Background
Mary Harriman Rumsey, the eldest of the three daughters and three sons of Edward Henry Harriman and Mary W. (Averell) Harriman, was born in New York City.
Mary Harriman Rumsey, the eldest of the three daughters and three sons of Edward Henry Harriman and Mary W. (Averell) Harriman, was born in New York City.
After a preparatory-school course, she entered Barnard College and was graduated with the degree of A. B. in 1905. Her major studies were biology and sociology, and she became so interested in eugenics that she was nicknamed Eugenia. She also had a passion for social betterment.
In 1901 Rumsey conceived the idea of a society which should include girls of her class and give them opportunity for service. The new organization, the purpose of which was "to work for a better city, " was called the Junior League, and Mary Harriman was president of it for five years. Groups in other cities heard of it, organized Junior Leagues of their own, and a national corporation was formed in 1921. After leaving college, Miss Harriman managed her father's country estate, at Arden, N. Y. , with its more than six hundred employees, and experimented there with eugenics in cattle breeding.
In later years she founded the Eastern Livestock Cooperative Marketing Association. In 1909 she presented to the city of New York a large ferry-boat, which was to be moored near its shore line and used as a school and outdoor playhouse for tubercular children of Brooklyn. She provided it daily with food supplies from her father's estate. In 1910 she established herself on a large farm in the Blue Ridge section of Virginia. She managed the farm and pursued her favorite theories of breeding cattle and horses with such success that another large property in the neighborhood was added to the first. She also bought a chain of small Southern newspapers, through which she preached the doctrine of cooperation among farmers.
During the First World War, she removed to New York City, where her civic activity increased. She organized and directed the Committee of Community Councils of National Defense, and served as chairman of the subcommittee on field activities of the United States Food Administration's Fair Price Commission.
In 1919 she was a defender and helper of the Women's Trade Union League, also chairman of the conference board of the Council of Women's Organizations. She was made a trustee of the United Hospital Fund of New York in 1925 and was chairman of its Women's Auxiliary. During the early years of the depression which began in 1929 she was active in the affairs of the Emergency Exchange Association, and was one of the founders of the American Farm Foundation, both having the cooperative intent which she always favored. While treasurer of the Girls' Service League in 1931 she turned over to it a house in New York, to be a trade school for unemployed girls.
In 1933 she was New York state chairman of the organization for the share-the-work movement. She made possible a farming community of the unemployed near Binghamton, N. Y. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 appointed her head of the Consumers' Advisory Board, and she took up her residence in Washington, where she also became a member of the National Emergency Council.
She was long a member of the New York State Charities Aid Association, and for a time its chairman, and she was one of the trustees of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A generous patron of the arts, she gave replicas of her husband's statue of Pizarro to both Spain and Peru. She was an excellent horsewoman, polo player, and four-in-hand driver, but was seriously injured when her horse fell with her during a fox hunt near Middleburg, Va. , and died of a complication of ailments that developed later. Her burial was at Arden.
As a head of the Consumers' Advisory Board, Rumsey fought the principle of price-fixing from the beginning of her tenure, and was one of the first to combat price increases brought about by the National Recovery Act. In the formation of Consumers' Councils throughout the country she took a prominent part. In 2015 she was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
Quotations: She was reported to have lectured her associates in such words as these: "We girls are privileged. Eighty-five of us are coming out together. We ought to work together to make a better city. We debutantes, if we could get together for some big idea and get away from the pettiness of competing as to who receives the most cotillion favors, could really do something to improve our neighborhood" (Junior League Magazine, September 1939, p. 22).
In 1910 Mary married Charles Cary Rumsey, a sculptor. In 1922 her husband was killed in an automobile accident. She had three children, Mary, Bronson Harriman, and Charles Cary Rumsey, Jr.
