Background
Charlotte Elizabeth Carr was born on May 3, 1890 in Dayton, Ohio, United States; the daughter of Joseph Henry Carr, a prosperous businessman, and Edith Carver.
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Charlotte Elizabeth Carr
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also known as
Scarlet
Education
Carr developed an early sensitivity to problems of poverty and injustice, and when her parents insisted on her becoming a debutante instead of going to college she ran away and got a job in Pittsburgh. Her parents relented and enrolled her at Vassar College. Carr later said she learned little at Vassar; her higher education began in 1915 when she graduated and started “bumming around. ”
Career
Charlotte's career in social work began upon graduation with the B. A. from Vassar in 1915, when she became a matron in a Columbus, Ohio, orphan asylum. She subsequently worked with delinquent and runaway children with the New York State Charities Aid Association and New York Probation and Protective Association and as a New York City policewoman, patrolling the streets from 6 P. M. to 6 A. M. During the next several years Carr held personnel positions with industrial enterprises, including assistant employment manager of the American Lithograph Company in New York City, employment manager of the Knox Hat Company (1921 - 1923) in Brooklyn, New York, and personnel manager of the Stark Mills (1923) in New Hampshire. In 1923 Carr returned to the field of social work, serving under Frances Perkins as assistant director of the Bureau of Women in Industry of the New York State Department of Labor. In 1925 she started a similar bureau for Pennsylvania and was director until 1929, when she was dropped from the state payroll for refusing to pay political assessments. She returned under Governor Gifford Pinchot in 1931 as deputy secretary of labor and industry, subsequently serving as secretary from 1933 to 1934. In 1934, during the depths of the Great Depression, Governor Herbert Lehman of New York drafted her as an adviser on the problem of relief. Shortly thereafter, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia made her executive director of the Emergency Relief Bureau in New York City (1935 - 37), where she had under her supervision as many as 18, 000 employees, a monthly budget of $9 million, and the welfare assistance of nearly one million people. In 1937 Carr succeeded Jane Addams as head of Chicago's Hull House, serving until December 1942, when she resigned due to friction arising from her active support of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's election campaign. From 1943 to 1945 she served as assistant to the vicechairman of the War Manpower Commission. In 1945 she became the first director of the newly formed Citizens' Committee on Children of New York City, serving until her retirement in 1953.
Early in her industrial relations work in Pennsylvania, she singlehandedly mediated for four hours with striking miners when her car was stopped at a roadblock, thus opening the way for a quick and peaceful settlement. At Hull House, Carr refused blindly to pattern her leadership and programs on those of Jane Addams. When she arrived to take up her duties, she declined to be photographed with a group of neighborhood children called in for the occasion. "Those children never laid eyes on me before, " she stated bluntly. "Why should they look up at me and smile?" At Hull House Carr formulated adult education programs and community centers, and conducted research on health services. She worked tirelessly to eliminate racial and cultural barriers at Hull House and in the neighborhood, and invited the distinguished black social worker Faith Jones into the Hull House family. In her view the slum problems of Hull House did not inherently make the neighborhood a problem community. Rather, she believed that the Hull House problems, like all similar social and economic problems, were community problems. During the Great Depression, Carr ran New York's relief program efficiently and intelligently rather than--as she put it--"humanely. " Under her leadership thousands of relief recipients found jobs in the federal WPA, thus moving off the relief rolls. Believing that work relief preserved self-respect, she considered domestic welfare fundamentally tragic. For efficiency as well as economy she cut administrative costs, while at the some time providing the right to organize and appeal employment grievances. She believed that some good things came out of the depression, such as old-age assistance, unemployment relief, and the right-to-earn and wage-hour regulations. Carr was also interested in the problems of working women and children and of workers in hazardous jobs. She was a frequent contributor to social-work journals and throughout her career actively participated in a wide range of professional meetings and conferences. The night before her death, in New York City, she had represented the New York Welfare Department at a housing rehabilitation meeting.
Achievements
Personality
Carr was a big, heavy woman who described herself as a "fat Irishwoman. " She was genial, yet commanded attention and respect. A born storyteller, she could dominate a social conversation with witty anecdotes and reminiscences. She was both politic and canny, intelligent and innovative. Above all, she was a skillful administrator and a superb mobilizer of people. Her lifelong struggle for the betterment of life and work for the poorest third of the population was characterized by boundless energy, vigorous action, the ability to work under pressure, practical idealism, and the talent to confer and negotiate with industrialists and businessmen as well as with labor leaders and workers. Her prized nickname "Scarlet" was based on her tough, aggressive qualities.
Connections
Carr never married.
