Edith Nourse Rogers: Biographical Sketch
Rogers, Edith Nourse (1881 - 1960), was born in Saco, Maine, March
19, 1881. She was the daughter of Franklin T. Nourse, the manager of
a textile mill, and Edith Frances Riversmith. With both parents from
old New England families and her father a leader in business and politics,
Edith and her younger brother had comfortable childhoods in Saco. Educated
by a tutor until she was fourteen, Edith then attended Rogers Hall boarding
school, a private girls' academy in Lowell, Massachusetts, and Madame
Julien's finishing school in Neuilly, France. Returning to Lowell after
her European schooling and travel, she became active, as was her mother,
in social welfare and church work. In 1907 she married her neighbor
and childhood sweetheart, Harvard law graduate John Jacob Rogers. With
a thriving law practice in Lowell, her husband entered politics as a
regular Republican in 1911. He won election to Congress in the Fifth
Congressional District in 1912 and was reelected until his death.
Living in Washington, Edith's interests turned toward public affairs. In 1917, when her husband and other members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee journeyed to France and Britain, she accompanied them, volunteering briefly with the YMCA in London and then touring the battlefields. John Jacob Rogers, retaining his congressional seat, enlisted in the artillery, while Edith joined the Red Cross as a Grey Lady and worked at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, beginning her lifelong commitment to the welfare of veterans.
At the end of the war, Congressman Rogers joined the newly formed American Legion; Edith joined the auxiliary. In 1922 President Warren G. Harding appointed her as a dollar-a-year inspector of the new veterans' hospitals. She toured the country visiting hospitals and communicating their needs directly to the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. She entered politics as a presidential elector for Calvin Coolidge in 1924.
When her husband died in March 1925, Edith yielded to pressure from Republicans and the American Legion to run for his seat and to continue their support of veterans. Commenting that "the office seeks the woman," 44-year-old Edith Nourse Rogers won the special election in June 1925, defeating a former governor with 72 percent of the vote, the first of eighteen lopsided electoral triumphs. Averaging 60 percent of the vote in elections throughout the New Deal years, she increasingly faced no Republican opposition and in three campaigns had no Democratic opponent. In several campaigns her only expenditure was the filing fee.
Although she served on the Committee on Foreign affairs and the Civil Service Committee, her major energies were devoted to veterans' affairs. In 1947, when forced to choose service on one major committee, Rogers selected the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, becoming the ranking Republican member and serving as its chair in the Eightieth and Eighty-third Congresses. Of the more than 1,200 bills Rogers introduced in her long congressional career, more than half concerned veterans' and military affairs. She secured pensions for army nurses in 1926, a permanent Nurse Corps in the Veterans Administration (VA), and major appropriations to build VA hospitals. During World War II she successfully sponsored the legislation creating the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAC) and the Navy Waves. One of the landmark measures she sponsored and helped to draft was the 1944 GI Bill of Rights, which established veterans' financial and educational benefits.
In the area of foreign affairs, Rogers was one of the first in Congress to speak against Hitler'' treatment of the Jews, and she voted for preparedness measures in the Pacific. During the Cold War she supported appropriations for the House Committee on Un-American Activities and was a backer of Senator Joseph McCarthy, but she balked in 1954 at sending U.S. troops to Vietnam. She supported the United Nations but in 1953 urged American withdrawal of support and removal of UN headquarters from the United States if Communist China were admitted.
Rogers worked tirelessly for her constituents, explaining she could not "refuse to spend mere money when I know that people need it." She fought relentessly to protect the textile and leather industries of Massachusetts, won flood control appropriations for the Merrimack River basin, and was successful in securing jobs through the billions of dollars in federal contracts garnered for her state.
When elected in 1925, Rogers had hoped that "everybody would forget that I am a woman as soon as possible." Yet her longevity and her legislative effectiveness made her the "dean" of congresswomen; her trademark was an orchid or gardenia on her shoulder. Colleagues described her as capable and aggressive. While insisting that, for a woman, home and children came first, she also worked for equal pay for equal work. Her motto was "fight hard, fight fair and persevere," adding, "when women fight to protect their rights, though, they hang on longer than the men" (Boston Globe, September 11, 1960).
Rogers was childless and never remarried. In 1949 she was threatened with scandal when named in a divorce case brought by the wife of one of her aides, but the district court judge dismissed the allegations and ordered all references to Rogers stricken from the record. Throughout her long career she was recognized by honorary degrees, by the Distinguished Service Medal of the American Legion in 1950, and by the naming for her of the WAC museum in Alabama and the veterans hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts. In an interview near the end of her career she asserted, "The first 30 years are the hardest" (Boston Globe, September 11, 1960). She died in Boston September 10, 1960, in the midst of her nineteenth Congressional campaign, three days before the primary, ending thirty-five years in Congress.
