or paying Black workers disastrously low
wages. He also discovered that racial bias
ran rife throughout the New Deal.
New Deal discrimination was increasingly
institutionalizing racist practices
into programs and policies at the federal
level, and Foreman embraced the fight
to end it as his personal mission. One of
his first acts was to decline to accept a
secretary from the all-white federal pool
and demand that Ickes allow him to hire
an African American woman. The interior
secretary agreed and said he knew just the
right person—a fellow Chicagoan, Lucia
Mae Pitts.
Besides being a top-notch secretary,
Pitts brought to the special adviser’s office
the much-needed perspective of a Black
woman. After completing her secretarial
degree, Pitts worked for the Tuskegee Institute,
a New York theater, Atlanta’s African
American newspaper syndicate and the
Federal Council of Churches. In the early
1930s, she landed a job in the Illinois
House of Representatives’ stenographic
pool. The pool’s only African American
secretary, Pitts endured the frigidity of her
white coworkers and elected officials. But
one figure welcomed her, Anna Wilmarth
Ickes, a representative from Winnetka, IL,
and the wife of Harold Ickes, who was then
a crusading local reformer.
When Foreman came calling, Pitts
had fallen victim to the state of Illinois’s
Depression-era layoffs. She jumped at his
offer and headed to Washington. On September
5, 1933 she became the first African
American woman to serve as a secretary to
a white federal administrator at the capital.
Pitts was eager to work but she refused
to be flattered and, like other African
Americans, harbored serious reservations
about Foreman. At the beginning, she
maintained a cool, yet professional distance
from her new boss. Foreman later
described her attitude as “rude,” while she
characterized it as “unbending.”
Pitts remembered the New Deal’s formative
period as “hectic and busy.” Relief
and recovery programs were organized
and reorganized rapidly. Some were
housed within preexisting divisions in cabinet
departments; others were new, independent
agencies whose purpose required
oversight from one or more cabinet secretaries.
There was competition among
programs and cabinet secretaries, especially
for funding. But all those serving in
the New Deal realized the seriousness of
President Franklin D. Roosevelt greets scientist and inventor George Washington
Carver with a handshake during his second term of office, at a time when
whites generally refused to shake hands with African Americans.
their charge; they were there to rescue the
nation from economic catastrophe. Foreman
had already rushed into battle. He
spent long days trying to pressure cabinet
officials and New Deal heads to appoint
African Americans to their divisions.
The iciness between Pitts and Foreman
quickly thawed, as she became convinced
of his sincerity. He spent long hours in
the office receiving individuals and delegations
asking for help for themselves
or economically devastated Black communities.
Pitts not only witnessed but also
contributed to the expansion of African
American federal appointments, as Foreman
sought her recommendations for
expanding the Black secretarial corps. He
also immediately added “field representative”
to her list of duties and dispatched
her to Virginia Beach to survey the damage
from a deadly hurricane that had left
numerous Black families homeless.
While Foreman may have earned Pitts’s
respect, he still had a long way to go
with the Black public. He knew that with
each passing day, African Americans were
tumbling deeper into economic despair.
He tenaciously charged ahead pushing
for jobs and resources for Black citizens.
He aggressively buttonholed Roosevelt’s
cabinet heads and became an unwelcome
figure in cabinet and New Deal offices.
Foreman eventually stumbled onto one
official willing to hear him out, Secretary
of Commerce Daniel C. Roper. A fellow
southerner, Roper was eager to do damage
control on race relations. The Commerce
Department was a major player in
the National Recovery Administration, and
Roper had taken much of the heat for
that program’s bigoted practices. Roper had
compounded his problems by dismissing
a respected African American appointee,
a Republican holdover who advised the
department on Black-owned businesses.
Then he made an unpopular decision even
worse by abolishing that position. African
Americans demanded the secretary restore
the post and either rehire its previous occupant
or find a replacement. So, when Foreman
came calling in the late summer, Roper
seized the chance to fix his public image.
At Foreman’s suggestion, Roper agreed
to sponsor a conference on the economic
Hulton Deutsch
24 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Summer 2020 | www.MoAF.org