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Modern Era
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A Tar Heel in Cloak: George Watts Hill, Interventionism, and the Shadow War Against Hitler Commentary
Scion of a distinguished North Carolina family (“Durham’s first family”), George Watts Hill played a key role in the secret war against Hitler. For his effective work and efficient administration, the Italian and French governments respectively awarded him the Cross of War Merit and the Legion of Merit.
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Josiah Bailey and the Creation of a Post-World War II Conservatism Commentary
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had many fans, but North Carolina Senator Josiah Bailey, an author of the Conservative Manifesto of 1937, was not one. In a letter to anti-New Dealer Senator Peter G. Gerry of Rhode Island, Bailey wrote, “Our President is not actuated by principle, but by fears. He will try to head off anything in order that he may stay at the head.”
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Limits of Liberalism Commentary
North Carolina's conservatism in the 1930s contradicts the state's progressive image, or rather, the myth of its progressivism, born of developments before and after the 1930s. The conservative opposition to the New Deal created momentum for a postwar conservatism and a viable two-party competition in the state. Genuine liberalism, New Deal or otherwise, one could argue, has yet to capture the Tar Heel state.
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Senator Robert Rice Reynolds: An Atypical Tar Heel Politician and Isolationist Commentary
A most atypical southern politician and U. S. Senator from 1933 to 1945, Robert Rice Reynolds was an unabashed isolationist and Anglophobe, whose foreign policy positions, not economic ones, alienated him from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Reynolds’s notorious womanizing and five marriages, opposition to Prohibition, flamboyant actions, and non-racist demagoguery set him apart from the straight-laced, Tar Heel politicians, who supported FDR’s aid-to-Britain policies.
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Speaker Ban Law Commentary
Enacted in 1963, the Speaker Ban was a North Carolina state law that restricted the appearance of Communists and other radical speakers at state-supported campuses, including the University of North Carolina. The Speaker Ban sparked a major controversy over Communism, academic freedom, and the First Amendment.
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