EUGENIE MOORE ANDERSON WAS A CONSTANT PRESENCE and an active influence on the American political scene in the mid-twentieth century. She achieved a historic diplomatic status when President Truman appointed her the first woman to the rank of Ambassador for the United States in 1949. Over the course of her career, international news and images of her engaged readers of thousands of papers across the country and the world, through her high-level appointments to postwar Denmark, Communist Bulgaria, and the United Nations. Until now, however, the story of her life, combined with her experience as a woman in politics, her involvement in the Minnesota DFL Party and the national Democratic Party, and the effect she had on the history of Minnesota and the country, has not been told. Walter Mondale says: “Eugenie was one of the giants of the DFL Party … a gifted, scholarly, kindly, totally aware person. Probably [Hubert] Humphrey’s best friend.”1
Eugenie was not in a position to ask if a woman could have it all; rather, she concerned herself with protecting the democratic system that would enable other women, and men, to pursue such questions.
This biography of Minnesota’s Eugenie Anderson will explore not only how her life was influenced as a woman by the politics and expectations of her century but how she directly influenced twentieth-century politics and history. Jo Freeman, feminist author and civil rights activist whose work spans over fifty years, wrote, “It took the concentrated efforts of both insiders and outsiders to hoist women’s political participation beyond the level of tokenism.” Eugenie began, naturally, as an outsider. Friend, adviser, and campaigner for future vice president Hubert Humphrey, she launched her own career after meeting the women who were insiders: Eleanor Roosevelt and Democratic National Committee vice chairman India Edwards. It was through the combined sponsorship of Minnesota men like Humphrey and Governor Orville Freeman, and women with direct ties to the White House like Roosevelt and Edwards, that Eugenie burst into national view, seemingly from nowhere. Her own strategies for staying in the game proved just as valuable as sponsorship by others. Eugenie said: “The important thing for any woman in public life is to forget first that she is a woman and concentrate on her objectives.”2
Eugenie Anderson was not a proclaimed feminist. But her parameters and expectations of feminism were very different than they are for women today. When Eugenie said of feminism, “That aggressive attitude won’t get a woman any place,” she was speaking, out loud, to the press, in 1949. Jo Freeman stated in her book A Room at a Time: “Context is crucial to political history. It is impossible to understand what people say or do in the political arena without knowing the influences upon them and those whom they are trying to influence. Otherwise one runs the risk of seeing the past through the eyes of the present, and distorting both.”3
In post–World War II America, there was no active women’s movement. There had never been a woman president, woman prime minister, or female—anywhere in the world—elected to lead a democratic nation. One single woman, Margaret Chase Smith, had ever been elected to the US Senate. Suffrage had been adopted thirty years before, and the current social climate in America dictated that women should be grateful for peace after victory in the world war, grateful that their men were home and dominating the workplace, grateful that they could raise children in a free country, and grateful that they had the right to vote and choose candidates. Wilfrid Sheed described the era in his biography of Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce: “The summer was 1949.… The whole forefront of American life had a strange gleam to it, like a starlet’s smile, as wartime propaganda turned its incandescence on peace and tried to make it glow like World War II: patriotism, religion, optimism, for its own sweet sake—anything to ward off depression.”4
Not until 1963, when Betty Friedan published her groundbreaking social study, The Feminine Mystique, would the “strange gleam” of postwar gender stereotypes and conditions come into sharper scrutiny; eventually, by the end of the 1960s, the conversation led into the second wave of feminism in the United States. So while it may seem anachronistic to apply ideas in The Feminine Mystique to the path of Eugenie Anderson’s career (which began almost twenty years before its publication), the fact that the subject matter of the book examines and discusses those very years makes it a perfect reflection on the women’s issues and challenges that Eugenie faced.5
When Eugenie joined politics, her objective was not feminism, women’s rights, or anything that would draw attention to her gender. She wanted to fight tyrants and bullies, and the bigger and tougher and higher up they were, the stronger she wanted to protest. She wanted to meet them on diplomatic ground and argue, intellectually and morally, why they were wrong. She wanted to lend her voice to the support of democracy and human rights, and if she had to do it in a skirt, well, then, she’d wear a skirt and wear it like silk shantung armor. An avid student of political history, and traumatized by (not through experiencing, but through understanding) the horrific crimes of Nazi Germany and other totalitarian regimes in the first half of the century, Eugenie focused her beams on Soviet Communism and the effects of Stalinism. Her work and championing of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and President Truman’s Marshall Plan exemplified everything she believed about international cooperation and resistance to the spread of Communism. In a letter to Hubert Humphrey, she wrote: “Sometimes I feel that a far greater danger to our survival than H-bombs or nuclear warfare, is Western fear of these things. The Soviet Union is masterful about exploiting our fears.”6
It is hard not to draw parallels to our own position in time, as we live through each day now listening to debates over interrelationships between the highest levels of power in America and Russia. In 1963, based in Communist Bulgaria, Eugenie wrote home to her family: “I was absolutely shocked to see that recent picture of [Ambassador] Harriman and Khrushchev embracing each other on reaching the test-ban agreement. It is one thing to reach such an agreement—but it is quite unnecessary (and unwise in my opinion) for an American official to be carried away by it.” Most of the nation reacted the same way in 2018 when President Trump publicly congratulated Russian President Putin on his “electoral” victory. One of the strongest female voices in American politics today, former senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, still sees a global threat from the Kremlin. Clinton wrote: “Now that the Russians have infected us and seen how weak our defenses are, they’ll keep at it. Maybe other foreign powers will join them. They’ll also continue targeting our friends and allies. Their ultimate goal is to undermine—perhaps even destroy—Western democracy itself.”7
Above all, Eugenie Anderson wanted to be known for advocating democratic ideals. If being the “first woman” in any given role helped her spread the message of that goal, then it was useful. If representing women helped provide an example that all people, regardless of gender, color, race, or creed, could join the democratic process, then it was useful. But when those same situations—any emphasis on her femininity—jeopardized her very presence at the tables where policy was made and democracy was at stake, then calling attention to her gender was not useful, and she blazed forward, relying on hard work, loyalty to her political sponsors, and the adept camouflaging of blatant sexist challenges. Her bottom line was to keep communication lines open to promote peaceful diplomatic solutions to conflicts anywhere on the globe. Civil rights. Human rights. Persistent, and inevitable, conversations about women’s rights were always in the background of those larger ideals. While Eugenie dealt with sexism every day of her life, she employed every bit of personal stamina to keep its power over her to a minimum. And she succeeded far more often than she failed. Hillary Clinton wrote: “It can also be deeply rewarding to be a woman in politics. You know that just by being in the room, you’re making government more representative of the people. You’re bringing a vital perspective that would otherwise go unheard.”8
Eugenie kept her place in the room. This is her story.
Studio portrait of the Moore family in 1912, during Rev. Moore’s posting to the Methodist Church in Dexter, Iowa. Clockwise from top: Ruth Moore (Stanley), age nine; Ezekiel A. Moore, age thirty-nine; Helen Eugenie Moore (Anderson), age three; Flora Belle McMillen Moore, age thirty-eight; Mary Katharine Moore (Biederman), age one; Julie Moore (Ross Stanley), age seven. The youngest sibling, William J. Moore, was born a year later. Anderson family collection.