Dr. Rorin M. Platt, who died in 2016, was an associate professor of history at Campbell University when he wrote for this encyclopedia. He was a diplomatic historian specializing in American intelligence history and southern foreign policy sentiments during the FDR era. Dr. Platt also taught history at Meredith College; William Peace University; Wake Technical Community College; the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga; and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He wrote Virginia in Foreign Affairs, 1933-1945 (Lanham, 1991), and Wings of Redemption: Colonel Earl L. Cole and the 385th Bombardment Group, Eighth Air Force, 1943-1945. He was a book review editor for American Diplomacy. He received many teaching awards, and in 2009 the student body of Campbell University voted him “Professor of the Year.”
Rorin Platt
Historian and Writer
Senator Robert Rice Reynolds: An Atypical Tar Heel Politician and Isolationist
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.
A Tar Heel in Cloak: George Watts Hill, Interventionism, and the Shadow War Against Hitler
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.