Ronald Reagan was born and educated in Illinois and moved to California in i937 where he had a successful career as an actor and as president of the Screen Actors’ Guild (making him the only union leader so far to hold executive office) and where, in the 1950s, he became a spokesman for the General Electric Corporation. It was his speech in support of Barry Goldwater’s i964 presidential bid that brought him national attention, and in i966, he was elected governor of California. His own bid for the presidency failed in i968 and again in i976, but the third time was a charm in 1980. Reagan’s victory in 1980 was regarded as a turning point, not just in the narrow sense of the rising fortunes of the American Right, but more generally for a nation still smarting from the debacle that had been the Vietnam War. With his emphasis on government as the problem, Reagan both harked back to Thomas Paine and to the tradition that developed along with the nation itself of individual entrepreneurship as the driver both of the American economy and of individual American lives although, as was the case with the Age of Jackson, the rhetoric of inclusivity disguised the exclusivity enjoyed by a fairly narrow and mainly business elite. The post-1980 retreat from perceived liberal values, from the active state solutions represented by the New Deal and the Great Society, was also accompanied by the rise of a moralistic right intent on directing the lives of others to a degree that no state - in its most intrusive imaginings - could ever conceive or achieve. In some respects, fear was the motivating ideology that drove the rise of the “New Right” after 1980, fear of disintegration at home and the dangers of the “evil empire” abroad. In this context, Reagan offered a deceptively straightforward solution to America’s problems at home and abroad. His economic program moved the American economy away from its pre-1980 Keynesian (in brief, government or public-sector spending as economic driver) toward supply-side (sometimes termed “trickle-down”) economics (“Reaganomics”) and drove through tax cuts via the Emergency Recovery Tax Act (1981) in an attempt to reduce the deficit. At the same time, because Reagan believed that defense was not a “budget item,” American military spending rose by 40 percent between 1980 and 1984. Reagan’s reelection in 1984 saw the president increasingly involved in foreign affairs, most notably the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Reagan’s efforts to improve relations with the Soviet Union were generally deemed successful, but in 1986, the revelation that the United States had been secretly supplying the Contras in Nicaragua - in defiance of the Congressional decision to suspend such aid - exposed (or not, given that both files and memories conveniently disappeared) the extent of the shadow state behind Congress. Ultimately, Reagan’s success with regard to the Soviets counterbalanced what was known as the Iran-Contra Affair (the funds for the Contras had come from arms sales to Iran negotiated in return for American hostages seized by Shi’ite groups), and Reagan left office as one of America’s most popular presidents.
Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president of the United States, was born in New York. Early childhood illness produced in him a determination to overcome his weak health with a robust physical fitness regime (he later praised what he termed the “strenuous life”) that came to define his political outlook, a regenerative impulse that grew from his own personal experience into a progressive program for the nation. He was educated at Harvard, and after this was elected to the New York State Assembly. His interest in America’s naval power saw him publish The Naval War of 1812 (1882). He came to presidency as the youngest man to hold the executive office with the assassination of William McKinley in 1901. By that time, Roosevelt already had a reputation as a man of action, a reputation partly forged at San Juan Hill on Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898. As president, Roosevelt sought to promote broadly progressive values, and his economic program, the Square Deal, sought to ensure that the interests of “Big Business” in the form of the U.S. Steel and Standard Oil did not operate against those of the public, or the nation. He was a strong proponent of antitrust legislation and of the conservation of the great American wilderness. Roosevelt was instrumental in protecting the nation’s natural resources from economic exploitation and secured millions of acres with the intention that the land be used for new national parks. The United States, by the time of Roosevelt’s presidency, had already designated Yellowstone (1872) and Yosemite (1890) as federally protected National Parks, so Roosevelt was developing, rather than instigating, a policy of environmental protection. In terms of foreign policy, just as Roosevelt divided corporations into those he deemed beneficial to the nation and those whose power threatened it, abroad he tended to see a juxtaposition between civilized and uncivilized, and to extend his progressive domestic politics onto the world’s stage by attempting to intervene in the internal affairs of several Central American nations, inaugurating the idea of America as “the world’s policeman.” Having served two terms, Roosevelt left office, but in 1912 he sought to return, and established a new Progressive Party whose platform, the New Nationalism, advocated control of business and the expansion of social justice achieved via greater government intervention. Although not successful - he was defeated by Woodrow Wilson - Roosevelt’s general ideology proved influential in American economic, political, and social development in the twentieth century.