Thursday is Ronald Reagan's birthday: How the president shaped Republican Party
Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on this day in 1911. His legacy still shapes American politics, historians say, and he's a guiding force for Republicans as they control the White House, House and Senate.
Reagan’s presidency is remembered for the optimism he instilled in many – but not all – Americans and his creation of modern conservatism, according to presidential historians.
“A lot of people look back to Reagan’s days as a time when country was thriving,” said Chester Pach, a history professor at Ohio University with a book in the works on Reagan’s presidency.
The White House hailed Reagan Thursday as "a giant of American history, a lion of freedom and liberty." His legacy, a presidential message said, is "bringing common sense back to Washington and fortifying the causes of prosperity, safety, security, and peace that he cherished so deeply."
Here's what to know: The 40th president was born on Feb. 6, 1911, in the village of Tampico, Illinois. After attending Eureka College, he went on to work as a sports broadcaster before landing a contract that jumpstarted his acting career. He served as governor of California from 1967 to 1975. Reagan completed two full terms as president from 1981 to 1989, the first president to do so since Eisenhower.
The former president died on June 5, 2004, at 93 years old after living with Alzheimer's for several years.
What did Reagan mean to Americans during his presidency?
The 1970s leading up to Reagan's first election were marked by economic distress, with a recession raging, and the threat of the ever-present Cold War.
American hostages were being held in Iran and there was a decline in trust in government institutions and the military in the wake of the Vietnam War, said William Inboden, director of the Alexander Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida and author of “The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, The Cold War, and the World on the Brink.”
"When Reagan takes office, the country is very demoralized and kind of has a sense our country is broken, our best days are behind us, our economic system doesn't work anymore and the presidency itself is broken," Inboden said.
Reagan represented change. He promised to cut taxes drastically, reduce the federal budget and cut what he called wasteful programs, Pach explained.
“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Reagan said in his first inaugural address in 1981.
By the end of his first term, the economy had come “roaring back,” Inboden said. Inflation dropped from a high of 13.5% in 1980 to 4.6% come the 1984 election. An iconic campaign ad known as “Morning in America” portrayed a hopeful nation, better off economically than it was four years before.
Reagan won reelection in 1984 in one of the biggest landslide victories in U.S. history, snatching all but one state – Minnesota – and Washington, D.C.
“Even now, when people learn about him, he seems to be the kind of guy who represents a lot that people want to believe about America, American values, that the country is good,” Pach said.
However, many Americans didn't feel lifted by Reagan's time in office. Though the AIDS crisis raged since the start of his presidency and devastated LGBTQ communities, Reagan didn’t acknowledge it publicly for several years, Pach said.
He had low support among Black Americans. He promoted the idea that fraud and abuse were overrunning welfare programs, platforming the offensive stereotype of the "welfare queen." Reagan maintained that his economic policies would benefit all, but his use of what some call trickle-down economics faced accusations of only benefitting the wealthy.
Read more about so-called trickle-down economics.
“There were also a lot of people who were living in poverty, or the working poor, or just struggling to survive that thought that somehow Reagan really didn't understand the depth of their problems,” Pach said.
A lasting legacy
Polling shows that Americans rank Reagan among the top-performing presidents. According to a Gallup survey published earlier this year, he’s ranked by Americans as behind only John F. Kennedy in a field of 10 U.S. presidents for how they will go down in history. Reagan is the only Republican president who Democrats do not rank negatively, the poll found.
Politicians from across the political spectrum often reference Reagan when advertising their own values today.
“Almost every successful Republican politicians for the next 20 or 30 years would want to say, ‘I'm a Reagan Republican,’” Inboden said. “Even a lot of Democrats will pay tribute.”
Nearly 20 years ago, former Democratic President Barack Obama said Reagan “tapped into what people were already feeling, which is: We want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”
Still, historians say that like any president, Reagan’s record isn’t flawless. There were significant segments of the U.S. population who look back on his time in office with contempt, and “thought he was almost unaware of their problems or maybe even hostile to them,” Pach said, referring to the AIDS crisis and his treatment of government assistance programs.
How modern conservatism took shape
What Reagan means to Americans today may depend largely on how much memory they have personally about the time before and during his presidency, Inboden said. Reagan was more controversial during his time than he is today, he explained, because some policies like aggressive tax cuts and military spending made people uneasy.
Over time, assessments of his presidency have increased, Inboden said.
Reagan is credited with shaping what would become the modern conservative movement and drawing the political center to the right. He described the model of the three-legged political stool, Inboden said: free-market trade, national security hawkishness and social conservatism.
He also introduced Americans to the “art of the possible," Inboden said – that the country could overcome seemingly impossible challenges. One need look only to Reagan's role in the end of the Cold War, he added. That included a 1985 meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva, six years before the decades-long struggle would ultimately end.
“Reagan is one of those rather rare, kind of paradigm-defining presidents,” Inboden said. “No one would say that Reagan didn’t matter.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson are other examples of such figures, and in some ways Obama did something similar for Democrats, Inboden said.
“Donald Trump has now become certainly a paradigm-defining president for the current era,” he said, adding that conservatism today is somewhat divided between Trump's further-right MAGA movement and more traditional members of the GOP. For example, former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney went so far as to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
Though many of the core messages of Reagan’s conservatism remain, Pach said, there's a real difference around tone and rhetoric in today's politics.
“In our current era we sometimes do lose sight of the art of the possible,” Inboden said. “Wherever Americans are the political spectrum it's certainly in our best interest... that we all remember the great possibilities of our country.”
What to know about Nancy Reagan
Reagan met former first lady Nancy Reagan in 1949 when she was also working as an actress. Formerly Nancy Davis, she was having trouble when another actress with the same name was associated with Communist groups. She met with Ronald Reagan, who was president of the Screen Actors Guild at the time, to sort it out.
The two began dating and married in 1952. They appeared in one film together.
Nancy Reagan said, "My life didn't really begin until I met Ronnie."
The couple had two children together, Patti Davis and Ronald Prescott Reagan. Ronald Reagan also had two children during his first marriage: Maureen Reagan and Michael Reagan.
While Ronald Reagan was governor, Nancy Reagan worked on behalf of wounded Vietnam veterans, prisoners of war and service members missing in action. As first lady, Nancy Reagan is remembered for her staunch "just say no" policy on drugs and her devotion to her husband. She also drew early criticism for her expensive tastes in White House residence decor and fashion.
She was a fierce defender of her husband's legacy. Her later years were marked by her advocacy for research for Alzheimer's, which plagued Ronald Reagan for a decade.
Nancy Reagan died in 2016 at the age of 94 and was buried at her husband's presidential library in Simi Valley, California.
Contributing: David Jackson, Maria Puente and Andrea Stone