Alice Mary Robertson, the next woman to follow Jeannette
Rankin of Montana into Congress, was her predecessor’s
polar opposite. Colorful, quotable, conservative, and
hostile to the women’s suffrage movement and its many
leaders, Robertson’s single term in the House hinged on her
rejection of a significant piece of legislation—a proposed
World War I Veterans Bonus Bill.
Alice Mary Robertson was born on January 2, 1854,
in the Tullahassee Mission in the Creek Nation Indian
Territory, now in Oklahoma. Her parents, William Schenck
Robertson and Ann Eliza Worcester Robertson, were
missionary schoolteachers. As far back as her maternal
grandfather, the Reverend Samuel A. Worcester, her family
had been committed to assisting displaced Cherokee and
Creek.1
After attending Elmira College in New York from
1873 to 1874, Robertson took a job as the first female clerk
at the Indian Office at the Department of the Interior in
Washington, DC. Making a brief stop in Pennsylvania in
1879 to work at the Carlisle Indian School, a boarding
school where white instructors often forcibly worked to
assimilate Native-American children, Robertson later
returned to Oklahoma. In 1885 she founded the Minerva
Home—a boarding school to train Native-American girls in
domestic skills. This institution later became Henry Kendall
College (the present-day University of Tulsa).2
Robertson’s missionary work put her within a network
of reformers during the early Progressive Era and opened
the door to a career in politics. In 1891 she earned the
admiration of rising GOP politician Theodore Roosevelt,
who later described her as “one of the great women of
America.” In 1905 then-President Roosevelt appointed
Robertson the postmaster of Muskogee, Oklahoma, where
she served until 1913. In addition to her patronage job,
Robertson operated a 50-acre dairy farm with an on-site
café, which she named “Sawokla,” based on a Native-American word meaning “gathering place.” Both the farm
and the café became a social magnet, drawing politicians,
former students, journalists, and local folk. During
World War I, she endeared herself to many servicemen by
distributing food to soldiers in transit through the local train
station. In 1916 the GOP nominated her to run for county
superintendent of public instruction, but Robertson lost.3
Robertson ran as a Republican for an eastern Oklahoma
congressional seat in 1920, challenging a three-term
Democratic incumbent, William Wirt Hastings. Trained as
a lawyer, Hastings was a formidable opponent who had long ties to the Cherokee Nation; however, Robertson believed
she could best represent the interests of her prospective
constituents. “There are already more lawyers and bankers
in Congress than are needed,” Robertson said. “The farmers
need a farmer, I am a farmer. The women need a woman
to look after their new responsibilities. The soldier boys
need a proven friend. I promise few speeches, but faithful
work. You can judge my past performances.” Robertson
campaigned actively only in the confines of the Sawokla
Café, where she sidled up to tables of voters and talked
politics over a bowl of soup. Lacking coverage from local
newspapers, she bought space in the classifieds to reach
voters. Her campaign platform, which she included in
her Congressional Directory profile, was straightforward: “I
am a Christian, I am an American, I am a Republican.”4
In a year in which the GOP did well nationally at the
polls, Robertson was part of a Republican groundswell in
Oklahoma that unseated three Democratic incumbents and
made the state’s House delegation majority Republican.
With support from farmers and veterans, she narrowly
defeated Hastings, by 228 votes out of nearly 50,000 cast.5
In the 67th Congress (1921–1923), Robertson, given her
career before the House, was appointed to the Committee
on Indian Affairs. She also received assignments on the
Committee on Expenditures in the Interior Department
and, as the only woman in Congress, on the Committee on
Woman Suffrage.
During Representative Robertson’s term in Congress,
her work on the Committee on Indian Affairs proved
frustrating. She twice introduced a bill that would
have provided a federal appropriation to reimburse the
descendants of Cherokee who had been forcibly removed to
Oklahoma in the nineteenth century.6
But her initiative was
referred to Indian Affairs and received no consideration. On
her final day in office, Robertson scolded her colleagues for
their lack of attention to the obligations she felt they owed
to Native Americans. “I have kept watch through the years
of the tribesmen with whom I took the peace obligation so
long ago—an obligation never broken,” she said. “I protest
against such action as … would take in depriving thousands
of helpless Indian people of the strong defense they can
receive through the Interior Department.”7
Considering Robertson’s tepid support for women’s
voting rights, her assignment to the Committee on Woman
Suffrage insulted many reformers. Robertson once remarked
that exchanging the privileges associated with Victorian-era womanhood for the political rights enjoyed by men
was like, “bartering the birthright for a mess of pottage.”
She was an avowed critic of women’s groups, including the
League of Women Voters, “or any other organization that
will be used as a club against men.” Robertson repeatedly
tangled with prominent national women’s groups leaders
and discouraged participation in nonaligned, nonpartisan
groups. “There is an unfortunate tendency on the part
of women just now, having hardly found themselves in
politics, to criticize faults rather than to encourage virtues,”
Robertson lectured. “They call themselves non-partisan and
stand on the side as harsh critics instead of going right in
at the very source of government in their own immediate
communities to build up what is best.” Robertson advised
women to gain valuable experience in local office and state
legislatures before seeking candidacy to national office.
Women “have gone into politics the wrong way, beginning
at the top instead of the bottom,” she once observed. “You
wouldn’t think of jumping into a big Packard car and trying
to run it until you had learned how. When a woman shows
she is fitted for office, she will receive the call to office just
as a man does.”8
Robertson opposed one of the first major pieces of
legislation that affected women—the Sheppard–Towner
Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921, which
provided for educating the public about pregnancy and
other prenatal and infant issues. Despite intense lobbying
from women’s groups and a strong measure of support in
her district, she testified against the “better baby” measure
in committee and voted against it on the House Floor. As
the only witness to oppose the bill in its entirety, Robertson
told the House Interstate Commerce Committee that it
was “dangerous class legislation, separating women from
the men.” Robertson believed the bill would create a
federal bureau that would intrude on family life. She also
preferred the money be spent on material support, worrying
that instructional programs might foster “an autocratic,
undefined, practically uncontrolled yet Federally authorized
center of propaganda.”9
The traditionally minded 67-year-old posed little
threat to the folkways of the male-dominated House. One
newspaper reporter described her in the vein of a former
House Speaker: “built on the same architectural lines as
the late Champ Clark and moving with the same deliberate
tread … her costume was always black and of cut behind
the prevailing mode.” Robertson was quickly welcomed by her male colleagues because of her steadfast determination
to shun feminist overtures. “I came to Congress to represent
my district,” she declared, “not women.” On June 20,
1921, during a roll call vote on funding for a United
States delegation to the centennial celebrations of Peru’s
independence, Robertson became the first woman to
preside over a session of the House of Representatives.10
Robertson soon alienated a core group of constituents—World War I veterans—when she opposed a measure that
would have allowed them to receive an early payment
on their military service pensions. President Warren G.
Harding vetoed the “Soldiers Bonus Bill” in 1922, but
it passed over the veto of President Calvin Coolidge in
1924.11 Robertson suggested that such government doles
would only increase public dependency on an ever-growing
bureaucracy. She faced withering attacks from veterans’
groups inside and outside her district, including the
Women’s Auxiliary of the American Legion, which judged
her “unworthy of American womanhood.”12
Congresswoman Robertson’s other legislative work
accorded with her district. She secured authorization for the
construction of a veterans’ hospital in Muskogee to assist
the more than 91,000 Oklahomans who served in World
War I.13 Robertson also won approval for an amendment
that increased the subsistence rate and rent money for Army
and Navy nurses. She supported higher tariff rates and
stricter immigration quotas—positions which Oklahomans
broadly approved. Like many midwestern politicians,
Robertson also opposed the entry of the United States into
the League of Nations. She challenged Representative Meyer
London of New York when he urged the release of labor
leader Eugene V. Debs from prison.
But when staking out her interest in a second term,
Robertson admitted that she had not been able to steer
enough money into her beleaguered district to overcome
her unpopular votes. “I haven’t been able to get any ‘pie,’
speaking in the language of the restaurant, and there are
a lot of Republicans down in Oklahoma who are mighty
hungry,” she told a reporter. She formally declared her
candidacy for a second term and won the GOP primary but
faced her nemesis, William Hastings, in the 1922 general
election. Statewide, Democrats surged back into office,
claiming seven of Oklahoma’s eight House seats. Hastings
prevailed, with 58 percent of the vote to Robertson’s 42
percent, and went on to serve an additional six terms in
the House.14
Robertson spent the last decade of her life trying,
with little success, to fit back into life in Muskogee.
In April 1923, a month after she left the House, President
Harding appointed her as a welfare worker in the Muskogee
Veterans’ Hospital. With memories of her Bonus Bill vote
fresh in the minds of local servicemen, she was eventually
ousted from the hospital position. In 1925 a fire destroyed
her Sawokla home and the café, which prompted Robertson
to tell a local reporter that she was certain “some of her
enemies had set it.” Robertson spent her last years supported
by generous friends and family and died on July 1, 1931, at
the Muskogee Veterans Administration Hospital.15
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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