Born: March 19 1881, United States
Died: September 10 1960
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Edith Francis Nourse
The following is republished from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Edith Nourse Rogers, Champion of Veterans and Women in the Military
In photos with her fellow politicians, she often appears as the only woman in the frame. Yet, Edith Nourse Rogers never hesitated to speak up on the issues that mattered most to her. She dedicated much of her time in office to supporting Veterans and advocating for their welfare. She also fought with great success to elevate the status of women within the military. Rogers adopted the military motto “Fight hard, fight fair, and persevere” as her own and that mindset served her well as she navigated the male-dominated corridors of power during a trailblazing political career that spanned 35 years and 18 consecutive sessions of Congress.
Born in 1881 into an established New England family, Rogers enjoyed a refined upbringing. Her father managed a textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, and her mother immersed herself in volunteer social work at the family’s church. Edith often accompanied her mother, providing aid to those in need. A young Edith was tutored privately before attending boarding school and then finishing school in Paris. In 1907 she married lawyer John Rogers, who in 1912 was elected as a Republican to the House of Representatives for Massachusetts’s Fifth District. When John served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Edith traveled with him to the United Kingdom and France during World War I.
Rogers’s volunteer experience proved invaluable. In both England and France, she served in the Red Cross, tending injured soldiers. From her “boots on the ground” vantage point, Rogers kept President Woodrow Wilson apprised of the medical treatment American servicemen were receiving overseas. Upon returning to the United States, she joined the newly founded American Legion as part of its women’s auxiliary. Rogers continued her service to Veterans in Washington, D.C. as a Gray Lady for the American Red Cross and was dubbed the “Angel of Walter Reed Hospital.” Her early interactions with military personnel shaped the course of her later political career and dictated the causes that would become her life’s mission.
Her husband’s untimely death in 1925 launched Rogers’ life in a new direction. Although women had gained the right to vote a mere five years earlier and a grand total of six had been elected to Congress, Rogers decided to run for her late husband’s seat. She won the special election in a landslide, beating her Democratic opponent, former mayor Eugene Foss, with 72 percent of the vote. During her first year in office, Rogers made her voice heard, sponsoring a bill that created a permanent U.S. Army Nurse Corps.
The following year, she supported legislation establishing pensions for Army nurses who served in the war and disability payments for those who sustained injuries in the line of duty. Rogers also secured an assignment on and soon chaired the newly established Committee on World War Veterans’ Legislation, thus beginning her decades’ long commitment to advancing the welfare of Veterans. During the second half of the decade, Rogers and other committee members oversaw the appropriation of millions of dollars for the construction of veterans hospitals. In 1930, she supported the Veterans’ Administration Act, which consolidated all of the government offices responsible for Veterans benefits and medical care into a single federal agency.
In the years preceding World War II, Rogers was one of the first politicians to condemn Adolf Hitler and anti-Semitism. She spoke candidly about the treatment of European Jews and encouraged government officials to accept refugee ships. In 1939, she co-sponsored a bill with Robert F. Wagner, the Democratic Senator from New York, that would have allowed upwards of 20,000 Jews, age 14 and under, into the country. The Wagner-Rogers bill unfortunately failed, with tragic results.
In 1941, Rogers launched a new legislative effort that would have great ramifications for future generations of women. On May 28, she introduced a bill to establish a women’s corps within the Army independent of the Nurse Corps. After much heated debate and several amendments, her bill passed almost a year later, on May 14, 1942.
The law creating the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) compromised her vision, as women serving in the WAAC were not granted military status, thus depriving them of life insurance and other benefits given to male soldiers. Nonetheless, WAACs performed a variety of essential jobs for the Army and proved so indispensable that military leaders dropped their opposition to allowing women to serve in the Army on the same general terms as men.
Rogers had the satisfaction of sponsoring a new bill establishing the Women’s Army Corps that became law in mid-1943. Overall, about 150,000 women served in the WAAC and WAC and they were employed in every major theater of operations during the war. The WAC was largely demobilized by 1946, but two years later, President Harry S. Truman signed the Women’s Armed Services Act, which allowed women to enlist in all branches of the armed forces. This measure fulfilled Rogers’ ambition of securing for women the same right and opportunity to serve their country as men.
During the war, Rogers made an enduring contribution to the other cause dear to her heart: the well-being of Veterans. After World War I, Rogers had seen the difficulties many Veterans experienced when they left the military. She wanted to spare the millions currently in uniform from similar hardships and do everything in her power to ease their return to civilian life.
As the ranking Republican on the Veterans’ Legislation Committee, she joined with chair John Rankin, a Democrat from Mississippi, to take up a legislative proposal for a G.I. Bill of Rights submitted by the American Legion in early 1944. Her work on and support for the bill helped secure its passage in Congress. In its final form, this landmark piece of legislation provided ex-service members with a package of benefits never before offered to Veterans: unemployment compensation, money for education and training, and low-interest loan guarantees to purchase a house, business, or farm.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt invited Rogers to the historic bill-signing ceremony held on June 22, 1944. She was given a place of prominence just behind him and, in recognition of her efforts on behalf of the bill, Roosevelt handed his pen to Rogers after he signed it.
In the post-war era, Rogers continued to serve as a powerful advocate for Veterans. During the Korean War, she played a key role in getting Congress to approve a new version of the G.I. Bill granting educational and loan benefits to Veterans of that conflict. She also endorsed turning the Veterans Administration into a cabinet-level agency, an idea that would not become a reality until President Ronald W. Reagan came out in support of such a measure more than three decades later.
Rogers was not always on the right side of history. She protested some New Deal policies, and, in the 1950s, she supported Joseph McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities that impinged upon citizens’ civil liberties. Rogers also railed against the inclusion of communist China into the United Nations. Rogers did, however, oppose child labor and she supported Civil Rights legislation.
Although she advocated for women’s causes, Rogers would not have considered herself a feminist. She believed a woman’s primary duty was to her family. In fact, early in her career, she voted to limit women’s employment to forty-eight hours per week. But as a child-free progressive and careerist, she championed women who chose to serve in the military like no other politician of her time.
Throughout her political career, Rogers sponsored more than 1,200 bills, nearly half of which concerned Veterans’ issues, and she continued fighting on their behalf from her seat in Congress until the day she died in 1960 at age 79. She received many honors both during her lifetime and afterwards. Rogers was the first woman to receive the American Legion’s Distinguished Service Cross.
In 1978, on the fiftieth anniversary of its opening, the VA medical center in Bedford, Massachusetts, was renamed the Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital. Twenty years later, Rogers was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Most recently, VA celebrated her name and work by establishing the Edith Nourse Rogers STEM Scholarship, which provides an additional $30,000 for specialized training to Veterans who have exhausted their educational benefits. Her decades of public service and dedication to improving the lives of Veterans remain her most inspiring legacy today.
The following is republished from the U.S. Congress. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
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.”
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. 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. 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.” 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. 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. 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. 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. “I am a Republican by inheritance and by conviction,” she declared. 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. Rogers observed, “I hope that everyone will forget that I am a woman as soon as possible.”
Rogers was returned to the House by increasingly large margins, eclipsing those of her husband, in her subsequent 17 re-election campaigns. 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.” 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. 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.”
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. 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). 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. 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.”
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. 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. 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.