Background
Davie was descended from a Tammany Hall founder and was a lifelong activist.
Davie was descended from a Tammany Hall founder and was a lifelong activist.
She was second wife to influential lawyer Preston Davie. 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, Incorporated. She butted heads with Fiorello Louisiana Guardia during World World War II after he told William Fellowes Morgan, Junior. to dismiss her as an unpaid assistant.
Louisiana Guardia"s tenure marked the end of the Tammany power in New York, and Davie"s political influence gradually faded over the ensuing decades. Her husband died in 1967, but she continued to go by Mistress
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.
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 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 Doctorate. Roosevelt in 1940.