Ruth Baker Pratt, a New York City icon of government
reform and fiscal conservatism, won election to the House
of Representatives on the eve of the worst economic disaster
ever to befall the country. Congresswoman Pratt’s support
for the Herbert Hoover administration’s cautious programs
to remedy the Great Depression held firm, even as the
national crisis worsened, and Americans, in ever-greater
numbers, looked to the federal government for relief.
Ruth Sears Baker was born on August 24, 1877, in
Ware, Massachusetts, daughter of the cotton manufacturer
Edwin H. Baker and Carrie V. Baker. Ruth Baker attended
Dana Hall in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and Wellesley
College, where she majored in mathematics. She also
studied violin at the Conservatory of Liege in Belgium.1 In
1904 Ruth Baker married John Teele Pratt, a lawyer and
the son of Charles Pratt, a pioneer Standard Oil Company
executive and founder of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
The couple settled in New York City’s Upper East Side and
raised five children: Virginia, Sally, Phyllis, Edwin, and
John Jr. Ruth established strong ties with the community
by engaging in a range of philanthropic activities. When
her husband died in 1927, he left Ruth Pratt a fortune
estimated at more than $9 million.
Pratt’s involvement in Republican politics in New York
began during World War I, when she worked with the
Woman’s Liberty Loan Committee. She served on the
mayor’s wartime food commission and met Herbert Hoover,
then head of the National Food Administration.2 She
remained a Hoover devotee throughout her political
life, working for his presidential nomination in 1920
and helping to deliver the New York state delegation to
Hoover’s side at the 1928 GOP convention.3 Pratt initially
balked at the notion of elective office, choosing instead to
focus on the upbringing of her five children. In January
1924, she was chosen as the associate GOP leader of New
York’s Upper East Side Assembly district—providing her a
powerful political base for the next decade.
When she overcame her reluctance to enter the political
limelight and campaigned for city alderman against
Democrat James O’Gorman, the race received national
attention because no woman in New York City history had
ever served on the city’s governing body. With a heavily
Republican constituency, Pratt won by a wide majority on
November 4, 1925.4 As alderman, she clashed repeatedly
with Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine,
particularly over the budget, which she believed could be slashed by millions if spending, patronage positions, and
rampant graft were curtailed. She became known as the
“Watchdog of the Treasury.”5 In 1928, after winning reelection
by an even larger margin, she introduced measures
to authorize construction of the Triborough Bridge and
tunnels under the East River.
Pratt entered the race for an open U.S. House seat in
September 1928, when Democratic incumbent William
Wolfe Cohen declined the nomination. Her combination
of wealth, social standing, and knowledge of local politics
suited New York’s “Silk Stocking District,” an area that cut
a geographical East–West swath across midtown Manhattan
and included the city’s wealthy parts of the theater district,
and the westside docks and shipping businesses. Running
on a platform that called for modifying the Volstead Act
and the Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition) to allow for
the production of light wines and beer but no hard alcohol,
Pratt comfortably won the September 28 primary with 62
percent of the vote.6 In the general election, she emphasized
her credentials as an alderman against Democratic opponent
Phillip Berolzheimer, who ran as a “wet” anti-Prohibition
candidate.7 She defeated Berolzheimer with 50 to 44 percent
of the vote—despite the fact that the Democrats had a
strong ticket, featuring New York Governor Al Smith as the
party’s presidential candidate. “That puts the Seventeenth
District, back where it belonged, in the Republican column
and I am glad that a woman did it,” Pratt rejoiced on
election night. “But I did not run as a woman. I ran for the
Board of Aldermen and for Congress not as a woman but
as a citizen.”8 When she took her seat in the 71st Congress
(1929–1931), Ruth Baker Sears Pratt became the first
woman to represent New York in the national legislature.
During Pratt’s first term, she received assignments on
the Banking and Currency Committee, the first for a
woman and a nod to her work on New York City’s budget
and the Library Committee. In her first House speech,
she criticized a proviso of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Bill
that raised the duty on sugar imports, arguing that the
increase would be needlessly passed on to consumers and
would fail to improve the wages and conditions of sugar
workers.9 Pratt’s first House bill sought to increase benefits
for permanently disabled World War I veterans, though
she would later oppose an across-the-board bonus for
all veterans.10 She also favored repealing the Eighteenth
Amendment and, after the onset of the Depression in
1929, noted that liquor production, transportation, and sales would create new jobs.11 In January 1930, from her
seat on the Library Committee, Pratt introduced a bill for
a $75,000 annual appropriation to acquire and publish
books for blind readers. With the public backing of Helen
Keller, a nationally recognized advocate for blind people,
it eventually passed the House and Senate, providing the
Library of Congress $100,000 annually to procure Braille
books. Pratt also presided over the House as Speaker pro
tempore on numerous occasions during her first term.
On the Banking and Currency Committee, Pratt and her
colleagues contended with the effects of the Stock Market
Crash of 1929 and a severe midwestern drought, catalysts
for the Great Depression. Pratt introduced a bill amending
the Federal Reserve Act to streamline the rules guiding
the election of officers of Federal Reserve banks. She
also advocated balancing the federal budget and limiting
government intervention, once remarking that, “There is a
real need for the people once more to grasp the fundamental
fact that under our system of government they are
expected to solve many problems themselves through their
municipal and state governments.”12 In the 72nd Congress
(1931–1933), with little fanfare, Pratt was assigned to the
Education Committee and left Banking and Currency.
She remained a fiscal conservative, however, refusing to
countenance federally backed programs to alleviate the
nation’s economic woes. Pratt praised Hoover’s reliance on
private funding to curb unemployment. By 1932, as the
administration considered additional measures to address
the Depression, Pratt rejected the General Relief Bill as a
“crowning folly” which would “unbalance the Budget.” The
bill sought to broaden the powers of the Reconstruction
Finance Corporation, the central organizational response
of the Hoover administration, and to create a public works
program to employ large numbers of idle workers. A few
hours after Pratt’s speech, the House passed the bill, 216 to
182.13 She also opposed the Steagall Bill, which called for
the creation of a federal insurance guarantee fund to protect
individuals’ bank deposits.14
As a woman alderman and one of the few Republicans
in the Democratic-controlled Tammany Hall, Pratt and
her reform efforts gained the attention of the press. In
Congress, however, Pratt’s appeal as a crusader diminished
as she joined a group of women and became part of the
Republican majority and an ardent defender of the Hoover
administration. She spoke rarely on the House Floor and
the impression of many voters was that she was ineffectual, if not somewhat disinterested in national politics. “New
York circumstances put her in the position of an outspoken
objector,” a New York Times writer observed in 1932. “In
Washington circumstances have made it possible to play the
game with the rest of the team and be good. And in politics
as in morals it is hard to find a spectacular way of being
good.”15 Nevertheless, her name was mentioned prominently
as a possible New York City mayoral candidate in 1930 and
as a GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1932.16
Internal politics within her district threatened to derail
Pratt’s 1930 re-election bid. Able to secure the Republican
nomination despite dissension in the party ranks, Pratt
faced Tammany Hall’s handpicked Democratic candidate,
city magistrate Louis B. Brodsky, in the general election
and the journalist Heywood Broun running on the
Socialist ticket.17 Though she polled only about half the
total of her first election, Pratt held on to win by a bare
margin—695 votes out of some 45,000 cast. In 1932 she
faced yet another tough battle to win re-election to the
House. Prior to the 1932 GOP National Convention, a
faction in the New York delegation, disenchanted with
Hoover, attempted to unseat Pratt as a delegate. The move
failed but seemed to weaken her base of support heading
into the fall elections.18 In the Republican primary, she
weathered charges from opponents that she had abused the
House franking privilege. After securing the Republican
nomination, Pratt squared off against Democratic challenger
Theodore Albert Peyser.19 With the two candidates agreeing
on the substantive issues, the decisive factor in the race
became the presidential election. Disenchanted with
Hoover’s economic policies, American voters swept New
York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Democratic
coalition into the federal government. In what had been an
evenly divided House, the Democrats gained a commanding
majority as the GOP hemorrhaged—losing 111 seats. In her
Manhattan district race, Pratt lost to Peyser in a four-way
race by a margin of 53 percent to 44 percent.20
After Congress, Ruth Pratt served as chair of the Fine
Arts Foundation, a forerunner of the National Endowment
for the Humanities, and was appointed to the Republican
Builders, a group formed to renew the party after the defeats
of 1932 and 1934. She continued to live in New York City
and was president of the Women’s National Republican
Club from 1943 to 1946. On August 23, 1965, a day
before her eighty-eighth birthday, Pratt died in Glen Cove,
New York.21
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
[ Top ]
