Helen Gahagan Douglas (born Helen Mary Gahagan; November 25, 1900 – June 28, 1980) was an American actress and politician.
Gahagan Douglas's acting career included success on Broadway, as a touring opera singer, and in Hollywood films. Her portrayal of the villain in She (1935) inspired the Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
In 1944, Gahagan Douglas was first elected to the United States Congress. In the 1950 U.S. Senate election in California, she lost to Republican nominee and future president, Richard M. Nixon. The campaign became symbolic of modern political vitriol, as both Gahagan Douglas's Democratic primary opponent Manchester Boddy and Nixon referred to her as "pink right down to her underwear", suggesting Communist sympathies.
Helen Mary Gahagan was born in Boonton, New Jersey, of Scotch-Irish descent. She was the eldest daughter of Lillian Rose (Mussen) and Walter H. Gahagan, an engineer who owned a construction business in Brooklyn and a shipyard in Arverne, Queens; her mother had been a schoolteacher. She was reared Episcopalian. Gahagan was raised at 231 Lincoln Place in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn, an upper-middle-class neighborhood. She attended the prestigious Berkeley Carroll School, where she "attracted the favorable attention of Brooklyn critics through her performance in school plays". Following an argument with her father, who did not believe becoming an actress was a suitable occupation for a woman, she was sent to study at the Capen School for Girls in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Gahagan gained admittance to Barnard College of Columbia University, class of 1924. To the dismay and shock of her father she left after two years, without finishing her degree, to pursue an acting career.
Gahagan found great success and became a well known star on Broadway in the 1920s, appearing in popular plays such as Young Woodley and Trelawney of the Wells.
In 1927, at the age of 26, Gahagan set out to forge a new career as an opera singer, and, after two years of voice lessons, she found herself touring across Europe and receiving critical praise, unusual for an American at the time. In 1930, she returned to Broadway to star in a production of Tonight or Never, where she co-starred with actor Melvyn Douglas. The two married in 1931, Gahagan keeping her maiden name. They had two children, Peter and Mary.
Gahagan Douglas went to Los Angeles in 1935, starring in the Hollywood movie She, playing Hash-a-Motep, queen of a lost city. The movie, based on H. Rider Haggard's novel of the same name, is perhaps best known for popularizing a phrase from the novel, "She who must be obeyed".
While in Vienna in 1938, performing in opera (which was a dream come true for Gahagan Douglas), she found herself having coffee with a Nazi sympathizer. The experience sickened her to such a degree that she immediately flew back to Los Angeles, determined to fight Nazism publicly.
Introduced to politics by her husband, Gahagan Douglas joined the Democratic Party shortly after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. The Roosevelts and the Douglases would develop a close friendship, with Eleanor Roosevelt serving as a political mentor to Gahagan Douglas.
She largely disliked the atmosphere of Hollywood; following the birth of her daughter, Mary Helen, in 1938, Gahagan Douglas took to learning about the plight of migrant workers and grew increasingly politically aware. She soon became the director of the John Steinbeck Committee, named for the author of The Grapes of Wrath, and by 1940 she was the national spokesperson for migrants.
The Douglases joined the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League; in 1939, they joined others in calling for a United States boycott against goods produced in Nazi Germany.
Gahagan Douglas was a member of the national advisory committee of the Works Progress Administration and of the State committee of the National Youth Administration in 1939 and 1940. She then served as Democratic national committeewoman for California and vice chairwoman of the Democratic state central committee and chairman of the women's division from 1940 to 1944. She was also a member of the board of governors of the California Housing and Planning Association in 1942 and 1943, and was appointed by Roosevelt as a member of the Voluntary Participation Committee, Office of Civilian Defense. She was later appointed by President Harry S. Truman as an alternate United States delegate to the United Nations Assembly.
In 1946, she was among those honored by the National Association of Colored Women for her role in interracial cooperation for advancing race and gender equality. Gahagan Douglas had been a colleague of the organization's founder, Mary McLeod Bethune, on the National Youth Administration.
In 1943, Democratic leaders, including FDR, persuaded Gahagan Douglas to run in the 1944 election for the 14th Congressional District seat opened by the retirement of Congressman Thomas F. Ford. To try to appeal to conservative voters, she started using her husband's last name. As the California Democratic committee chairwoman, she spoke at the 1944 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Her impressive speech raised her profile, with some imagining a VP spot in her future, if not a presidential candidacy. In the fall elections, Gahagan Douglas won the House race and subsequently ran for — and won — two more terms, serving in the 79th, 80th and 81st Congresses (January 1945 – January 1951).
During her three terms in the House, she championed various issues, such as civil rights, migrant worker welfare, women's issues, affordable housing, progressive taxation, and nuclear disarmament; she sponsored an anti-lynching bill against Southern opposition. She also championed a controversial bill to create a Franklin Delano Roosevelt National Forest that would protect California redwoods from Sonoma County to Oregon. The forest bill was opposed locally by business interests fearing the loss of taxable properties.
Her love affair with Lyndon B. Johnson was an open secret on Capitol Hill.
In 1950, Gahagan Douglas ran for the United States Senate, although incumbent Democrat Sheridan Downey was seeking a third term. California Democratic state chairman William M. Malone had advised Gahagan Douglas to wait until 1952 to run for the Senate, rather than split the party in a fight with Downey. Gahagan Douglas, however, told Malone that Downey had neglected veterans and small growers and had to be unseated. Downey withdrew from the race before the primary and supported a third candidate, Manchester Boddy, the owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News. When Gahagan Douglas defeated Boddy for the nomination, Downey endorsed the Republican nominee, U.S. Representative Richard M. Nixon.