Reagan, Ronald

1911–

American Actor, Politician, and President

Ronald Reagan enjoyed careers in radio, film, and politics, and he served as the fortieth president of the United States (1981–89). Partly through his acting career, but primarily through his highly popular presidency and his conservative political policies, he became an icon of American masculinity.

Reagan graduated in 1932 from Eureka College, where he played football, and became a radio sports announcer. In 1937 he turned to acting. Appearing in fifty-three films over the following two decades—most notably Knute Rockne: All American (1940) and King's Row (1941)—he played roles that identified manliness with patriotism, football, military heroism, and the West.

After making army training and morale films during World War II, Reagan became president of the Screen Actors' Guild (1947–52). While he initially held liberal and Democratic views, growing Cold War fears of communism made him increasingly conservative, anticommunist, and militaristic in his outlook. Amid controversy involving his co-operation with the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigation of communism in the film industry in the 1950s, Reagan left the acting business. He then became a national spokesman for General Electric, giving speeches that associated masculinity and patriotism with business, capitalism, and conservatism.

Ronald Reagan, elected president in 1980, embodied a conservative and nostalgic vision of American masculinity emphasizing physical vigor, patriotism, military strength, morality, and capitalism. His success heralded a Republican ascendancy in American politics that lasted into the early twenty-first century. (© Hulton/Archive)

In the 1960s, supported by business leaders who admired his inspirational speaking style, Reagan sought political office as a Republican. After two terms as governor of California (1967–75), he won the Republican presidential nomination in 1980. In his successful campaign, which tapped concerns that the nation had been weakened during the 1970s by economic stagnation, defeat in Vietnam, and Middle Eastern terrorists, Reagan promised to reinvigorate the nation militarily and economically, identifying his masculinity with national strength. By contrast, he portrayed his Democratic opponent, the incumbent president Jimmy Carter, as a weak president who had been ineffective at addressing economic malaise and [Page 386]confronting terrorists holding Americans hostage at the U.S. embassy in Iran. Reagan's campaign image of manly vigor, typified by television commercials depicting him wearing a cowboy hat or splitting wood, also addressed concerns raised by the fact that, at age sixty-nine, he was seeking to become the oldest president in American history.

As president, Reagan continued to associate patriotism, military strength, capitalism, and moral righteousness with masculinity. He used tough rhetoric in his dealings with the Soviet Union, ordered an invasion of the Caribbean island nation of Grenada to topple a Communist-backed government in 1983, and, responding to a series of terrorist acts during the early 1980s, launched a military strike aimed at Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi in 1986. Identifying manliness with entrepreneurship and economic expansion, he supported a probusiness agenda that reduced both corporate taxes and federal regulation on corporate activity. His conservative positions on issues of family, gender, and sexuality won him the support of the Christian Right, whose leaders believed that the 1960s counterculture and feminist challenges to traditional patriarchal domestic relations had undermined moral values and the stability of the family. But Reagan's masculine image was eroded during the Iran-Contra affair, when his claim that he was unaware of secret government sales of weapons to Iran to raise money for anticommunist guerillas in Nicaragua renewed concerns that advancing age had left him too weak to function effectively as president. His critics claimed confirmation of these suspicions following Reagan's 1994 announcement that he had Alzheimer's disease.

...