Frances Payne Bingham Bolton was an American politician. At age fifty-four, Bolton was the first woman in Congress from Ohio.
Background
Frances Bolton was born on March 29, 1885, in Cleveland, Ohio, United States, the daughter of Charles William Bingham, a financier, and of Mary Perry Payne. Her maternal grandfather was a United States senator, and she inherited a fortune from a maternal uncle who was a founder of Standard Oil.
For three decades, Bolton was a traditional wife, moving between Washington, D. C. , and Ohio to support her husband's political interests. When he was appointed to the War Industries Board in 1917, she developed her lifelong interest in nursing through volunteerism during World War I. She was influential in persuading the secretary of war to establish the Army School of Nursing, and nursing education became a priority for the Payne Foundation, which she established in 1917. For the rest of her life, Bolton administered foundation grants ranging from research in parapsychology to children's literature.
Chester Bolton was elected to Congress as a Republican in 1928, during the disastrous Democratic presidential year of Al Smith's candidacy. By 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal had made inroads against incumbent Republicans, even in Bolton's affluent district of Cleveland Heights, and he was defeated. Frances Bolton served on the state Republican committee when they returned to Ohio, and in 1938 her husband was again elected to Congress. He died only a few months after taking office, and she was easily elected to fill his term the following February. One of her initial acts was to return to the United States Treasury the pension to which she was entitled as the widow of a congressman. The news media frequently referred to Bolton as "perhaps the richest member of Congress. " Nonetheless, she devoted her career to the less fortunate.
Bolton was expected to be merely a caretaker finishing up her husband's term, but she surprised pundits by running in and winning the 1940 election by a larger margin than her husband ever had. Though elected as an isolationist Republican, Bolton quickly developed global views after she was appointed to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in January 1941. She would go on to support the Roosevelt administration's foreign initiatives more often than those of her party. Bolton even voted against the Republicans on such domestic issues as antistrike legislation and was a prime sponsor of a 1949 bill to establish a national network of low-rent housing. In addition, she sponsored equal-pay legislation in 1953 that finally became law in 1963. Bolton's most important wartime legislation was the 1943 Bolton bill, which provided funds to nursing students and nursing schools; one of the first federal appropriations aimed primarily at women, it was directly responsible for the training of more than 120, 000 wartime nurses. Bolton also sponsored legislation to improve conditions for dietitians, therapists, and other War Department employees whose secondary status was gender-based. To check on medical delivery at the front, she paid her own way to Europe in the summer of 1944; she was in London during bombing raids and went to Paris two days after its liberation, where "in grim tents" she saw medical "miracles performed. "
Bolton was conflicted by President Roosevelt's proposed draft of nurses late in the war. While her friends in the Army Nurse Corps believed that she shared their quiet opposition, Bolton, recognized by her peers as their best-informed member on nursing issues, did not join the opposition, and the bill passed. Bolton's position was complex, for it was the singling out of nurses that concerned her, not the unprecedented drafting of women. At the war's end, she proposed a genderless draft. Seemingly oblivious to conservative opinion, in 1949 she wrote an article for American Magazine with the blunt title "Women Should Be Drafted. " At the same time, Bolton was a sponsor of the 1948 Women's Armed Services Integration Act, which regularized rank and benefits for women, and both during and after the war, she pressured officials for racial integration of the military.
In 1943, Bolton became one of six drafters of the Republican party's foreign-policy platform plank, and when the Republicans became the majority party in the House, she chaired the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Near East and Africa. In 1945 she was granted an audience with the pope, and the following year, she was the first woman received by the king of Saudi Arabia. When, in 1946, the Republicans won a majority in the House, Bolton became the first woman to lead a congressional mission abroad. The following year, she chaired the Subcommittee on National and International Movements; the report of this body, The Strategy and Tactics of World Communism (1948), became an important diplomatic and military document.
The election of 1952 was of special significance to Bolton, for not only did Republicans retake the White House for the first time in twenty years but she also became the first congresswoman to have a child serving simultaneously in Congress. Oliver Payne Bolton, the youngest of her three sons, was elected from the Eleventh Ohio District that year; his mother represented the adjacent, Twenty-second District.
Bolton supported federal aid for education when opposition to it was a litmus test of conservatism in the late 1950's. Called "the African Queen" by some reporters because of her deep interest in that continent, she financed several trips there, not only for herself but also for expert advisers. Bolton's interest in Africa deepened. Appointed by President Eisenhower and confirmed by the Senate, she and Democratic Congressman James P. Richards of South Carolina served during the Eighth General Assembly in 1953 and 1954. This was a historic time as the still-new United Nations struggled with decolonialization not only in Africa but all around the globe.
A particular problem during Bolton's tenure was the independence movement in Puerto Rico that was critical of the United States. With the death of Republican Edith Nourse Rogers in 1960, Bolton became "Dean of the Women of Congress, " having served longer than any other woman; she also became the senior Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee and was an alternate delegate to a 1961 North Atlantic Treaty Organization conference. Her longevity in Congress was partially explained by her willingness to spend her own money on a staff large enough to keep in close touch with voters; her moderate views were also key to winning fifteen consecutive elections.
In 1968, Bolton faced a new district when reapportionment forced her and an incumbent Democratic man to run against each other. Moreover, the nation faced unprecedented domestic tumult, especially among young people, and not surprisingly, the eighty-three-year-old Bolton finally lost an election. She supported a host of mainstream organizations but also gave time and money to such less known ones as the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. She was a trustee of the Tuskegee Institute and of the Museum of African-American Art. Perhaps the most important of Bolton's philanthropies was the establishment of the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Western Reserve University with an endowment of more than $1 million in 1929. She also bought more than five hundred acres of land opposite Mount Vernon to protect it from commercialization. Bolton enjoyed less than a decade of retirement before dying in the Cleveland suburb of Lyndhurst shortly before her ninety-second birthday.
Achievements
Religion
Bolton was a member of the Republican party. She was a member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Ohio's 22nd district from 1940 to 1969.
Membership
Bolton was a member of the Society of Women Geographers.
Personality
Another factor was her personal energy, despite routine days from 6 A. M. to 10 P. M. Bolton practiced yoga, and reporters noted that she did "not remotely appear her age. "
Connections
On September 14, 1907, Frances was married to Chester Castle Bolton, an attorney. They had four children, one of whom died at birth.