This was the philosophical core of what would become Reaganism — articulated twenty-three years before his presidential campaign. Reagan told the Eureka graduates about his own college experience during the Great Depression, when the Illinois National Guard 'paraded down Michigan Avenue in Chicago as a warning to the more than half million unemployed men who slept every night in alleys and doorways under newspapers.' He acknowledged the good intentions of those who sought to place 'an economic floor beneath all of us.' But then he warned: 'Look more closely and you may find that all too often these well-meaning people are building a ceiling above which no one shall be permitted to climb, and between the two are pressing us all into conformity, into a mold of standardized mediocrity.' The argument was characteristically Reagan — sympathetic to the impulse, suspicious of the mechanism.