Franklin D. With the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt immediately acted to restore public confidence, proclaiming a bank holiday and Ulysses Grant commanded the victorious Union army during the American Civil War and served as the 18th U. During the Civil Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. Ronald Reagan. Reagan's Reelection.
Reagan's First Inaugural Address. Reagan Accepts Presidential Nomination. Nancy Reagan Nancy Reagan was an American first lady , the wife of Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States, and actress, noted for her efforts to discourage drug use by American youths.
How Ronald Reagan's Convention Battle Fueled His Landslide On the second day of the highly contested Republican National Convention, it was still far from clear which candidate the party delegates intended to choose: sitting president Gerald Ford or his challenger, former actor and California governor Ronald Reagan.
John F. Truman Harry S. Abraham Lincoln Abraham Lincoln, a self-taught lawyer, legislator and vocal opponent of slavery, was elected 16th president of the United States in November , shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. Young Ronald Reagan was successful as an actor and football player at Eureka College. But his most important role was a lifeguard at a local park in Illinois.
The future president saved an estimated 77 lives in his summers as a lifeguard. Toggle navigation. Here are 10 facts about President Reagan you may not know. Sign up for our email newsletter. A former actor and governor of California, Ronald Reagan was a formidable politician whose rise exemplified the shift in American demographics to the west.
Within the Republican Party, his ascension marked the revitalization of the conservative western wing of the party that many thought had faded before his defeat of Barry Goldwater in Reagan unapologetically reduced social welfare programs and encouraged a conservative social ethic regarding the role of religion in public life and reproductive rights.
In foreign policy, Reagan guided the United States through the end of the Cold War as the Soviet Union imploded, and he established a new working relationship with the post-Soviet Russian leadership. Ronald Reagan embodied the rebound of conservatism after the defeat of Barry Goldwater, running on a platform distrustful of government action other than within the arenas of foreign policy and the military. Reagan took office with a program of reducing the size and scope of government while standing firm against the Soviet Union and leftist insurgencies elsewhere in the world.
Reagan could strike a graceful pose, as in his remarks after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in Reagan narrated training films for new recruits and appeared in several patriotic films designed to aid the war effort. Perhaps the most important of these was Rear Gunner made at the request of the Air Corps, which had a surfeit of pilots and a shortage of gunners.
Other movies included Mr. Reagan was relieved from duty for several weeks to participate in the highly popular Irving Berlin musical, This Is the Army , which raised millions for wartime charities. Hollywood changed Ronald Reagan's world, on- and off-screen. He met the talented Jane Wyman during the filming of Brother Rat , Reagan's ninth film and one of the best of his B-division efforts.
Their romance blossomed, encouraged by the influential Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons, who took a special interest in Reagan's career because she was also from Dixon, Illinois.
Reagan and Wyman married on January 26, , and were promoted by Hollywood as the "ideal couple. While Reagan was making training films in the Army, his wife's film career skyrocketed. She received favorable notices for this film and for The Yearling , for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. Two years later, in what critics consider her best role, she won the Oscar for best actress in a stunning portrayal of a raped teenager, deaf and mute, in Johnny Belinda.
While Wyman scaled the top rungs of film stardom and Reagan battled to recapture his pre-war popularity, their marriage fell apart.
They were divorced in Four years later, after a period that Reagan described as the unhappiest of his life, he began seeing actress Nancy Davis. She had been moderately successful in ten films and had received good reviews for The Next Voice You Hear and Night into Morning But she gave up her acting career for Reagan: they were married on March 4, They had two children: Patricia, known as Patti Davis, born in and Ronald Prescott, born in Reagan's optimistic nature reasserted itself after his marriage to Nancy Davis.
But he struggled with his career. Reagan had signed a million-dollar, multi-year contract with Warner Brothers on the strength of Kings Row, which was released in when Reagan was in the Army. The movie audience that had come of age during the war years barely knew Reagan, who battled with Warner Brothers over his film roles and eventually left the studio.
Reagan saw himself as a dramatic actor but was more effectively cast in lighter films, winning good notices for his performances in The Voice of the Turtle and The Girl From Jones Beach He gave a convincing performance as the epileptic baseball pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander in The Winning Team at a time the name of the disease could not be mentioned on the screen. In , with his film career all but ended and his finances low, Reagan was offered a unique contract by General Electric.
The company hired him to narrate and occasionally act on its new program, General Electric Theater , which soon dominated the Sunday night television ratings. General Electric Theater kept Reagan's name and face in public view, and trips to the GE plants enabled Reagan to hone his speaking message and technique.
General Electric canceled the contract in because Reagan would not agree to a new format for the program, which had been overtaken in the ratings by Bonanza. But in , his brother Neil, an advertising executive, landed Reagan a contract to host Death Valley Days , a popular western series.
Throughout his life, Ronald Reagan displayed a strong interest in politics. Reagan's national political outlook was shaped by his parents, both Democrats, and especially by the onslaught of the Great Depression.
The entire Reagan family supported Franklin D. Roosevelt for President in and backed his New Deal. Roosevelt's resonant optimism dazzled Reagan, who imitated the President's inaugural speech on a broomstick microphone to college friends.
Reagan was grateful to FDR for providing work for his father and brother in New Deal relief programs. He voted for FDR each of the four times he was elected President and continued to speak well of him even after he became a conservative Republican. In Hollywood, in the late s and early s, Reagan also identified with Roosevelt's internationalism, especially his opposition to the aggressions of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.
Reagan joined the Screen Actors Guild SAG in , became a member of the union's board in and its president in and continued to serve on the board after stepping down from the presidency in During that period, SAG was involved in a myriad of battles, including repeated efforts to purge itself of Communist influence.
Reagan opposed the Communists and their allies; in he became a secret informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI , reporting on Communist activities in Hollywood.
Reagan, however, was wary of the indiscriminate anti-Communism then sweeping the country in the early days of the Cold War. He worried that SAG's programs designed to root out Communists might harm innocent actors and actresses. He was skeptical of the House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities, which in the late s investigated Communist infiltration of Hollywood.
But as president of SAG, Reagan helped implement the blacklist of suspected Communists that had been agreed to by movie producers frightened by the congressional investigations. Reagan did, however, work to clear the names of actors whom he thought had been wrongfully accused or had only dabbled with leftist groups, as he had done in the s. He continued in the s to campaign for Democratic candidates, including the liberal Helen Gahagan Douglas, who in lost a U.
Senate race in California to Richard Nixon. Reagan's politics changed in the s. Still an influential member of SAG—he resumed its presidency in —Reagan and the SAG leadership continued to win better pay and benefits for actors. In partisan politics, however, Reagan identified more frequently with Republicans. He was a participant in the Democrats-for-Eisenhower campaigns in and , which attracted many other Democrats. But in , when many of these "Eisenhower Democrats" returned to the party fold and supported John F.
Kennedy, Reagan championed the candidacy of Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon. Reagan did not especially like Nixon; he was motivated more by a distrust of Kennedy and the national Democratic Party, which Reagan saw as moving to the left.
Reagan, still a nominal Democrat, delivered more than speeches for Nixon, whom Kennedy narrowly defeated.
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