Theodore Roosevelt Supports Giving Government Pensions to Widowed Mothers, the First Government Welfare Aid Not Provided to War Veterans

As President, Roosevelt called social workers to a White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, the first meeting for a social cause under U.S. government auspices. There he stated: “Home life is the highest and finest product of civilization…Children should not be deprived of it except for urgent and compelling reasons.” The conference declared that preserving the family in the home was preferable to placing the poor in institutions, which were widely criticized as costly failures. It gave rise to a nationwide campaign on the part of social welfare groups and women’s organizations for government pensions to widowed mothers, whose conditions were worsening in the wake of mass urbanization and immigration. This movement heralded the shift to large public welfare programs and expenditures, and foreshadowed the New Deal.

Mothers’ Aid soon organized and gained popular and political support, including that of Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette and Calvin Coolidge. It also gathered the support of Catholic and Jewish charities, who not only sympathized with the purpose, but saw in Mothers’ Pensions new opportunities to influence public welfare policy.

In 1911, sociologist Clara Cahill Park presented a paper to the National Congress of Mothers on “The State of the Fatherless Child”, and upon returning to Boston spearheaded a campaign for mothers’ pensions. She founded Boston’s Congress of Mothers and became its vice president, and aggressively set about making her cause a reality. She involved the Jewish community, working with the noted Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. She enlisted Mary Boyle O’Reilly, who had established the Catholic Guild of St Elizabeth, a Boston settlement house for children, and gone on to become a trustee of the city’s Children’s Institutions.

As part of her efforts in starting up the Boston Congress of Mothers, Mrs. Park wrote Theodore Roosevelt. He responded warmly in support, and even sent his regards through her to Brandeis, Wise and O’Reilly. Typed letter signed, on his The Outlook letterhead, New York, December 5, 1911, to Mrs. Park. “Of course I most emphatically and cordially approve of pensioning mothers under the circumstances you name. A pension given to such a mother, the mother of a large family, who has had to be both father and mother and has done her duty well, is as much a matter of right as any pension ever given to the most deserving soldier. What I did, really at your suggestion, in connection with Mrs. Morris was merely to try to apply practically this principle. Good luck to you! I believe in you and the work you are doing with all my heart. Give my warm regards to Miss Mary Boyle O’Reilly, Rabbi Wise, and Mr. Louis Brandeis, and all the others associated with you.”

This very letter is cited as an authority for TR’s opinion on the subject in the book, “Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life” By Kathleen Dalton.