Craig, Elisabeth May

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CRAIG, Elisabeth May

Born 19 December 1888, Coosaw Mines, South Carolina; died 15 July 1975, Silver Spring, Maryland

Also wrote under: May Craig

Daughter of Alexander and Elizabeth Adams; married Donald A. Craig, 1909

Elisabeth May Craig was the sixth of nine children born to parents who left England for a small South Carolina mining town. Her mother died when she was five, and she was raised by Frances and William Weymouth, one of the owners of the phosphate mines in which her father was a blacksmith. In 1900 the Weymouths moved to Washington, D.C., where Craig attended Central High School, enrolled in George Washington Hospital Nursing School, and worked at developing fiction and nonfiction writing skills.

After marriage to journalist Donald Craig in 1909, Elizabeth began to publish feature articles and in 1923 to assist her husband with the column he wrote for the Gannett chain of newspapers in Maine. When her husband died in 1936, she kept his Maine column, retitling it "Inside in Washington" and writing it almost seven days a week until her retirement in 1965. In the 1940s Craig began radio broadcasts, and in 1949 appeared on the first televised "Meet the Press" broadcast. She received national prominence as the lady with the hats and the "dodgeproof" questions during her tenure of 18 years.

The best of Craig's reportage appeared in the Gannett column "Inside in Washington," which was published in four major Maine newspapers. For this column she developed a vast store of political knowledge about complex bills, laws, and issues relevant to the national and local Maine environments. The column's topic was introduced within the first few sentences, or else a "chatty" description of Washington social events was followed by an abrupt shift to a political theme. Readers were presented with a large array of political facts organized within a framework of personal opinion. Generally approving of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal reforms because they were efforts "to do something for the forgotten man," Craig also kept her readers aware of the various interest groups who stood to benefit from each new piece of legislation. Legislative "samples" explained political philosophies and practical politics. Discussions of the "milk imbroglio," the "homestead idea," or the "medical trust" illustrated issues of an ideal "American standard of living" and "the little local grafters who saw to it that they got theirs."

Throughout her journalistic career Craig covered presidential and congressional politics; she attended press conferences, legislative sessions, political conventions, and diplomatic conferences. In World War II, Craig was in the European theater, where she wrote about the Normandy campaign, London during the buzz-bomb raids, and Paris the day after its liberation. She was the first woman correspondent to fly in the Berlin Airlift and the first to fly over the North Pole. During Truman's Administration she was the only woman present at the Kaesong ceasefire talks in Korea and the first woman correspondent to receive accreditation by the U.S. Navy. During the 1950s and 1960s she wrote about Cold War politics in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia.

Despite the difficulties being a woman journalist presented (such as exclusion from "stag" White House correspondents' gatherings), Craig was part of the "established" Washington press corps. This gave her a powerful vantage point from which she did not hesitate to criticize officials' behavior. In her most widely read article, "Decline of the United States—And Fall" (reprinted in several magazines and newspapers in 1964), she castigated the American government for being "incapable of giving leadership." This column called for a "strong man to lead us" in "worthy" causes of "schools for the young, care for the elderly, strength so that none will dare attack us."

Craig was an active member of the journalists' union, the American Newspaper Guild, and she served as an executive officer of the local Washington Newspaper Guild. An articulate feminist, Craig was a vocal member of the board of governors of the Women's National Press Club and an elected president in 1943. She was the first woman elected to the Standing Committee for Congressional Press Galleries (1944-46). As an "able journalist" Craig was presented with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Maine in 1946, and in 1952 she received the Business and Professional Women's Association Award for Distinguished Service.

Ahead of her male colleagues on issues of equal rights in the profession of journalism, Craig was in other matters a journalist critically attuned to the times in which she lived. Her columns are a unique personal reflection on nearly 40 years of American domestic and foreign policymaking.

Other Works:

Elisabeth May Craig's column "Inside in Washington" appeared during the years 1925-65 in Maine's Portland Press Herald, Evening Express, Kennebec Journal, and Waterville Sentinel. She also shared a byline with Donald Craig for the Maine column from 1925 until 1936.

The papers of Elisabeth May Craig are at the Library of Congress, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the Gannett Publishing Company, and the archives of "Meet the Press."