On This Date In History

On February 6, 1911, in Tampico, a small town in northwestern Illinois, Ronald Reagan was born.
As the 40th president of the United States, the former movie star was called the “Great Communicator” for his ability to get through to ordinary Americans and give them hope and optimism for their own future and that of their country. Despite his lifelong opposition to “big” government, he was credited with restoring faith in the U.S. government and the presidency after a long era of disillusionment in the wake of Nixon, Vietnam and economic hardship under Carter.  
Though his family was poor, Reagan later remembered his as an idyllic childhood. After playing football in high school and college (at Eureka College), he graduated during the Great Depression with few job prospects. He soon began working in radio in Iowa, broadcasting for football and other sports. While on a spring training trip with the Chicago Cubs in Los Angeles, Reagan got in touch with a former colleague at WHO in Des Moines, who connected him with a Hollywood agent, and in 1937 Warner Brothers offered Reagan a seven-year contract starting at $200 per week. His first role was far from a stretch: He played a radio reporter in the 1937 B-movie Love Is on the Air, and the Hollywood Reporter called him “a natural.”
After a few years as what he later called “the Errol Flynn of the B pictures,” Reagan won the role he would become known for, the football player George Gipp of Notre Dame University in Knute Rockne, All-American. The film told the story of the legendary Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne (played by Pat O’Brien), who died in a plane crash in 1931. Gipp was the walk-on who became Rockne’s star player and died of a throat infection two weeks after his final game.
In addition to making more than 50 films, Reagan became heavily involved in the Screen Actors Guild during his years in Hollywood, serving six terms as its president and leading the union through some of the most volatile years in the movie industry. In 1947, when accusations of Communism were running rampant in Hollywood, Reagan testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to name names of suspected Communist sympathizers. Around this same time, Reagan’s personal life was in turmoil: His wife, the actress Jane Wyman, divorced him in 1948; his increasing involvement in the Screen Actors Guild was reportedly mentioned as a factor in the divorce. Reagan married Nancy Davis, also an actress, in 1952; they had two children, Patricia and Ronald. (Reagan and Wyman also had a daughter, Maureen, and adopted a son, Michael.) Nancy Reagan would become her husband’s closest confidante and adviser during his future political career.
In the early 1950s, Reagan became familiar to a much wider audience when he began hosting the television program General Electric Theater; he also traveled the country giving speeches as the GE company spokesman. Though he was a registered Democrat during his years in Hollywood, he changed his political affiliation to Republican in 1962. Two years later, Reagan made his grand entrance on the political stage with a much-publicized speech at a fundraiser for Barry Goldwater, that year’s Republican presidential candidate. In Kings Row (1941), Reagan had played a small-town hero whose legs are amputated. He considered it his finest film and took a line from it, ”Where’s the rest of me?”, for the title of his first autobiography, published in 1965, before his run for governor of California. The following year, Reagan defeated the incumbent governor of California, Pat Brown, by close to a million votes, taking the next step on the road to the White House.
After two terms as governor of California, he made a bid for the Republican presidential ticket in 1976, losing to President Gerald Ford. In 1980, he gained the nomination and beat out embattled Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter to become president, ushering in a new era of conservatism in American politics.
At 69, Reagan was at the time the oldest man in history to take office as U.S. president. His career in Hollywood, thought to be a weakness at the beginning of his life in politics, turned out to be arguably one of his biggest assets. As president, he projected optimism and weathered setbacks with such success that he became known as the “Teflon president.” His foreign policy legacy, tarnished after the Iran-Contra affair, was redeemed in the eyes of many by the end of the Cold War and the opening of relations with the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. The long-term success of his sweeping tax cuts and “Reaganomics” managed to maintain his popularity throughout, leaving the White House in the hands of his loyal vice president, George H.W. Bush, in 1988 and maintaining a high approval rating. Six years later, Reagan made the sobering announcement that he had Alzheimer’s disease, which would end his public career. He died on June 5, 2004, at the age of 93.

 

 

Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump

 

 John Wayne And Ronald Reagan

 Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan

 

 Shirley Temple And Ronald Reagan

 Ronald Reagan And Clint Eastwood

 

Richard Petty and Ronald Reagan

President Reagan's Funeral procession.

A Marine cries at the funeral of President Ronald Reagan.

On February 6, 1917, just three days after U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s speech of February 3, 1917, in which he broke diplomatic relations with Germany and warned that war would follow if American interests at sea were again assaulted, a German submarine torpedoes and sinks the Anchor Line passenger steamer California off the Irish coast.
The SS California departed New York on January 29 bound for Glasgow, Scotland, with 205 passengers and crewmembers on board. Eight days later, some 38 miles off the coast of Fastnet, Ireland, the ship’s captain, John Henderson, spotted a submarine off his ship’s port side at a little after 9 a.m. and ordered the gunner at the stern of the ship to fire in defense if necessary. Moments later and without warning, the submarine fired two torpedoes at the ship. One of the torpedoes missed, but the second torpedo exploded into the port side of the steamer, killing five people instantly. The explosion of the torpedo was so violent and devastating that the 470-foot, 9,000-ton steamer sank just nine minutes after the attack. Despite desperate S.O.S. calls sent by the crew to ensure the arrival of rescue ships, 38 people drowned after the initial explosion, for a total of 43 dead.
This type of blatant German defiance of Wilson’s warning about the consequences of unrestricted submarine warfare, combined with the subsequent discovery and release of the Zimmermann telegram, an overture made by Germany’s foreign minister to the Mexican government involving a possible Mexican-German alliance in the event of a war between Germany and the U.S., drove Wilson and the United States to take the final steps towards war. On April 2, Wilson went before Congress to deliver his war message; the formal declaration of U.S. entrance into the First World War came four days later.

 

 

 

On February 6, 1778, during the Revolutionary War, representatives from the United States and France sign the Treaty of Amity and Commerce and the Treaty of Alliance in Paris.
The Treaty of Amity and Commerce recognized the United States as an independent nation and encouraged trade between France and the America, while the Treaty of Alliance provided for a military alliance against Great Britain, stipulating that the absolute independence of the United States be recognized as a condition for peace and that France would be permitted to conquer the British West Indies.
With the treaties, the first entered into by the U.S. government, the Bourbon monarchy of France formalized its commitment to assist the American colonies in their struggle against France’s old rival, Great Britain. The eagerness of the French to help the United States was motivated both by an appreciation of the American revolutionaries’ democratic ideals and by bitterness at having lost most of their American empire to the British at the conclusion of the French and Indian Wars in 1763.
In 1776, the Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee to a diplomatic commission to secure a formal alliance with France. Covert French aid began filtering into the colonies soon after the outbreak of hostilities in 1775, but it was not until the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga in October 1777 that the French became convinced that the Americans were worth backing in a formal treaty.
On February 6, 1778, the treaties of Amity and Commerce and Alliance were signed, and in May 1778 the Continental Congress ratified them. One month later, war between Britain and France formally began when a British squadron fired on two French ships. During the American Revolution, French naval fleets proved critical in the defeat of the British, which culminated in the Battle of Yorktown in October 1781.