Robert Rice Reynolds

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Robert Rice Reynolds

Robert Rice Reynolds (born June 18, 1884 in Asheville , North Carolina , † February 13, 1963 there ) was an American politician . Reynolds, a member of the Democratic Party , represented his home state North Carolina in the United States Senate .

Life

Early life

Robert Rice Reynolds was born in Asheville, North Carolina, the youngest of two sons to William Taswell and his wife, Mamie Elizabeth Reynolds. After graduating from college in Weaverville , he enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , where he studied law. While at university, he wrote for the school newspaper , but was also accepted into the faculty football team. Reynolds dropped out of college for unknown reasons without having a university degree. He later caught up on the necessary courses via distance learning and was admitted to the bar in North Carolina in 1907.

After three years practicing as a lawyer in his hometown of Asheville from 1907 to 1910, he was appointed Attorney General for the 15th District of North Carolina in 1910, which he served until 1914. During the First World War , Reynolds was drafted into military service, but was not involved in active combat operations. He served briefly in the National Guard .

Political career

In the 1920s, Reynolds ran for two high electoral offices. In 1924 he was seeking the office of lieutenant governor of North Carolina and two years later, in 1926, he announced his intention to run for the office of US Senator from North Carolina. Both times, however, he had to accept an election defeat in the party's internal primaries. Six years later, in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression , he made a second attempt, was confirmed by the party executive as the top candidate for the office of Senator and, with 65.4 percentage points of the vote, was the highest election result for a politician in North Carolina history Experienced. Reynolds took over from Senator Cameron A. Morrison on November 8, 1932 .

During his first term in office, Reynolds founded the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which provided jobs and livelihoods for thousands of unemployed North Carolina's residents. During this time the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway were created . He also campaigned for numerous other social policy programs in the southeastern United States, where he went from a supporter of the New Deal of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to an advocate of a more business-friendly policy, in which less the state, but more sole proprietorship should be the economic backbone of society.

Reynolds, an opponent of communism , also advocated a tightened immigration policy and took the view that immigrants who had committed criminal offenses should be rigorously deported to their home countries. In 1936, the Reynolds-Starnes Bill was ratified, in which government spending on immigrants was cut by 90 percentage points. Reynolds also advocated arming the US armed forces and was an opponent of the US policy of neutrality promoted by Roosevelt at the beginning of the Second World War .

Due to the very radical views of Reynolds and his controversial opinion that Adolf Hitler and Germany would pose no threat to the USA, he was often denounced by many opponents as a supporter of Nazi politics and as an anti-Semite. Above all, the Vindicators Association , a conservative, isolationist and, to a degree, anti-Semitic association, which he founded in January 1939, agreed with his opponents. Reynolds' contacts with the Nazi propagandist George Sylvester Viereck and the head of the American-German Confederation , Fritz Julius Kuhn , were also reported. Reynolds was only able to partially refute the opinion of his opponents about him by advocating a ban on communist and right-wing parties and groups in the USA. The Vindicators Association only existed until December 1941. After the attack on Pearl Harbor , Reynolds also voted for the United States to declare war on the Axis powers .

Late life and death

In 1944 Reynolds declined to run again for the office of US Senator. In 1945, shortly after the end of the war, he founded the American Nationalist Party , a neo-isolationist and anti-communist party, which, however, was short-lived and was dissolved in the same year.

After living in suburban Washington, DC for a short time in Maryland , after leaving the Senate , Reynolds moved back to Asheville, where he died in February 1963 at the age of 78.

Private life

Robert Rice Reynolds was married a total of five times. On January 20, 1909, he and Frances Jackson from Kentucky appeared before the altar. The two had two children, a daughter and a son. However, Frances Jackson died of typhus four and a half years after the wedding on October 17, 1913 . She was only 24 years old at the time. Robert Rice Reynolds junior, their son, died in October 1950, at the age of 37, after a traffic accident .

Little is known of Reynolds' second marriage to Mary Bland. A daughter emerged from the connection. The marriage ended in divorce. His third marriage with the Canadian Denese D'Arcy also fell apart.

On February 27, 1931, Reynolds married actress Eva Brady . The marriage was short-lived as Brady died of a brain tumor on December 13, 1934, at the age of 30 .

In 1941 Reynolds entered the state of marriage for the fifth time. He and his wife, Evalyn Washington McLean, had their fourth child, a daughter, in October 1942. 1946 committed Evalyn McLean Washington with taking sleeping pills from unspecified reasons suicide .

After that, Robert Rice Reynolds did not remarry.

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