U.S. Senate
In his first term, Reynolds was in favor of
Franklin Roosevelt's
New Deal and believed that it provided much-needed jobs for his North Carolinans. That allowed the
Blue Ridge Parkway and the
Great Smoky Mountains National Park to be built. Reynolds favored
taxing the wealthy and imposing
regulations on the economy. In addition, he supported
Social Security, the
Fair Labor Standards Act, the
Works Progress Administration,
Tennessee Valley Authority, and the
Agricultural Adjustment Act, which raised tobacco prices. Reynolds initially supported Roosevelt's
Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 to pack the Supreme Court but later joined other Democrats in sending it back to the
Judiciary Committee, effectively killing the bill. He vociferously opposed Roosevelt's efforts to revise the
Neutrality Acts. Reynolds and Senator
John Overton of Louisiana were the only senators from the South to vote against the repeal of the arms embargo. Therefore, during his
1938 re-election campaign, Roosevelt recruited Congressman
Franklin W. Hancock, Jr. to oppose Reynolds in the Democratic primary, but Reynolds won handily. An advocate of immigration restriction, Reynolds spoke out against the
Wagner–Rogers Bill that aimed to accept 20,000 Jewish refugee children into the United States from Nazi Germany. He elicited the praise of the magazine
Social Justice, organized by
demagogue and radio priest
Charles Coughlin. In 1939, less than three months before the beginning of World War II, Reynolds, described by the leftist newspaper
PM as "the Senate's No. 1 alien-baiter," called for a 10-year ban on all immigration to the United States and said that "the time has come for changing the tradition that the U.S.A. is an asylum for the oppressed." He also demanded that newly-arrived immigrants, "millions of foreigners who are about to begin the rape of this country," should be deported or detained in concentration camps. Unusually for a major American politician, Reynolds openly praised
Nazi Germany and worked with
fascist intellectuals such as
Gerald L. K. Smith and
George Sylvester Viereck. After the
Pearl Harbor attack and the
German declaration of war against the United States in December 1941, he partially reversed his pro-German and pro-fascist opinions and introduced a bill to extend the
Selective Training and Service Act sponsored by the
U.S. War Department. By
1944, the Democratic Party chose former Governor
Clyde R. Hoey to seek Reynolds's seat in the primary. As a result, Reynolds did not seek reelection. Hoey won the primary and went on to win the general election in a landslide victory over a Republican opponent. Reynolds sought to return to the Senate in
1950, but he was by then hopelessly discredited and won only 10% in the Democratic primary, behind
Frank Porter Graham and
Willis Smith. ==Later life==