The amazing story of the thinker behind his sunny optimism The Gipper's warm "morning in America" worldview was directly shaped by his reading of occult thinker Manly P. Hall
By Mitch Horowitz
Salon.com - Sunday, Jan 5, 2014
Ronald Reagan often spoke of America’s divine purpose and of a
mysterious plan behind the nation’s founding. “You can call it mysticism
if you want to,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference
in 1974, “but I have always believed that there was some divine plan
that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by
those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special
kind of courage.” These were remarks to which Reagan often returned. He
repeated them almost verbatim as president before a television audience
of millions for the Statue of Liberty centenary on July 4, 1986.
When touching on such themes, Reagan echoed the work, and sometimes the phrasing, of occult scholar Manly P. Hall.
From
the dawn of Hall’s career in the early 1920s until his death in 1990,
the Los Angeles teacher wrote about America’s “secret destiny.” The
United States, in Hall’s view, was a society that had been planned and
founded by secret esoteric orders to spread enlightenment and liberty to
the world.
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