Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [78]
“In 1938, when Colleen and my father went to Europe on their honeymoon, she said she wanted to bring me a present. I said I’d like a black shirt from Italy and a swastika. She was trying to make friends with me, so she brought both back. I put the swastika up on my bedroom wall with the college pennants. One day I came home from school and the swastika was gone. I asked Colleen where it was. ‘Your father couldn’t stand it anymore.
It went down the incinerator.’”37 According to his son, this was Homer Hargrave Sr.’s reaction to Kristallnacht, the first organized attack on Jewish communities in Germany, which occurred on November 9, 1938.
Richard Davis recalled his parents’ lunching with the Lindberghs at the Arizona Biltmore, probably in the spring of 1940. “I don’t think Dr.
Loyal was impressed by Charles Lindbergh at all. He was very impressed by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who was a marvelous author.” Davis also recalled, “Walter and Nan Huston were very much against Hitler. This went back to when we spent two summers with them, and I heard a lot of conversations at the dinner table. They were very pro-European. They were oriented to the British and the French.”38
On the other hand, Edith and Loyal saw a lot of Lillian Gish in Chicago in 1940 and 1941. Richard Davis said he had never heard any talk of America First during the dinners they had with the actress, but of all Edith’s actress friends, the conservative Gish was his father’s favorite. “She and Loyal were very close. I always thought they had a thing for each other.”39
Historians have made much of Loyal Davis’s political views and his influence on those of the future First Lady and her husband. According to the stock portrayal, the doctor was a relentless right-wing bigot who turned 1 2 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House his stepdaughter into a Republican zombie and through her converted Ronald Reagan from a New Deal liberal to a New Right conservative. As former California governor Pat Brown, whom Reagan defeated in 1966, put it, “There is no doubt that Reagan’s move to the far right began after he met and married Nancy.”40
Loyal Davis was a Republican, but he was neither a party activist nor a significant donor to any candidate other than his son-in-law. Whether he was particularly right-wing is difficult to say—his friends insist he wasn’t, his enemies insist he was. Allegations of his racism and anti-Semitism appear to be exaggerated, though not far-fetched. In discussing such matters, there is a natural but simplistic tendency to apply the standards of the present to those of the past. What can be said unequivocally about Loyal Davis is that he was very much of his time, place, class, race, sex, and profession. Only his negative attitude toward religion in general was unusual.
As a self-proclaimed Southern Democrat, Edith held views that were even more clichéd than her husband’s.
Nancy Reagan always maintained that her stepfather had little interest in politics and no influence on her views or Ronald Reagan’s, which is somewhat disingenuous and clearly overstated. “His life was medicine,”
she told me. “I never heard him say that he was a Republican. My mother was a Democrat—Southern Democrat, y’all. And I knew nothing about politics.”41
Richard Davis told me his father was a standard-issue Republican: “He didn’t like Roosevelt, but no one in upper-middle-class America did.”
Davis was uncertain as to whether Edith ever voted for Roosevelt: “If she did, she didn’t tell Loyal, that’s for sure.”42 Edith’s political hero, he noted, was Senator Carter Glass, an eminent conservative Democrat from her home state of Virginia and the last surviving member of the Senate born in the antebellum South; he had authored the Federal Reserve Act of 1913
and been secretary of the treasury under Woodrow Wilson. Nicknamed the Unreconstructed Rebel by FDR, Glass led the fight against his attempt to abolish the poll tax, which effectively deprived blacks of the vote in many Southern states, and