One of the major factors in transforming Ronald Reagan from a New Deal Democrat into a conservative Republican was his confrontation with Herb Sorrell in 1946-47 Hollywood. Head of the Conference of Studio Unions, Sorrell was a veteran union organizer. He was also a secret member of the Communist Party and a frequent contact for Soviet intelligence agents.
Sorrell in 1945 launched a strike to ensure that his union dominated Hollywood labor. Sorrell had no problem using physical intimidation to reach his goals. This was demonstrated at what has been called the Battle of Burbank on October 5, 1945 when 800 members of the Conference of Studio Unions battle with police of the Los Angeles Police Department, using knives, bats, chains and pipes to shut Warner Brothers down. The violence shocked Hollywood and attracted nationwide attention and led to a negotiated settlement of the strike.
In 1946 the Conference of Studio Unions launched a new strike with Ronald Reagan witnessing in person the use of violence to enforce a picket line at Warners Brothers. In tandem with Roy M. Brewer of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the stage hands union, Reagan, as President of the Screen Actors Guild waged an unremitting, and successful, struggle to rid Hollywood of the violent Communist dominated union. Go here for the details. Reagan remained a liberal Democrat, vigorously supporting Harry Truman’s re-election in 1948, but his involvement against the Communist dominated Union set him on a trajectory towards conservatism.
I highly recommend the Paul Kengor book The Last Crusader. Reagan was an amazing man. He outlived the USSR and always believed in freedom and that Communism would fall. He wasn’t perfect – none of us are, but I do miss him.
We had six Republican presidents between 1933 and 2015. Two of them were careerists (one of whom had some interesting ideas on second-order questions), two of them AFAICT were in politics as an outlet for competitive impulses, and one of them a true public servant but one with no interest in domestic policy beyond an agreeable aversion to public sector borrowing. Reagan was the one who had two features: (1) he could have been doing other things with his life more to his liking and (2) he had a clear idea of what he wanted to accomplish and why.
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Two other influences on Reagan. His public relations job with General Electric sent him on speaking tours all over the country and gave him a chance to re-connect with the provincial world in which he’d been raised. See Reagan’s remarks on ‘human-scale’ institution. The other was his father-in-law Loyal Davis. Dr. Davis was a wage-earner’s kid from Galesburg, Illinois, about 100 miles from where Reagan grew up; he was one of a modest corps of doctors who invented neurosurgery in the 1920s.