Lee Daniels’ The Butler: Ronald Reagan and Racism

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20th Century America, African Americans, Alan Rickman, American Presidents, Apartheid, Eugene Allen, Forest Whitaker, Lee Daniels' The Butler, Nancy Reagan, Racial Issues, Ronald Reagan

One accusation that has been leveled against Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013, dir. Lee Daniels) is that it depicts the Reagan White House unfairly. For example, Michael Reagan, President Reagan’s son, wrote that to depict “Ronald Reagan as a racist because he was in favor of lifting economic sanctions against South Africa is simplistic and dishonest.” Ben Shapiro of Breitbart News complained that “[Eugene] Allen had warm relations with all the presidents with whom he served, and left the White House in 1980 with a hug from Ronald Reagan; Cecil Gaines, leaves the White House in rage over Reagan’s stance on South African apartheid. The film depicts Eisenhower as a colorless milquetoast, largely ignores southern Democrats’ support for Jim Crow during the 1960s and paints Reagan as slightly senile.” Reagan biographer Paul Kengor blasted one scene in which Reagan refuses to accept a bill that would have imposed economic sanctions on South Africa due to its Apartheid system of segregation, because the film offered no wider political context for Reagan’s decision.

So does the film merit such criticism?

It’s clear that Eugene Allen, the man on whom The Butler’s Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) is based, was treated at least somewhat better than Gaines is in the film. Whereas Allen retired as the White House Maitre d’hotel at the end of his career, Gaines spends 30 years as a butler and quits when he is refused a pay raise and promotional opportunities by an unnamed supervisor. While the incident represents Gaines’ acknowledgment that some of his son Louis’ (David Oyelowo) complaints about American society are valid, the scene as it literally plays is false, and in that sense, Shapiro’s objection is valid. It undeniably misrepresents Allen’s decision to retire. (But Shapiro’s claim that Gaines quits “in rage” is a serious exaggeration; Whitaker plays the scene very quietly and calmly, with no expression of emotion at all. Nor is Reagan’s stance on Apartheid the actual issue, although it does seem to prompt his demand for a raise.)

Eugene Allen and his family posing with Ronald and Nancy Reagan

But the film includes an incident from Allen’s life in which Nancy Reagan (Jane Fonda) invites Gaines and his wife to a State Dinner as guests rather than staff. There’s a suggestion that Gaines is uncomfortable at the dinner when his co-workers are waiting on him, but apart from that, the film plays the scene as the Reagans respectfully acknowledging his long service.

The Allens with Nancy Reagan

The film’s whole approach to the scenes with presidents is to show Gaines quietly serving in the background while the various presidents are discussing political issues with advisors. Periodically, one of the politicians will briefly acknowledge Gaines in a more personal way. President Kennedy tells him that he didn’t understand how deeply black people were hated until he saw the treatment the Birmingham marchers received, and after the assassination, Jackie Kennedy gives him one of her husband’s ties. Gaines receives a tie-pin from President Johnson. The film also shows him attending Johnson in a vulgar scene in which a constipated Johnson is sitting on a toilet discussing racial issues with his advisors just outside the bathroom door. The film spends more time on Richard Nixon (John Cusack) than anyone else, showing him as Vice-President trying to get the black staff at the White House to vote for him, and as President discussing how to deal with the Black Panthers and then drunk and despondent just before his resignation. Ford and Carter don’t even appear, except in news clips. So in most scenes, the presidents and their advisors treat Gaines as a domestic servant, but the film scatters in a few brief personal conversations, at least one each for Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan.

The Kennedys greeting the White House domestic staff, with Cecil Gaines (Whitaker) on the right

In Reagan’s case, the personal scene comes when Reagan (Alan Rickman) asks Gaines to mail a letter to a constituent. The constituent is having economic problems, and Reagan wants to send some money, but Nancy and his staff object to him doing this. So he asks Gaines to do it on the sly. It’s a scene that humanizes Reagan for the viewer, although it doesn’t say anything about Reagan’s attitude toward Gaines. Personally, I think Reagan comes off quite well in that scene.

Nor does the film “paint Reagan as slightly senile” as Ben Shapiro charges. I certainly saw no sign of that in the film. And it’s worth pointing out that Reagan, who died of Alzheimer’s 16 years after leaving office, almost certainly had the disease while he was president. His son Ron Reagan Jr has said that he saw traces of the characteristic confusion in his father as early as 1984, and reporter Lesley Stahl did as well. So had the film chosen to explore that facet of Reagan’s time in office, it would have had justification for doing so.

Reagan and Apartheid

However, the essence of the complaints about the film is really that the film treats Reagan poorly because it includes a scene in which South African Apartheid is an issue, and implies that Reagan was racist. Gaines is serving Reagan during a meeting with unnamed Republicans who are seeking to persuade the president to not veto the 1986 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which aimed to impose economic sanctions on the white South African government because of the country’s system of segregation, which became infamous during the 1980s. During the scene, Reagan says twice that he has made up his mind to veto the bill, without explaining why.

Jane Fonda and Alan Rickman as Nancy and Ronald Reagan

Reagan did veto the bill, which had bipartisan support, but his veto was overridden by a substantial margin in both houses. It was, in fact the first time in the 20^th century that a veto of a foreign policy bill was overridden, and it was seen as a significant defeat for Reagan. After the override, Reagan released a statement attributing his veto to a concern that the bill would hurt the people it was intended to help.

So the scene is essentially accurate. Republicans did press Reagan to accept the bill and he did in fact veto it. And it’s hard to argue that the film should have ignored the event. The whole film is about the dismantling of segregation in the US, and the CAAA played in role in helping to bring about the end of Apartheid in South Africa, so its inclusion in the film is appropriate. But the film does not make any statement that Reagan was motivated by racism. Kengor is correct that the film does not explore any wider context for the bill or Reagan’s decision, but I’m not sure that the film could have provided a meaningful context without going substantially out of its way.

Is this film biased against Reagan? Does it depict Reagan as a racist? I don’t think so. If it had wanted to paint Reagan in a negative light on race issues, it could certainly have done so by including reference to his use of the racist Southern Strategy to woo racist whites into the Republican Party, for example by using coded language about ‘welfare queens’ and ‘young bucks’, or his decision to kick off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, an obscure town whose only claim to fame is the lynching of three Civil Rights activists in 1964, or his 1982 defense of Bob Jones University, which was losing federal funding because of its ban on interracial dating. It could have mentioned that Reagan declared the Voting Rights Act “humiliating to the South”, or that he described Confederate president Jefferson Davis as a personal hero. It could have highlighted Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager, Lee Atwater, who explicitly acknowledged the role coded racism played in the campaign. In a film dealing with race and racism in the United States, inclusion of these events would have been entirely reasonable.

Reagan at the Nashoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi

The fact that Reagan was friendly to domestic servants in the White House and once hugged Eugene Allen doesn’t really occlude the numerous ways that Reagan used racism as a tool during his political career. Michael Reagan insists that his father was not a racist and at various points did nice things for black friends; that may well be true but it doesn’t mean that Reagan can’t have exploited racism to further his own goals. It is entirely possible to have black friends and yet still say and do racist things. So whether Reagan’s veto of the CAAA was motivated by racism or something else entirely, the film uses the incident as an example of the way Reagan’s policies looked quite different to blacks than to whites. Given that the whole movie is about how black people viewed America and American politics in this period, that’s an entirely reasonable approach. Could the film have gone into deeper detail about Reagan’s decidedly mixed record on racial issues? Could it have provided more of the context Paul Kengor wanted by delving into the Reagan administration’s policies and the political strategy Reagan used to win two elections? Absolutely, but had it done so, I think Reagan would have come off much worse than he does in the film.

Want to Know More?

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is available on Amazon. The article that inspired the film was released as a promotional piece for the film, along with some material about the making of the film. You can get it as The Butler: A Witness to History, but it’s probably not worth the money. You can find the original article here.

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Lee Daniels’ The Butler: Upstairs, Downstairs at the White House

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20th Century America, African Americans, American Presidents, Civil Rights Movement, David Oyelowo, Eugene Allen, Forest Whitaker, Lee Daniels' The Butler, Oprah Winfrey, Racial Issues, Washington DC

Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013, dir. Lee Daniels, duh!) tells the story of Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), the son of a Georgia cotton-picker who leaves after being trained as a domestic servant and eventually works his way up to being a well-respected butler at the White House. He starts working there under President Dwight D. Eisenhower and quits during President Reagan’s tenure, serving through various famous events, such as the Little Rock school desegregation crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Voting Rights Act, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Vietnam, Nixon’s resignation, and the debate over South African Apartheid under Reagan. At the end of the film, after voting for Barack Obama, he is invited back to the White House as an honored guest.

The film is “inspired by true events”, which is Hollywood-speak for “it’s basically made up.” In this case, the film was very loosely modeled on the life of Eugene Allen, who worked at the White House from 1952 to 1986. Shortly after the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the Washington Post ran an article on Allen, which prompted the film.

But while Allen was the inspiration for the film, and Gaines’ time at the White House covers almost the same range of years (Gaines starts in 1957), there are only a few similarities between the two men. Allen was married with one son, whereas Gaines is married with two sons; Allen’s wife Helene and Gaines’ wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) both die just before the 2008 election. Jackie Kennedy really did give Allen one of her husband’s ties after the assassination, and Nancy Reagan really did invite Allen to a state dinner.

Eugene Allen

But beyond these details, the film takes enormous liberties. Allen was from Virginia, whereas Gaines is from Georgia. In the film, his mother is raped by her employer, who promptly shoots Gaines’ father for protesting it. That’s complete fiction; it’s purpose is to help establish for the viewer the legal and social inequalities between blacks and whites that is really the theme of the whole film. Nor, so far as I can tell, did a young Gaines break into a bakery to get something to eat and be taken in by a black employee.

In the film, Gaines starts at the White House as a butler and 30 years later is still just a butler. He periodically asks the Maitre d’hotel (the head of the domestic staff at the White House) for pay equal to the white employees and equal career opportunities, and continues getting turned down until he finally quits as an act of protest. Allen, however, started out not as a butler but as a pantry worker, shining silver and doing similar chores. He was promoted to butler and by the end of his career he was the Maitre d’hotel. So the film’s claim that the White House did not permit its black employees to advance at all is false.

Allen (right) serving President Eisenhower (center)

However, while these details are untrue, they do serve to dramatize a basic problem at the White House; while the domestic staff included large numbers of black men and women, there were comparatively few blacks in political offices of any level; usually no more than one or two in any administration. The year after Allen retired, Colin Powell became the highest-ranking black man to hold any White House position when President Reagan named him National Security Advisor in 1987.

Father and Son

Daniels smartly focuses on race issues in the film by contrasting Gaines’ service to various presidents with the experiences of his son Louis (David Oyelowo), who is essentially fictional (Charles Allen was not a political activist). When he graduates from high school, Louis decides to go to Fisk University where he meets Carol (Yaya DaCosta). While Gaines appears to be a Republican for most of the film (as considerable numbers of blacks were in the 1950s, since the Republicans were “the party of Lincoln”) Louis and Carol slowly become radicalized by their experiences, which allows the film to depict numerous moments in the turbulent racial politics of the 1960s.

Whitaker and Oyelowo as Cecil and Louis Gaines

At Fisk, Louis meets James Lawson, an early advocate of nonviolent political action (who did, in fact, work with students at Fisk), and Louis and Carol participate in a lunch counter sit-in. The specific training in non-resistance they participate in and the violent treatment they receive at the lunch counter are some of the most powerful scenes in the whole film, showing how the Civil Rights movement involved carefully planned strategy, not just spontaneous events. (A good example of this is Rosa Parks; contrary to the usual depiction of her, Parks was not simply too tired to get up from that bus seat; her action was a very intentional gesture. As the secretary of local NAACP president E.D. Nixon, she understood that the NAACP was looking for a good candidate to trigger a lawsuit over the bus system’s discriminatory policies, and she knew there were plans for a local bus boycott.) The Sit-in scene is a damn good piece of film-making.

After Louis gets arrested, he has a falling out with Cecil and they part ways, barely seeing each other for years. Louis and Carol participate in a Freedom Ride and narrowly survive an ambush by the KKK. They get arrested repeatedly, have fire hoses and dogs turned on them in Birmingham, are present at Selma during the Voting Rights march, and are with Dr. King when he is assassinated in Memphis. They become advocates of Black Power and join the Black Panthers, but Louis eventually becomes disenchanted when the movement starts drifting toward violence.

Louis being arrested after the Lunch Counter sit in

All of this makes the film a virtual primer on the Civil Rights struggle. The film repeatedly contrasts scenes of White House gentility with scenes of racist violence, and Gaines hears a good deal of discussion about the politics of race issues by various presidents and their advisors. Gaines and his son travel in opposite arcs, one from conservatism to activism and the other from radicalism to more moderate forms of protest, finding reconciliation when Gaines finally finds the dignity to quit his job after being refused another pay raise. And it’s true that Eugene Allen did live through all of these upheavals while working at the White House.

But the tidiness of it all simply feels false. It makes sense that Gaines saw Jackie Kennedy after her husband was assassinated and spoke with a despondent President Nixon shortly before his resignation, because he was a domestic staffer whose job including waiting on the First Family. But to have his son constantly be thrust into similarly important moments during the Civil Rights struggle from the side of the activists simply strains credulity too much for the film to be truly persuasive as a depiction of history; it’s several coincidences too many.

Which is a pity, because the underlying story the film is telling us is both true and important. Looking at the Civil Right era from these twin perspectives provides a more nuanced depiction of the black experience during this period than one normally gets in film or television. The conflicting viewpoints of Gaines and his son show how complex the political choices facing black people were at the time. Louis thinks his father is being subservient to power until Dr. King comments that the dignified service of black servants was a powerful way of undermining stereotypes of blacks as lazy and stupid. Gaines thinks his son is being disrespectful by protesting, and slowly comes to realize that perhaps being respectable isn’t enough. Both Gaines and his son slowly become disenchanted with the organizations they belong to because the one seems to ignore the needs of black citizens and the other becomes too radical.

Gaines, the film’s central character, is written to be quiet, dignified, and stoic, apart from one brief outburst at his son. While that may be true to Allen’s personality (or perhaps simply his public persona), it doesn’t always give Whitaker much to work with, and Gaines sometimes feels like a cipher. Louis often comes across more sympathetically than his father does. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better job of aging in character in a film; by the end of the film Whitaker does genuinely come across as a frail old man.

The best performance, however, is by Oprah Winfrey, who sinks her teeth into the surprisingly nuanced role of the alcoholic Gloria, who is at different moments proud of and resentful of her husband’s job, deeply in love with him and sexually frustrated by him, angry at Louis and worried about his safety. It’s a role to remind you that she’s an Academy Award nominated actress. And it’s a nice break from the noxious Hollywood tendency of casting inappropriately young actresses as romantic partners for much older male stars.

Winfrey as Gloria

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is not a perfect film; the inclusion of the radical Louis Gaines as a central character simply feels too pat and strains credulity. But it does an excellent job of introducing the viewer to the turbulence of racial issues in the 1950s and 60s, and the concept of making a movie about this period in which white presidents are merely supporting players in a story about the political and personal struggles of a black family feels gently subversive. Watching famous white actors like Robin Williams, John Cusack, Alan Rickman and Jane Fonda having cameos while the black actors takes center stage is a pleasant change of pace from normal Hollywood casting. Although the film occasionally feels like it’s straining to prove it’s a prestige movie, the subject matter alone makes it worth watching and the solid performances make it enjoyable.

Update: In the original draft of this column, I made a comment about the inclusion of Lee Daniels’ name in the title. It has been pointed out to me that this was actually forced on Daniels, who would have preferred to use the title “The Butler”, which was a title legally owned by Warner Bros. Thus Daniels was not responsible for the decision. Since it wasn’t Daniels’s choice, I’ve removed the comment.

Want to Know More?

Lee Daniels’ The Butleris available on Amazon. The article that inspired the film was released as a promotional piece for the film, along with some material about the making of the film. You can get it as The Butler: A Witness to History, but it’s probably not worth the money. You can find the original article here.

If you want to know more about the below-stairs work at the White House, The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House might be a better choice.

There are many good books on different aspects of the Civil Rights struggle. One good general treatment is Daniel Luck’s Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War (Civil Rights and Struggle). You might also consider looking at the various primary documents of the movement, collected in The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, which is a companion piece to the acclaimed PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement