Oveta Joins the Army
My father taught me that I could turn the world around just as well as any of my brothers.
OVETA CULP HOBBY
The telephone blared in the Houston home of Oveta and Governor William Hobby. Oveta wondered who would call during the nice evening meal. With the family’s busy lives, Sunday dinner was one of the few times they had to be together. She threw down her napkin and went to answer the phone. She listened to the caller and said a few words the family couldn’t quite hear from the dinner table. At the call’s end, she returned to the table.
“What was that all about?” the governor asked his wife.
“That was General Surles,” she replied. “He called again to ask me to come to Washington and head up this new women’s army organization he’s putting together.”
“He called again? Do you mean this isn’t the first time he’s called about this?”
“Heavens, no. He asked me last week, and I turned him down. I told him there was no possible way I could do such a thing, not with my responsibilities to you and the children and the newspaper. I told him he would just have to find someone else. I’m not interested in that job.”
“I can’t believe you made him ask you twice,” the governor told Oveta. “You must do whatever your country asks you to do. You shouldn’t have made him ask you a second time. Any thoughtful person knows that we are in this war, and that every one of us is going to have to do whatever we are called upon to do.”1
Oveta knew he was right. She called General Surles back and agreed to take the new job on a six-month basis; she felt like she couldn’t afford to be away from the newspaper and her young family for a longer period of time. The job was in Washington, D.C. Oveta would be paid one dollar per year for her services.
Before Oveta set off for Washington, the governor called her sister Lynn and asked her to take Oveta to lunch and then go buy some new clothes, but to do so without letting on that the whole thing was the governor’s idea. Lynn took Oveta to lunch at the old Houston Club, downtown, and then told her older sister, “I’m going to go across the street to Ben Wold’s Fashion, and I wish you’d go with me.”
Once Lynn got Oveta into the dressing room, she said that Oveta was “lost, almost like a child. It was charming. We were there trying on dresses until the store closed at 7. Oveta just couldn’t make up her mind which ones to choose.” Growing up, Oveta’s passion had been focused on books, not fashion, and she really didn’t know what to do.
Lynn said, “Let’s take these seven or eight dresses home and give Governor a fashion show.” When they got home, the governor wore a huge smile as Oveta modeled the dresses for him. She ended up keeping them all. A few days later, the governor caught Lynn alone and told her, “You sure did teach her well.”2
. . .
In June 1941, thirty-six-year-old Oveta Hobby arrived in Washington, D.C. She got right to work and began the formidable task of setting up the new Women’s Interest Section of the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations. One of her main jobs was to prove to American mothers that the Army provided for the welfare of their sons.3
“For every one of the 1,500,000 men in the Army today,” she said in an early interview, “there are four or five women—mothers, wives, sisters, sweethearts—who are closely and personally interested.”4 Oveta soon became a pen pal “to thousands of wives and sweethearts all over the country, assuring them the Army was taking good care of their men. One of the most frequent questions she got was, ‘How is the food?’ She smoothly answered, ‘It’s getting better all the time.’”5
As if she didn’t have enough to do as head of the Women’s Interest Section, General Marshall then asked Oveta to plan our nation’s first women’s army, which would eventually be called the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Oveta studied the British and French women’s armies and prepared a plan by which the United States could avoid making the same mistakes the Europeans had.
Once the plan was complete and submitted to General Marshall, Oveta was released to go home for the winter holidays. On Sunday, December 7, 1941, her flight to Houston included a detour to Chicago, Illinois, so she could give a speech to the American Farm Federation Convention on the subject of women’s roles in the not-yet-begun war.6 Getting off the airplane, reporters met her with the news that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
Oveta went ahead with her speech, which was inspired; General Marshall later said, “Oveta Hobby made the nation’s first declaration of war that day.”7
The speech done, Oveta rushed to the telephone and called her husband. “Governor, the Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor, and all hell is breaking loose across the country!”
“Oveta,” Governor said, “I know you’ve had this trip home planned for a while, but your country is more important. I’ll take care of this family. You turn around and go back to Washington and do what you need to do.”
Oveta hung up the phone, relieved. This was the day she’d anticipated for months, and she knew her place was in Washington, D.C., where she could oversee all the plans and preparations for the women’s army that she’d spent the last months developing.
A day later, on December 8, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared war on Japan and officially entered World War II. Three days later, on December 11, Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States on behalf of Germany.
The Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor left the United States with no alternative, and it clarified in Americans’ eyes the need for U.S. involvement. World War II escalated in earnest.
Upon Oveta’s return to D.C., she was appointed to the pre-planning committee for the new Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.
Seven months before, on May 28, 1941, Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers introduced House Resolution 4906 (HR 4906): “A bill to establish a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps for Service with the Army of the United States.” But the bill faced much opposition and stalled in Congress. Now, with World War II well underway, the push for the new corps became urgent and intense, and a great legislative fight ensued in pursuit of the bill’s passage.
While the War Department worked feverishly on planning for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, or WAAC, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and General George Marshall tasked Oveta with figuring out what jobs women could do in regular Army procedures with the least amount of special training. Oveta provided them with a plan and list of duties.
Based on her report, General Marshall sent Oveta to Capitol Hill to testify in front of Congress about how women serving in the WAAC could release men for frontline duty. He also asked Oveta to draw up a list of women who might command this new women’s army.8
Oveta provided a list of nine possible commanders to General Marshall and Secretary Stimson, and they held the list for quite some time. Congresswoman Rogers, author of the WAAC bill, was also asked to recommend candidates. She submitted one name for consideration: Oveta Culp Hobby.9
At this point, Oveta had been with the Public Relations Bureau of the War Department for almost a year, despite the fact that she agreed to take on the job for only six months. Senior officers wrote of Oveta: “She has the ability, vision, and is broadminded enough to assemble a staff of capable assistants around her. [She is] already known to most of the key people in government and War Department Circles.”10 They noted her personal energy, magnetism, sincerity, and idealism, and observed that a very considerable diplomatic ability on all matters was combined with a certain stubborn determination in pursuing major issues.11
The chief of staff informed Secretary of War Stimson that Oveta was his choice for the position of director of the WAAC because of her brilliant work in the Bureau of Public Relations and during negotiations for the WAAC bill. He said, “She has won the complete confidence of the members of the War Department Staff with whom she has come into contact, and she made a most favorable impression before the Committee of Congress.”12
Finally, General Marshall and Secretary Stimson called Oveta in to meet with them. When Oveta arrived at General Marshall’s office, he read over her list of nine names, then gingerly placed it facedown on his desk.
“Oveta,” General Marshall said, “I’d rather you took the job.”
“General, I cannot,” she told him.
But when Oveta discussed it with her husband, he said she could and should do it. She was caught between the two men she respected most in the world, General Marshall and her husband. She finally decided to accept the position, becoming the first director of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. She was thirty-seven years old at the time.
But Oveta found herself in a strange limbo. She was the unannounced head of a nonexistent office, which could not become WAAC headquarters until passage of the WAAC legislation at an uncertain future date. Yet she still had to perfect complete plans for the WAAC, which required formal coordination with many War Department agencies.13
On May 14, 1942, nearly a year after the WAAC bill was introduced, the Senate approved Public Law 554, which was signed into law the next day by the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, officially creating the first Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.14 With the stroke of the president’s pen, the WAAC came into existence and, with it, Oveta’s destiny.