Ronald Reagan, former Western movie actor and host of television\u2019s popular \u201cDeath Valley Days\u201d is sworn in as the 40th president of the United States.<\/p>\n
More than any president since the Texas-born Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan\u2019s public image was closely tied to the American West, although he was raised in the solidly Midwestern state of Illinois. In the 1930s, Reagan moved to California, where he became a moderately successful Hollywood actor. Thereafter, he always considered himself a true westerner in spirit.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Reagan\u2019s image as a westerner was reinforced by his acting career. Although he acted in other genres as well, many of Reagan\u2019s movies were B-grade Westerns like \u201cLaw and Order,\u201d in which he played a sheriff who was the only law \u201cfrom Dodge City to Tombstone!\u201d When his movie career waned, Reagan made the transition to television as a host of the hugely popular showcase for western stories, \u201cDeath Valley Days.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reagan\u2019s film and TV career not only won him public-name recognition but also helped establish his enduring \u201cgood-guy\u201d reputation. A few of Reagan\u2019s roles in non-western movies included men of questionable character, but in Westerns he usually played the brave and wholesome sheriff or cowboy who killed the outlaws, saved the school marm, and brought justice to the Wild West. Though it is difficult to estimate exactly how important such positive roles were for his subsequent political career, surely Reagan\u2019s \u201cwhite hat\u201d movie image helped win him some confidence and votes.<\/p>\n
Reagan\u2019s politics also increasingly reflected the mythic western image of rugged independence and self-reliance. Although he had been a liberal New Deal Democrat as a young man, by the 1950s, Reagan had become a hard-line conservative. As president of the Screen Actor\u2019s Guild (1947-52, 1959-60), he won national attention as an outspoken anticommunist, and he began to view even the mild federal socialism of the New Deal as destructive to individual initiative and freedom. Switching his allegiance to the Republican Party, Reagan won two terms as governor of California (1967-75), where he gained a devoted national following that helped him win the presidency.<\/p>\n
During his eight years as president of the United States (1981-89), Reagan redefined the center in American politics, moving it away from the liberal Democrats and towards the conservative Republicans. Though his days as a western movie star were long past by then, Reagan continued to celebrate the mythic independence of the western pioneer as a parallel to modern conservatism. To drive home the point, Reagan made frequent and highly visible retreats to his California ranch, where he rode horses, fixed fences, and cut firewood for the TV cameras. This president, Reagan\u2019s actions seemed to say, was a self-reliant cowboy at heart and only a reluctant politician.<\/p>\n
After a long struggle with Alzheimer s disease, Ronald Reagan died on June 5, 2004. He was buried at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ronald Reagan, former Western movie actor and host of television\u2019s popular \u201cDeath Valley Days\u201d is sworn in as the 40th president of the United States. More than any president since the Texas-born Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan\u2019s public image was closely tied to the American West, although he was raised in the solidly Midwestern state of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3515],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-old-west"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}