Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [77]
While Gish loved spending time in Europe, she was a flag-waving patriot and a practicing Episcopalian, proud that her mother’s ancestors had em-igrated from England in the 1630s and included President Zachary Taylor. Yet she endorsed FDR in 1936 and resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution when the organization refused to allow Marian Anderson, the black opera singer, to perform at its 1939 convention in Washington.26 In the 1940 election, she refused to vote for Roosevelt or Wendell Willkie, saying both “were more interested in other countries than in their own.”27
Gish’s year and a half in Chicago coincided with the rise of the America 1 2 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House First Committee, and her closest friends there, General Robert E. Wood and Colonel Robert McCormick, were the leaders of the isolationist organization. According to Colleen Moore, McCormick declared Gish “the most fabulous woman he had ever known and asked her to marry him.”28
As Gish wrote in Silver Glory, her unpublished history of Hollywood, “My days were filled happily by knowing Robert E. Wood and his family [and]
through them the idols of us all, Charles and Anne Lindbergh.”29 Gish became the AFC’s most prominent spokesperson after Lindbergh. On April 1, 1941, she gave a radio speech urging Americans to keep the country out of war. Among those who sent her congratulatory letters was Edith’s co-star on The Stepmother, Francis X. Bushman, who wrote, “I can think of no one woman who I would rather place beside our National Hero Lindbergh, than yourself. I am sure a National Shrine will in days to come, be erected to you.”30
In June, Gish joined Lindbergh at an America First rally at the Hollywood Bowl, where the crowd of eighty thousand chanted, “Lindy! Our next president!,” and she called for a national referendum on the war.31
But on September 1, 1941, one month after Senator Nye’s startling attack on the Hollywood moguls in St. Louis, she suddenly resigned from the AFC’s board—some say at the urging of her old friend Mary Pickford, others say to avoid testifying before Senator Clark’s Subcommittee on Moving Picture Propaganda, which was then convening in Washington.
Ten days after Gish’s renunciation, Lindbergh gave his notorious speech in Des Moines accusing the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration of pushing America into the war. By then the AFC was viewed by many as more pro-Nazi than anti-war, and according to Lindbergh biographer A. Scott Berg, “talk of Col. McCormick’s and General Wood’s anti-Semitism was rampant.”32
There is no record of the Davises’ being friendly with either Wood or McCormick, though the latter was close to their friend Mayor Kelly. It has been reported, however, that Loyal Davis was an “active member” of America First.33 “If he had been a member, I probably would have known,” asserted Richard Davis, who doubted that he was. “He was an Anglophile, so I think he was sympathetic to the British. I never heard him say we have to stay out of the war. Maybe he did in 1937 or 1938, but he never did anything about it politically. He was very interested in politics, but he was not a joiner.”34 The only organizations Loyal belonged to, his son said, were medical associations.
Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944
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Loyal’s friend Homer Hargrave Sr., while admiring of America First, was not a member, according to his son. “He was very sympathetic to Lindbergh and Senator [Burton] Wheeler,” Hargrave Junior said,35 referring to the Montana Democrat who was in the forefront of the isolationist movement and whose wife was on the AFC’s board. Hargrave added that his father, having lived through World War I, was adamantly opposed to going to war again but was neither pro-German nor anti-Semitic. He told a story to illustrate his point, though it also conveyed a sense of how nonchalant the Davises’ social set seemed about the rise of right-wing au-thoritarian regimes in Europe (an attitude shared by many Americans, including Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner, both of whom had