Robert Rice Reynolds (June 18, 1884 – February 13, 1963) was an American politician who served as a Democratic U.S. senator from North Carolina from 1932 to 1945. Almost from the outset of his Senate career, "Our Bob," as he was known among his local supporters, acquired distinction as a passionate isolationist and increasing notoriety as an apologist for Nazi aggression in Europe. Even after America's entry into World War II, according to a contemporary study of subversive elements in America, he "publicly endorsed the propaganda efforts of Gerald L. K. Smith," whose scurrilous publication The Cross and the Flag "violently assailed the United States war effort and America's allies." One of the nation's most influential fascists, Smith likewise collaborated with Reynolds on The Defender, an antisemitic newspaper that was partly owned by Reynolds.

Reynolds occasionally turned over his Senate office facilities to subversive propagandists and allowed them to use his franking to mail their literature postage-free.

Early life

He was born on June 18, 1884, in Asheville, North Carolina, at his family's estate, the Reynolds House. He was the son of William Taswell Reynolds (1850–1892) and Mamie Elizabeth Spears (1862–1939). including his maternal great-grandfather, Colonel Daniel Smith, a Revolutionary War hero of the Battle of Kings Mountain. He vociferously opposed Roosevelt's efforts to revise the Neutrality Acts. Reynolds and Senator John Overton of Louisiana were the only senators from the South to vote against the repeal of the arms embargo. Therefore, during his 1938 re-election campaign, Roosevelt recruited Congressman Franklin W. Hancock, Jr. to oppose Reynolds in the Democratic primary, but Reynolds won handily.

An advocate of immigration restriction, Reynolds spoke out against the Wagner–Rogers Bill that aimed to accept 20,000 Jewish refugee children into the United States from Nazi Germany. He elicited the praise of the magazine Social Justice, organized by demagogue and radio priest Charles Coughlin.

In 1939, less than three months before the beginning of World War II, Reynolds, described by the leftist newspaper PM as "the Senate's No. 1 alien-baiter," called for a 10-year ban on all immigration to the United States and said that "the time has come for changing the tradition that the U.S.A. is an asylum for the oppressed." He also demanded that newly-arrived immigrants, "millions of foreigners who are about to begin the rape of this country," should be deported or detained in concentration camps.

Unusually for a major American politician, Reynolds openly praised Nazi Germany and worked with fascist intellectuals such as Gerald L. K. Smith and George Sylvester Viereck. After the Pearl Harbor attack and the German declaration of war against the United States in December 1941, he partially reversed his pro-German and pro-fascist opinions and introduced a bill to extend the Selective Training and Service Act sponsored by the U.S. War Department.

By 1944, the Democratic Party chose former Governor Clyde R. Hoey to seek Reynolds's seat in the primary. As a result, Reynolds did not seek reelection. Hoey won the primary and went on to win the general election in a landslide victory over a Republican opponent. Reynolds sought to return to the Senate in 1950, but he was by then hopelessly discredited and won only 10% in the Democratic primary, behind Frank Porter Graham and Willis Smith.

Later life

After leaving public life, Reynolds practiced law and real estate until his death, in Asheville. He wrote the book Gypsy Trails, Around the World in an Automobile; Asheville, NC: Advocate Publishing Company (presumed date 1923).

Personal life

Reynolds married five times throughout his life and had four children. His first marriage was in 1910 to Frances Jackson (1889–1913). Before her death from typhoid fever in 1913, they had two children together:

  • Frances Jackson Reynolds (1910–1955)
  • Robert Rice Reynolds, Jr. (1913–1950)

In 1914, he married 17-year-old Mary Bland (b. 1897). Less than a year after their marriage, he left his new wife and their child. Before their divorce in 1917 and her three subsequent marriages, they had one daughter together: daughter of Edward B. McLean, the former publisher and owner of The Washington Post, and Evalyn Walsh McLean, owner of the Hope Diamond. Together, they had one daughter:

  • Mamie Spears Reynolds (1942–2014), an owner and driver for the Reynolds Racing Team of Asheville, the first woman to qualify for the Daytona 500, and co-owner of the ABA Kentucky Colonels professional basketball team. In 1963, she married Luigi "Coco" Chinetti Jr., son of Italian racecar driver and Ferrari agent Luigi Chinetti, and divorced two years later.

On September 20, 1946, his wife, Evalyn, died of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, which some believe is a result of the Hope Diamond curse..

Death

Reynolds died of cancer on February 13, 1963, at Reynolds House, in Asheville.

References

Bibliography

  • Rob Christensen: From Buncombe Bob to 'the Tar Heel Fuhrer'