As a nursing volunteer and advocate for veterans across
the country during and after World War I, Edith Nourse
Rogers was thrust into political office when her husband,
Representative John Jacob Rogers, died in 1925. During
her 35-year House career, one of the longest tenures of
any woman to date, Rogers authored legislation that had
far-reaching effects on American servicemen and women,
including the creation of the Women’s Army Corps and
the GI Bill of Rights. “The first 30 years are the hardest,”
Rogers once said of her House service. “It’s like taking care
of the sick. You start it and you like the work, and you just
keep on.”1
Edith Nourse was born in Saco, Maine, on March 19,
1881. She was one of two children born to Franklin T.
Nourse, an affluent textile plant magnate, and Edith Frances
Riversmith.2
She received a private school education at
Rogers Hall School in Lowell, Massachusetts, and finished
her education abroad in Paris, France. Returning to America
in 1907, she married John Jacob Rogers, a Harvard-trained
lawyer. The couple had no children and settled in Lowell,
Massachusetts. In 1912 John Rogers was elected as a
Republican to the 63rd Congress (1913–1915) and was
successfully re-elected to the House for six succeeding terms.
He eventually served as Ranking Majority Member on the
Foreign Affairs Committee and authored the 1924 Rogers
Act, which reorganized and modernized the U.S. diplomatic
corps.3
During World War I, Edith Nourse Rogers inspected
field hospitals with the Women’s Overseas Service League.
“No one could see the wounded and dying as I saw them
and not be moved to do all in his or her power to help,”
she recalled.4
In 1918 she joined the American Red Cross
volunteer group in Washington, DC. Her work with
hospitalized veterans earned her the epithet the “Angel
of Walter Reed Hospital.”5
During the 1920s, Presidents
Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover
each appointed Rogers as their personal ombudsman for
communicating with disabled veterans. She also continued
to work in her husband’s congressional offices in Lowell
and Washington. The Congressman considered his wife
his chief adviser on policies and campaign strategy.6
Their
home on Sixteenth Street in northwest Washington became
a fashionable salon where the Rogers entertained powerful
politicians and foreign dignitaries.
On March 28, 1925, Representative John Rogers died
in Washington, DC, after a long battle with cancer. Edith
Rogers declared her plan to run for her husband’s seat a week later.7
Her chief Republican competition for the
nomination was James Grimes, a former Massachusetts
state senator who ran on a “dry,” Prohibition and pro-law-and-order platform. During the campaign, Rogers noted
that she had always been a prohibitionist and believed in
strict enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment to the
Constitution—a position that won her the support of
temperance advocates. In the GOP primary of June 16,
1925, Rogers dispatched Grimes with 13,086 votes to
1,939.8
Democrats nominated Eugene Noble Foss of
Boston, a former Massachusetts governor, to challenge
Rogers in the June 30th special election. Foss believed the
GOP was vulnerable because it did not support stringent
tariff policies—a matter of concern especially in the strongly
Democratic district which encompassed textile mill cities
such as Lowell. Local political observers had nicknamed
the northeastern Massachusetts district the “fighting fifth”
because of its equal proportions of registered Democrats
and Republicans. Having come from a family in the textile
business, however, Rogers appealed to many textile workers
as a more empathetic Republican.9
“I am a Republican
by inheritance and by conviction,” she declared.10 On
June 30, 1925, voters overwhelmingly went to the polls
for Rogers, who prevailed with 72 percent of the vote—handing Governor Foss the worst political defeat of his long
career.11 Rogers observed, “I hope that everyone will forget
that I am a woman as soon as possible.”12
Rogers was returned to the House by increasingly large
margins, eclipsing those of her husband, in her subsequent
17 re-election campaigns.13 She was charismatic, and her
sense of humor endeared her to voters and colleagues.
Noting her 18-hour days, the press dubbed her “the busiest
woman on Capitol Hill.”14 She was attentive to textile
and clothing manufacturers—economic engines in her
district, which was a hub of the U.S. textile industry—by allocating federal money to create new international
markets and by advocating protective legislation.15 With her
trademark orchid or gardenia pinned to her shoulder, Rogers
became a congressional institution and was never seriously
challenged during her 18 consecutive terms. In 1950, on the
twenty-fifth anniversary of her first election, GOP colleagues
hailed her as “the First Lady of the Republican Party.”16
When Rogers was sworn into the 69th Congress
(1925–1927), she did not receive any of her husband’s
former committee appointments, which included Foreign
Affairs and the powerful Appropriations panel. Instead, she
received middling committee assignments: Expenditures
in the Navy Department; Industrial Arts and Expositions;
Woman Suffrage; and World War Veterans’ Legislation
(later renamed Veterans’ Affairs). In the 70th Congress
(1927–1929), she dropped the first three committees and
won seats on the Civil Service and Indian Affairs panels (she
stayed on the latter for only one term).
In the 73rd Congress (1933–1935), Rogers won back
her husband’s seat on the more coveted Foreign Affairs
Committee.17 Her concern with veterans’ issues went
hand-in-hand with her interest in foreign affairs. Well-traveled and attuned to international affairs, Rogers seemed
a natural appointment to that panel. Soon after taking her
seat, Rogers began to address the dangers of fascism in Nazi
Germany and in Italy. She was one of the first Members
of Congress to denounce Nazi racial policies. In 1937 she
broke with fellow Republicans to vote against the Neutrality
Act, which had won wide support from GOP isolationists.
In 1939 Rogers and Democratic Senator Robert Ferdinand
Wagner of New York cosponsored a measure to increase the
quota for Jewish immigrants in an effort to rescue Jewish
refugee children fleeing Nazi persecution. In 1940 she again
crossed party lines to vote for the Selective Service Act—creating the nation’s first peacetime draft. Rogers eventually
rose to the number two Ranking Minority Member post on
the Foreign Affairs Committee before she voluntarily retired
from it in late 1946, when the Legislative Reorganization
Act reduced the number of committee assignments a
Member could hold.
In 1947 Rogers became chair of the newly renamed
Veterans’ Affairs Committee when the Republicans took
control of the House in the 80th Congress (1947–1949).
She again chaired it when power briefly transferred
back to the GOP in the 83rd Congress (1953–1955).18
Veterans’ issues had long defined Rogers’s House career.
In 1926 she secured pensions for army nurses and later
helped create a permanent nurse corps in the Veterans
Administration.19 In the spring of 1930, as chair of
the World War Veterans’ Legislation Committee’s
Subcommittee on Hospitals, Rogers inserted a $15 million
provision for the development of a national network of
veterans’ hospitals into the Veterans Administration Act.
She did so over the objections of the committee chairman,
but her diligence was applauded by veterans’ groups.
“Expecting much from her, veterans always receive much,”
one wrote. “She never disappoints.”20
Congresswoman Rogers’s crowning legislative
achievements came during World War II and in the
immediate postwar years. In May 1941, Rogers introduced
the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps Act, to create a
voluntary enrollment program for women to join the
U.S. Army in a noncombat capacity. Her proposal, she
explained to colleagues, “gives women a chance to volunteer
to serve their country in a patriotic way,” as medical care
professionals, welfare workers, clerical workers, cooks,
messengers, military postal employees, chauffeurs, and
telephone and telegraph operators, and in hundreds of
other capacities.21 On May 14, 1942, the Women’s Army
Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) Act was signed into law, creating
a corps of up to 150,000 women for noncombatant
service with the U.S. Army. A year later that measure was
supplanted by Rogers’s Women’s Army Corps Bill, which
granted official military status to the volunteers by creating
the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) within the Army. Rogers’s
success opened the way for other uniformed women’s
services in the Navy (WAVEs) and the Air Force (WASPs).
Congresswoman Rogers, who had witnessed some of
the difficulties of post-World War I demobilization and
its effects on veterans, sought to ease that transition by
putting in place programs to assist servicemen and women
who would soon return from Europe and the Pacific. As
the Ranking Minority Member of the World War Veterans’
Legislation Committee, she sponsored a package of
measures, later dubbed the GI Bill of Rights, which passed
the House in 1944. Among the chief provisions of the
legislation were tuition benefits for college-bound veterans
and low-interest home mortgage loans. During the 82nd
Congress (1951–1953), Rogers spearheaded the Veterans
Re-adjustment Assistance Act of 1952, which extended
the GI Bill provisions to Korean War veterans. Late in the
war, Rogers also proposed the creation of a Cabinet-level
Department of Veterans Affairs. The proposal was not
adopted in her lifetime but eventually came to fruition in
1989. So beloved by veterans was Rogers that the American
Legion conferred upon her its Distinguished Service
Cross—making her the first woman to receive the award.
Rogers’s intense patriotism and conservative ideology
led her to embrace postwar anticommunism. In the early
years of the Cold War, she feared the potential insurgency of
communism in the United States, making public addresses
and floor speeches on the subject.22 She supported the
investigations of the House Committee on Un-American
Activities and the loyalty program undertaken by President
Harry S. Truman’s administration. She later supported the
initial investigations conducted by Republican Senator
Joseph Raymond McCarthy of Wisconsin. Her concern
about the influence of the “red menace” extended to
international organizations. Though she supported the
creation of the United Nations, Rogers advocated in 1953
that if China were admitted to the U.N. that the U.S.
should withdraw from the organization and evict the
organization’s headquarters from New York City.
Late in her career, Rogers was mentioned as a possible
challenger against Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy
of Massachusetts, who came up for re-election in
1958. Observers believed Rogers was the only potential
Republican who could defeat Kennedy. But the 77-year-old
Congresswoman declined the opportunity. On September
10, 1960, three days before the primary for the 87th
Congress (1961–1963), Congresswoman Rogers died of
pneumonia in a Boston hospital.23
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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