Oveta Culp Hobby

Government Official

• Born: January 19, 1905
• Birthplace: Killeen, Texas
• Died: August 16, 1995
• Place of death: Houston, Texas

American politician and businesswoman

As a U.S. Army officer, cabinet member, and business leader, Hobby was a pioneer for American women in many areas of public life. In her job as the first secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare she helped to institutionalize the department so that it became an important and necessary Washington fixture. She also helped develop the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II and was its first head.

Areas of achievement Government and politics, women’s rights, military affairs, business and industry

Early Life

Oveta Culp Hobby (oh-VEH-tah kulp HOH-bee) was born to Isaac William Culp and Emma Hoover Culp. Her father was an attorney who was first elected to the Texas state legislature in 1919; her mother was a homemaker who was active in the woman suffrage movement. From her earliest childhood, Hobby’s father took a personal interest in her training and schooling. Isaac Culp instilled an interest in public life in Hobby and convinced her that her gender did not constitute a barrier to any ambition she might have had. It was still somewhat unusual for a woman of her day, even one of the educated classes, to attend college. Not only did Hobby complete her undergraduate work at Mary Hardin-Baylor College, but she also studied law at the main campus of the University of Texas.

At a very young age and only partly through the influence of her father, Hobby began securing positions in the law, business, and government matrix of Texas. At the age of twenty, she was working as assistant city attorney in Houston. For several years, she served as parliamentarian, or chief clerk, for the lower house of the Texas state legislature, a position that enabled her to make extensive contacts in Texas politics. She made some use of these contacts when she decided to run for the legislature as a Democrat in 1929. Despite her efforts, she was not elected; women in electoral politics were to be more truly a phenomenon of her children’s generation. On February 23, 1931, Hobby took a more conventional step when she married William P. Hobby, about thirty years her senior, publisher of the Houston Post, and a former governor of Texas.

Life’s Work

Marriage, however, did not mean retirement to domesticity and obscurity for Hobby, as it did for many women of the period. Hobby immediately threw herself into both the business and editorial aspects of her husband’s newspaper business. Starting out as a research editor, she moved steadily up the hierarchy of the newspaper until 1938, when she was named executive vice president. These were not ceremonial positions; Hobby’s husband, busy managing other sectors of his extensive business interests, delegated much of his responsibility for the Post to his wife.

Houston during the 1930’s was a much smaller city than it became later in the century, and the Post was in many ways a small, regional newspaper. Hobby made efforts to modernize the newspaper and bring it to the level of sophistication achieved by dailies on the East Coast. She placed a premium on intelligent coverage of women’s issues, adding a woman editor to the staff to cover the activities and interests of women. Aside from her newspaper work and her devotion to her children, Hobby was particularly active within the Texas chapter of the League of Women Voters.

Hobby first attained national prominence with the beginning of American involvement in World War II. The United States government realized immediately after the onset of the war that this conflict would be more “total” than previous ones. It would affect not only soldiers fighting the war but also civilians living and working on the home front. Realizing that women would be more involved in the war effort than before, the government sought the assistance of recognized women leaders to help coordinate this involvement. Hobby was recruited to be the head of the women’s division of the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations. This mainly involved liaison work between the army and female family members of servicemen, and therefore fell short of giving women full equality in the war effort. The War Department soon realized the inadequacy of this situation, and, in the spring of 1942, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) was established to mobilize the talents and energy of women. Because of her work with Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall to plan the WAAC, Hobby was the natural choice to head this corps and, as such, was given military rank, first as a major, and then, more appropriately considering the status of her role, as a colonel.

World War II was one of the great watersheds in the democratization of American society. Most, if not all, of this democratization was unintentional. The government did not set out to use the war to enfranchise women and African Americans, yet staffing needs compelled the government to make use of their talents to serve the war efforts. Hobby’s tenure at the WAAC saw the most thorough emergence of American women into the public sphere in history. Once it was realized that the contribution of women was indispensable to the war effort, their social marginalization was far less viable. The increasing significance of women was recognized when the “auxiliary” was dropped from the name of the corps in the middle of the war. By 1945, Hobby’s efforts with the WAC had become nationally known, and, next to Eleanor Roosevelt, Hobby became the second most important woman in the American war effort.

After the war, Hobby returned to her duties at the Houston Post, but her interest in Washington affairs continued. In 1948, she advised the commission headed by former President Herbert Hoover on reducing waste in government bureaucracy. Surprisingly, her continuing interest in politics was no longer centered on the Democratic Party. In the Texas of Hobby’s girlhood, it had been culturally mandatory for a Texan to be a Democrat, since Texas, like many southern states, was dominated by a virtual one-party system. During her years in Washington, D.C., however, Hobby was increasingly drawn to the Republican Party, especially after its transformation under the leadership of Thomas E. Dewey. Under Dewey, the Republicans accepted most of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal social policies, while being more friendly to the free market and to capitalist initiative than were the Democrats. Hobby, a businesswoman as well as a liberal, was particularly sympathetic to this point of view. In addition, since they did not depend as heavily on the political influence of southern conservatives and urban party bosses as did the Democrats, the Republicans could theoretically be more responsive in alleviating the oppression of African Americans. As a result, although she continued to support local Democratic candidates, Hobby actively campaigned on behalf of Republican presidential candidates in 1948 and again in 1952.

Although Dewey suffered an upset loss in his 1948 presidential race against incumbent Harry Truman, the Republicans won in 1952 with the election of former general Dwight D. Eisenhower. By this time, Hobby was solidly in the Republican camp. When it came time for the new president to make his appointments, Eisenhower remembered Hobby’s wartime service and asked her to be the director of the Federal Security Agency. This agency coordinated the various government efforts directed at securing the health and comfort of American citizens. Socially concerned Democrats had long wanted to give this agency cabinet-level status, but it was the Eisenhower administration, often attacked for its conservatism, that presided over the agency’s elevation as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). After her appointment as secretary of this department was approved in 1953, Hobby became the second woman to serve in the cabinet. (Frances Perkins, secretary of labor in the Roosevelt administration, was the first.)

Hobby had enormous ambitions for the department, not all of which were realized during her tenure. She considered plans for overhauling the nation’s medical insurance system, proposing legislation that would have established a federal corporation to provide financial backing for private low-cost medical plans. Although her proposals were defeated as a result of staunch opposition by the American Medical Association and fiscal conservatives in Congress, many elements of her plan received renewed attention during the 1990’s under President Bill Clinton. Hobby also wished to focus more attention on the plight of the disadvantaged and economically subordinated, a highly unpopular cause during the prosperous 1950’s. So much of the budget was being spent on Cold War defense projects that funding for the projects Hobby wished to undertake was simply not available.

Despite these difficult challenges, Hobby performed her job with dynamism and diligence. She was particularly instrumental in the widespread distribution of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. As one of the few highly visible women in public life in the 1950’s, she made a decided impression on young women growing up at the time. She seemed responsible, capable, optimistic, someone equipped for the challenges of the political world. Although she had only been in office for two years when she resigned to take care of her ailing husband on July 13, 1955, Hobby had made important contributions during her tenure at HEW.

Hobby did not rest on her laurels after her retirement from government. Taking over the executive reins at the Houston Post, she presided over its development into a large metropolitan daily, acquiring the latest in technological equipment to help the paper keep pace with the exponential growth of Houston itself. She also oversaw the expansion of the Post media empire into the new realms of radio and, especially, television. She served as cofounder of the Bank of Texas and was invited to serve on the boards of several corporations, including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Hobby also developed more interests in the cultural sphere, accumulating an impressive collection of modern art, including paintings by Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani. Although Hobby did not pursue public office herself, she did have the satisfaction of seeing her son, William, Jr., elected as lieutenant governor of Texas in 1972 and serve twelve years in that position. In 1978, she became the first woman to receive the George Catlett Marshall Medal for Public Service from the Association of the United States Army in recognition of her contributions during World War II.

Hobby continued to be a prominent and much-beloved figure on the local Houston scene. In the later years of her life, her business success and family fortune made her one of the richest women in the United States. She could look back on a remarkable and unmistakably American life.

Significance

It is difficult to isolate one specific mark Hobby made on American history, if only because her long life saw her excel in so many pursuits. Her wartime service helped pave the way for the promotion of women to a position of full equality in the military as well as in civilian society. Her business success proved that women not only could direct a large corporate concern but also could transform and expand that concern at an age when many business executives typically settled into retirement.

Nevertheless, it was arguably in her cabinet role as the first secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare that Hobby made her most enduring contribution. Hobby started her cabinet position off on a good footing, helping institutionalize it so that it (and, more important, the concerns it represented) became a Washington fixture. The Eisenhower cabinet of which Hobby was a member was derided at the time as consisting of “eight millionaires and a plumber,” but it was in fact composed of many remarkable personalities, four of whom survived well into the 1990’s: Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, Attorney General William Rogers, and Hobby herself. Perhaps slighted by the Democratic bias of many historians, the Eisenhower cabinet was, especially in terms of domestic policy, a progressive force. Hobby’s presence was crucial in shaping this tendency.

Hobby’s cabinet service also firmly established the tradition of women being present in the cabinet. Under Roosevelt, the Democratic Party had been most associated with the equality of women. Hobby’s presence in a Republican cabinet meant that drawing on the abilities of Americans of either gender became a bipartisan concern. Every future woman cabinet member owed her position, in a way, to Hobby’s achievements.

Further Reading

Beasley, Maurine H., and Sheila J. Gibbons. Taking Their Place: A Documentary History of Women and Journalism. Washington, D.C.: American University Press, 1993. This book provides an impression of the history of women in journalism before, during, and after Hobby’s newspaper years.

Clark, James Anthony. The Tactful Texan: A Biography of Governor Will Hobby. New York: Random House, 1958. This biography of Hobby’s husband provides information on Hobby’s early career.

Eisenhower, Dwight D. The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963. The first volume of Eisenhower’s presidential memoirs makes frequent mention of Hobby in her role as head of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Howes, Ruth, and Michael Stevenson, eds. Women and the Use of Military Force. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1993. This book considers the theoretical issues accompanying women’s service in the military.

Hutchison, Kay Bailey. American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country. New York: William Morrow, 2004. U.S. senator Hutchison provides profiles of women who made history. Includes a profile of Hobby.

Lyon, Peter. Eisenhower: Portrait of the Hero. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. Emphasizes Hobby’s role as the nation’s top health care official.

Whisenhunt, Donald W., ed. The Human Tradition in America Between the Wars, 1920-1945. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2002. A collection of biographical essays describing how a wide range of Americans coped with the significant changes in American society that occurred from 1920 through 1945. Includes an essay on Hobby.