she herself once worked at McDonald’s, as her campaign has claimed.
The McDonald’s chatter tells us less about the Harris-Trump race than about their parties. The Golden Arches just don’t have a place in the Democratic vision of what our country should be, as Harris herself pointed out when she joined protesters demanding a doubling of the minimum wage at a McDonald’s back in 2019. Those arches don’t entirely fit into the new union-friendly vision of some Republicans, either. The corporation and its franchisees are some of the great union resisters in American history. But McDonald’s does exemplify the Grand Old Party of Ronald Reagan.
The extent to which this is true comes clear when you read Grinding It Out, the 1977 autobiography of the man who took McDonald’s national, the late Ray Kroc. Kroc’s story is a veritable parable of Reaganism, right down to the characters.
A Reaganesque Beginning
Kroc’s story starts like Reagan’s, with an artistic type from Illinois struggling his way through the Great Depression. Like Reagan, Kroc also exhibited a gift for sales. After an on-and-off career playing piano in speakeasies, Kroc turned to sales full-time, spending seventeen years hawking paper cups for the Lily Tulip Cup Company. Raising his sights—a little—Kroc eventually established his own company, Prince Castle Sales, and then set about finding a product that might conquer a growing new market, soda fountains.
His choice was the Multimixer, a six-spindled milkshake machine that whipped up six shakes at once. The copper and steel contraption was unwieldy: “a thirty pound metal mushroom.” Thirty pounds became fifty when you packed the mixer into its case, an awful lot for a salesman to pull behind him on a cart down the shadowy canyon of LaSalle Street.
Still, like Reagan in his years hawking free markets for General Electric, Kroc persevered, trailing from town to town with his “mushroom,” imagining soda-fountain managers “quivering with anticipation” for a Multimixer. “If you believe in something you’ve got to be in it to the end of your toes,” he said.
Belief didn’t suffice at first. Sales were slow. Copper rationing by the federal government in World War II placed a fresh obstacle before Prince Castle. Without copper wire, the Multimixer could not run. Try as he might, Kroc “could think of nothing that wasn’t illegal” to get around the rations, a frustration that deepened his awareness of the challenges posed by a planned economy. Eventually, Kroc resorted to powdered milkshake to sell to the soda fountains and then-young fast-food restaurants.
The Eden of Growth
Kroc’s great break, like Reagan’s entry into electoral politics, came relatively late in life. In 1954, Kroc managed to win a contract to establish franchises of an intriguingly successful hamburger joint in San Bernardino, California. McDonald’s was the brainchild of two New Hampshire transplants, Maurice and Richard McDonald.
Also important was Kroc’s own emphasis on franchises. He built his first McDonald’s, soon known, to the brothers’ chagrin, as “McDonald’s Number One Store,” as a showcase for future operators. What Kroc saw was that if store managers owned their own McDonald’s, they’d work harder than wage earners. From the start, therefore, Kroc saw McDonald’s franchisees as partners: “In business for yourself, but not by yourself,” became the company slogan.
Facilitating McDonald’s growth was the setting, the Eden of Growth that was the America of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In this less-regulated place, rapid advancement was possible. The prospects proved bright, even for returning veterans. So much ink has been spilt on the value of the GI Bill that we tend to forget that the most important postwar factor for veterans was that they could find a job or grow a business, with or without a federally funded degree.
Around the time Nikita Khrushchev warned Western ambassadors “we will bury you,” nine sailors just discharged from the Naval Station Great Lakes went to Kroc’s office on LaSalle Street and told him they wanted to stick together. Kroc obliged by writing them a contract for their own franchise in Portland, Oregon. “See, Khrushchev?” crowed the columnist Irv Kupcinet in the Chicago Sun-Times.
Immigrants were also beneficiaries in this easier America. Mexican-Americans operated McDonald’s in California. Newly arrived Cubans were among the franchisees in Florida.
From there it was onward to retail heaven—with thousands of McDonald’s opening in the U.S., Canada, and then overseas.
Long before Hillary Clinton gave the term “deplorables” its political meaning, Kroc and his colleagues recognized the contempt in which academics, State Department officials, and the fancier Wall Street investment houses held them—and gloried in it. Their revenge was to take McDonald’s public in 1965. Multiple stock splits later, McDonald’s continued to outperform some prestigious companies. Kroc passed away in 1984, but stock bought in 2004 for $10,000 sells for about $100,000 today.
Not everything about Kroc himself was heavenly. Those who’ve seen The Founder, the 2016 Kroc biopic, will be familiar with the contention that when he bought out the McDonald brothers in 1961, Kroc betrayed them by failing to honor a handshake promise to pay them 1 percent of revenue. This accusation has never been substantiated, and Kroc apparently did honor the contract.
What is incontestable, however, is that by styling himself as founder, rather than as someone who had scaled and transformed an existing business, Kroc cut the brothers out of the firm history when he thought he could get away with it. He probably couldn’t help himself.
Salesmen can be that way.
Still, Americans appreciated Kroc and his chain—and their politicians recognized that. As Walt Riker, a retired McDonald’s executive, reminded me in an email this week, both before and after his election in 1992, Bill Clinton ostentatiously included McDonald’s in his fast-food forays, perhaps to underscore the differences in social background between himself and George H. W. Bush.
A Parable for Our Times
The McReagan parable tells us a few things about our own past, and even about the policy that made that past worthy of a little nostalgia.
The first is that monetary stability matters: When the two brothers opened McDonald’s in 1948, they set the price of a burger at fifteen cents, and it was still fifteen cents when Kroc first visited San Bernardino in 1954. That price held all the way until 1967, when a rueful Kroc raised it to eighteen cents. His explanation that “we were in the midst of Lyndon Johnson’s guns and butter economy” was accurate, and the same point Governor Reagan of California was pounding when he gave speeches about “a life we cannot afford” that year.
A second takeaway is that growth makes more possible than many of our policy makers, and certainly the Harris campaign, allow today. McDonald’s got its mighty start in the America that Reagan missed, and that, in 1980, he ran for president seeking to restore.
A third is that free trade matters; McDonald’s—which has imported tomatoes from Mexico, potatoes from Canada, and beef from multiple nations—was right there among the companies supplying evidence to reporters on the virtues of NAFTA when President Trump turned on the trade treaty.
The final message of the McReagan story is that unions are not necessary. To vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, declining union membership may be a “tragedy”—to Kroc in his time, it was a victory. Most franchise operators tend to feel the same way.
Kroc passed away years ago. You have to wonder what he would have made of this election. A guess is that he would have smiled at the proposals to exempt tips from taxation, but rated free trade, low capital-gains taxes, and low income taxes more important. He certainly would have frowned at the new interest in unions that some Republicans demonstrate.
The bounce of the McDonald’s story this month reminds us that spinmeisters and the electorate are not one and the same.
While today’s commentators heap praise and airtime on candidates who claim they are “redefining the party,” voters themselves are not always so eager for the Great Game Change. Whatever their opinion of Trump, plenty of Americans still long for the simpler fare that was the old GOP.
Amity Shlaes chairs the Coolidge Foundation, is the author of Great Society, and is a fellow of National Review Institute. A version of this article first appeared in National Review’s “Capital Matters.”