Helen Gahagan

Helen Gahagan, circa 1920s

Helen Gahagan (born November 25, 1900 in Boonton , Morris County , New Jersey , † June 28, 1980 in New York ) was an American actress , singer and under the name Helen Gahagan Douglas politician of the Democratic Party .

Life

Helen Gahagan was born into a family of Irish descent. One of the ancestors, William Gahagan, emigrated from Ireland to the United States around 1700 , became a farmer and was one of the founders of Dayton , Ohio . Her father Walter Gahagan was a successful civil engineer who had made his fortune by building railways, her mother Lilian was a former school teacher. Helen Gahagan grew up with her four siblings - twins William and Frederick, two year older, her younger brother, Walter Jr., and her younger sister, Lillian, in Brooklyn , New York City , attended school here. She attended Barnard College , New York City for two years before beginning her acting career.

Artistic career

Her acting skills and her good looks soon attracted the attention of audiences and critics. She made her Broadway debut in 1922 at the age of 22 and became a Broadway star after appearing in Broadway performances alongside Helen Hayes and Katharine Cornell . In 1928 she retired from acting to train as an opera singer . Subsequently, she had several successful appearances on European stages. In 1930 she returned to New York - and to the theater.

In Tonight or Never, David Belasco's last Broadway production , she met Melvyn Douglas , whom she married in 1931. Gahagan kept her maiden name. In 1933 the couple moved to Los Angeles , California and son Peter was born. In the following years Helen Gahagan had other stage appearances, so in Moor Born (1934), Mary of Scotland (1934) and Stars Remain (1936). Helen Gahagan starred in just one Hollywood movie. In 1935 she got the lead role in the film She - Ruler of a Sunken World ( She ). The film was based on the novel of the same name by Henry Rider Haggard .

Political career

Helen Gahagan Douglas, 1945

Then Helen Gahagan left the stage and film industry and turned to politics. The social impact of the global economic crisis , especially in the poor rural areas of California, clearly before her eyes, she became politically aware and active. She left the Republican Party , of which she had been a member of family tradition until then, joined the Democrats and became increasingly involved in New Deal politics. In 1938, a few weeks after her daughter Mary Helen was born, she visited camps for migrant workers, tried to improve their living conditions, helped raise funds for them, and organized a Christmas party for 5,000 children in need.

She became a staunch advocate of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies, and was particularly supported and encouraged by his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt . With friends at the top, wealthy, exceptionally good-looking, Helen Gahagan soon became the most important woman in the California Democratic Party. She was given numerous functions to fight for the interests of the Democrats at the national level.

In 1944 she was a deputy for California's 14 electoral district in the Congress elected. She was able to hold her seat in the House of Representatives through two re-elections from January 3, 1945 to January 3, 1951 ( 79th , 80th and 81st United States Congresses ).

In 1950 Helen Gahagan ran for a seat in the Senate . In the primary of the Democratic Party in California, she was able to triumph over the then incumbent Senator Sheridan Downey , but was then defeated in the actual election by the candidate of the Republican Party, Richard Nixon (the future president).

Nixon was a Congressman at the time. In November 1946 he had succeeded in gaining a seat in the 80th Congress in the 12th district of California. He had been able to beat the Democrat Jerry Voorhis , a staunch supporter of the New Deal policy, who had been re-elected five times in a row (75th to 79th Congress / January 3, 1937 to January 3, 1947). For this success, Nixon was rewarded by his party with a seat on the notorious " Committee for Un-American Activities " and soon became one of the most famous representatives of the McCarthy persecution. In particular, his approach in the Alger-Hiss case pushed him into the limelight and made him well known at the national level and his re-election to the House of Representatives (81st Congress / 1949–1950) went without any problems.

Nixon's approach in the election campaign for a seat in the Senate that followed was soon described as a prototype of a “smear campaign” - a smear campaign. Against the foreign policy background of the Cold War , the outbreak of the Korean War and the McCarthy hunt for real and supposed communists, Nixon defamed Helen Gahagan as a communist, stigmatized her as “Pink”, “Pinko” or “ The Pink Lady "(German: the pink lady) and got into comments like" (she is) pink right down to her underwear "(German: she is pink up to the underwear). The title "Pink" or "Pinko" was equated with sympathizer of the Communist Party at that time .

Gahagan returned the favor with the name "Tricky Dick", a nickname that accompanied Nixon through his political career.

Helen Gahagan died of lung and breast cancer at the age of 79.

literature

• Douglas, Helen Gahagan: A Full Life. Garden City, NY (Doubleday) 1982;
• Helen Gahagan Douglas in: Women in Congress, 1917–1990. Prepared under the direction of the Commission on the Bicentenary by the Office of the Historian, US House of Representatives. Washington: United States Government Printing Office , 1991.
• Scobie, Ingrid Winther: Center Stage: Helen Gahagan Douglas, A Life. New York (Oxford University Press) 1992.
• Mitchell, Greg: Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas - Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950. New York (Random House) 1998

Web links

Commons : Helen Gahagan  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Helen Gahagan in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Helen Gahagan in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Patt Morrison: From the Archives: Helen Gahagan Douglas, Ex-Congresswoman, Dies . In: latimes.com . June 29, 1980. Retrieved March 11, 2016.