Eisenhower: For . . . But Not Quite
The NWP and other ERA supporters were optimistic after the 1952 Republican victory because they believed that Republicans would be less sensitive to pressure from women labor activists. Indeed, retention of the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act had been a campaign issue, with the Republicans coming out in favor of keeping it. In addition, Republicans had a longer history of support for the ERA, as the first party to introduce it in Congress in 1923 and the first, in 1940, to include support for the amendment in its platform.
But President Eisenhower held very conservative social views, and the Eisenhower period was profoundly one of social consolidation. Eisenhower eschewed a deliberately conceived and openly executed program aimed at social reform. In 1954 the Supreme Court decreed, in Brown v. Board of Education, that states could no longer segregate children by race in the public schools. Rather than welcoming this overdue gesture in support of racial equality, Eisenhower was angered by the decision and its intentional initiation of such broad social change by federal action. Confronted with overt resistance to the federal system on the part of some Southern states, Eisenhower took action against the segregationists only when national integrity appeared genuinely threatened.[30]
Eisenhower disliked overt social manipulation by the federal government, but measures passed by Congress—as federal aid for education and home and highway construction—wrought extraordinary alterations in the country's landscape and demographics. Government support of industry included a massive influx of federal dollars, all in the name of defense, into the chemical, aerospace, electronics, and computer industries, creating thousands more white-collar jobs for women to fill. The money built the economy. Between 1945 and 1960 the GNP increased more than twofold, and per capita income rose 35 percent. By 1960 nine million families had become new home-
owners. More than ever before, Americans were suburban white-collar workers, well educated and well off.[31]
Although Eisenhower insisted that government should be restrained, he did give small signs of promise to ERA supporters. For one, he replaced the Democratic Women's Bureau director, Frieda Miller, with a Republican state official, Alice Leopold. Miller had been only the second director in the bureau's thirty-year history, and by tradition bureau directors did not change with a change in administration. Mary Anderson, appointed by the Democratic president Woodrow Wilson, had stayed through three Republican administrations. The Women's Bureau had long been the exclusive terrain of the liberal reformers and labor women who had lobbied for its creation, and Miller and her colleagues were not only hurt when she was replaced but also alarmed. Eisenhower's action suggested that the bureau would become less closely tied to its constituents and, therefore, presumably less a champion of women's welfare and more a tool of the administration.
Mary Anderson had been a trade unionist; Miller had worked with the National Consumers League before accepting an appointment as Industrial Commissioner in the New York State government (a post Frances Perkins had filled before her). Each represented a wing of the Women's Bureau coalition, devoted to the welfare of working-class women.
Leopold's career differed sharply. A businesswoman, she had started out as personnel director for a department store and then had owned a children's toy company. Active in Republican politics, she had won a seat in the Connecticut state legislature and gone on to become Connecticut's secretary of state in 1950. She was not unsympathetic to women's labor issues and had in fact authored Connecticut's equal pay law; she had also championed protective labor legislation. But she shifted the perspective of the Women's Bureau. For the first time, the bureau devoted part of its resources to the examination of issues concerning professional women. And as the Women's Bureau coalition feared, Leopold took the bureau out of the ERA fight.[32]
Alice Paul thought that Leopold herself supported the amendment but that she could not make an unambiguous state-
ment in favor of the ERA because of opposition from the Women's Bureau staff. Leopold never did champion the measure, but she did consistently refuse to take any action to oppose the bill, and by stating on several occasions to ERA opponents and supporters, as well as to members of Congress, that the bureau no longer took a position against the ERA, she left a gaping hole in the leadership against the measure.[33]
To the disappointment of ERA sponsors, however, her position made little difference with respect to the fate of the measure. The Hayden amendment had become an effective weapon in the anti-ERA arsenal, and with little pressure on Congress outside of the small group of Washington lobbyists the ERA had no real chance. The National Committee on the Status of Women, whose agenda had narrowed to the Status Bill, disbanded when the Hayden rider proved more successful in scuttling the ERA.
ERA adversaries easily maintained the upper hand, even after the Republicans had gained control of both houses of Congress in 1953. In May the Senate Judiciary Committee reported the bill favorably, and by July 64 senators had pledged to vote for the amendment on the floor, as had 255 members of the House. But Carl Hayden offered his proviso on the Senate floor when the measure came up in mid-July, and once again the Senate approved both Hayden's clause (by a vote of 58 to 25) and the ERA (73 to 11).[34]
As before, the amended ERA created not a measure tolerable to both sides of the women's political community but one acceptable to neither. When NWP sleuths determined that the House would endorse the Senate "compromise," they directed their supporters to kill the hybrid creation. Janus-faced, the ERA with the Hayden amendment incorporated two contradictory views of women—equal but not equal. So long as the nation remained divided, the Congress would not choose.
Likewise, administration signals on this issue remained ambiguous throughout the decade. The Department of Labor, under the direction of James P. Mitchell, had held steady in its opposition to the ERA, but the White House had begun to give other indications. In a 1954 meeting with Katharine St. George Eisenhower had, according to her report, offered his private
support. (The fall elections, however, put the Democrats back in control in both houses, vitiating Eisenhower's backing, even such as it was.) National Woman's party members began to receive invitations to Women's Bureau meetings, and in December 1955 Gerald D. Morgan, special counsel to the president, had written to Nina Price of the NWP that, because it had been included in the party platform, the ERA would continue to be part of the Republican program and that Eisenhower was "encouraged by the number of sponsors of the amendment in the House and Senate."[35] (Secretary Mitchell countered, when he received a copy of Morgan's letter, that the platform did not commit the administration to a particular bill.) Notes of a prepress conference White House briefing in April 1956 suggest that the White House staff did not itself truly understand the basis for the dispute. A memorandum remarked: "Equal Rights for women came up, but nobody seemed to know exactly what was meant."[36]
In 1956 the ERA stayed in both party platforms, and a high-placed Eisenhower campaign official succeeded in arranging what all regarded as a coup for ERA supporters. Dorothy Houghton, cochairman of the Citizens for Eisenhower campaign, pledged that she would try to get the president to make a statement of support for the amendment. To the satisfaction of ERA enthusiasts, in an address given to a packed house at Madison Square Garden in New York City on October 25, a mere twelve days before the election, Eisenhower uttered these words: "And we shall—with intelligence and sympathetic understanding—do all in our power to make more secure, for all citizens, their civil rights. And, as a special item of this matter, we shall seek, as we promised in our Platform, to assure women everywhere in our land equality of rights."[37] Although the candidate had not in fact promised with this pledge support for any specific measure, it gained him much affection from Republican women. Eisenhower won a personal landslide (which probably did not owe much to this particular statement), but the Democrats retained their control of both houses of Congress.
Neither his campaign promise nor his 1957 budget message, which also referred to equal rights for women, made a differ-
ence in the amendment's fate—nor could it have. Moreover, Eisenhower's sincerity in championing the women's cause, even if in fact he favored the ERA, seemed questionable in light of his other behavior. The minutes of a February 1957 meeting of the secretary of labor's policy committee noted that the secretary inferred a lack of whole-hearted commitment to the ERA on the president's part: "Pres. for—but not quite." In view of his own reservations and the president's recent messages, his own posture, he decided, would be cautious: "Secretary will fudge."[38] The White House indeed responded to letters assuring the inquirers of the president's continuing interest in the subject of equal rights for women, but without specifically mentioning the Equal Rights Amendment.[39] Eisenhower further unsettled ERA advocates by his response to reporter May Craig at an August press conference. When the well-known correspondent for the Portland, Maine, Press-Herald asked the president why he had not worked harder for the ERA, Eisenhower replied, laughing: "Well, it's hard for a mere man to believe that woman doesn't have equal rights. But, actually, this is the first time that this has come to my specific attention now since, oh, I think a year or so. . . . I just probably haven't been active enough in doing something about it."[40] ERA supporters were shocked at both the president's response and his laughter; they had been under the impression that he had received and read their letters. Administration support was tepid, the Hayden amendment seemed unbeatable. The unadorned Equal Rights Amendment did not express the national sentiment, and it remained an unachieved objective.
The AFL-CIO Department of Legislation, headed by labor lobbyist Andrew Biemiller, maintained a cursory anti-ERA lobbying effort in the absence of effort from the Women's Bureau and other groups. The labor federation recognized that many legislators were sympathetic.[41] As lobbyist Hyman Bookbinder put it, being for the ERA "is like being against sin, I suppose";[42] AFL-CIO officials even admitted that "many of our own people . . . are surprized [sic ] to find labor opposed to it."[43] But the labor organization had no internal qualms about its position or its support for protective labor laws. In fact, a half-hearted attempt by the American Civil Liberties Union to craft yet an-
other compromise on the ERA elicited derision. One labor official responded: "If the ladies who are now worrying about this did not have this to worry about they would find something else. Vive le (sex) difference!"[44] Biemiller made it clear to Senator Hayden that the organization was depending on him to continue to introduce his proviso. The Industrial Union Department urged affiliate unions to "keep up a constant barrage of communications to members of Congress," a campaign coordinated by legislative representative Esther Peterson.[45] Although the Senate Judiciary Committee reported the amendment favorably in May 1959, by a vote of nine to three, the Senate in July 1960 voted both to adopt the Hayden rider and to recommit the bill to committee.
The course of the amendment's fortunes suggested that defeat of the measure throughout the decade rested on a national unwillingness to restructure sex roles, an unwillingness revealed in the success of the Hayden rider to the otherwise ideologically appealing amendment. The ERA stood little chance of passage because it represented an affirmation of absolute equality for women at a moment when heightened recognition of sex roles served a number of national functions, most important of which was the re-creation of a stable and familiar society in the wake of the social chaos of wartime. Engaged in the contest, some ERA opponents argued that only a more sharply focused piece of legislation would avoid the conflict that the ERA engendered. They proposed an equal-pay law.