Name Eugenie Ladenburg | Died September 19, 1975 | |
Eugenie Mary "May" Ladenburg Davie (1895–September 19, 1975) was a noted Republican activist in New York City and a director of the controversial Pioneer Fund at the end of her life. She was second wife to influential lawyer Preston Davie.
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Political activism
Davie was descended from a Tammany Hall founder and was a lifelong activist. Her 1917 affair with Bernard Baruch was of great interest to Alice Roosevelt Longworth who monitored the affair "in the name of patriotism," in the words of historian Blanche Wiesen Cook. She once angered pilot Amelia Earhart by injecting political commentary into a speech introduction.
Davie was on the Republican National Finance Committee, a regent of the National Library of Medicine, a trustee at Adelphi College and Long Island University; chairwoman of the Robert A. Taft Institute of Government.
A onetime leader of the Landon Volunteers, she was vice president of the American Women's Voluntary Services, Inc. She butted heads with Fiorello La Guardia during World War II after he told William Fellowes Morgan, Jr. to dismiss her as an unpaid assistant. She became an active member of the Republican Party and was the head of the Woman’s Auxiliary during Wendell Willkie’s campaign to unseat Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. La Guardia's tenure marked the end of the Tammany power in New York, and Davie's political influence gradually faded over the ensuing decades.
Later life
Her husband died in 1967, but she continued to go by Mrs. Preston Davie in formal situations. In the last year of her life, she became involved in the Pioneer Fund as a Director. She was informally known as May Davie, the name under which her New York Times obituary appeared.