After her husband William Ross passed away from appendicitis after almost two years as governor of Wyoming, Wyoming's Democratic Committee approached Nellie to ask her to run -- the election was a month away. Against the cautions of her brother and other friends, who saw Wyoming as a mainly Republican state and politics as a man's game, Nellie decided to run.
"No one wanted it more" - George Tayloe, Nellie's brother, to his wife
While the public got one side of the story, that Nellie sought to finish her husband's work, ambition played a role in her choice. She had participated in the Cheyenne Woman's Club, a gathering of political and social talk, and had helped with her husband's political life.
Nellie was born from a farming background. Her father had owned a large plantation but had repeatedly sold off land and properties to meet mortgages, plagued by drought and grasshopper plagues. After high school, she had eventually received enough private schooling to teach kindergarten. According to WyoHistory.org, she said to the public that she had "a cultivated, upper-class upbringing," but she faced more tribulation and required more grit than she let on.
Nellie won the election by 8,000 votes out of 79,000, a greater margin of victory than her husband had received two years before. According to Wyoming Postscripts, Nellie had not campaigned herself, but her supporters had done the work for her. The Republican nominee, Eugene Sullivan, had been scarred by connections with oil businesses, which came with public distrust from previous corruption.
In office
As governor, Nellie pursued her husband's Progressive Democrat policies. These included tax cuts, government assistance to farmers, strengthened regulation on banks, and laws protecting child labor and miners. Furthermore, she advocated increased prohibition regulation, a large part of her husband's platform.
The Republican-dominated legislature of Wyoming made laws hard to pass. Despite being gridlocked by Republicans, however, Nellie achieved national attention for being the first woman governor. The press and politicians viewed Nellie as a confusing anomaly, and, according to WyoHistory.org, women were often "belittled" by men.
Post-governor life
In 1926, Nellie was narrowly defeated in her re-election run. During the election, the press slathered her with charges that she had made little progress, both socially for women and politically.
Still, Nellie remained politically involved. She traveled around giving speeches for Al Smith, the 1928 Democratic nominee for president. When Herbert Hoover took office, she was offered the position of director of the Women's Division of the National Democratic Committee, and she moved to Washington D.C.
In 1933, Roosevelt named Nellie director of the Bureau of Mint, and she became the first woman to hold the job. She held the position for five five-year terms before retiring, and had established the Franklin Half-dollar and held the job throughout the recovery of the economy from the Great Depression.
Nellie died at the age of 101 after a long political career as one of the nation's most famous women, known for her continual ambition in the political sphere.
We often talk about the way in which the actions of powerful people who come from backgrounds that are discriminated against in mainstream society (Barack Obama, for example) are judged by different standards due to those backgrounds. But can the actions of those people be taken to reflect on the communities from which they come, and, if so, can a bad "representative" have a negative effect on the people they're supposed to represent?
ReplyDeleteFor example, had Nellie Tayloe Ross been an unhelpful and unsuccessful governor, would that have hurt opportunities for other women in politics?