Dr. Rorin M. Platt is an Assistant Professor of history at Campbell University. He is a diplomatic historian specializing in American intelligence history and southern foreign policy sentiments during the FDR era. He has written two books, including Virginia in Foreign Affairs, 1933-1945 (Lanham, 1991), and numerous articles and book reviews. He is currently working on a study of Virginians who served in America’s WWII intelligence services titled Cavaliers in Cloak: Virginians in the Secret War, 1941-1945.
Rorin Platt
Associate Professor of History
Campbell University
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.