The “Sweater Ladies” and the Carter White House

The “Sweater Ladies” and the Carter White House

By Peggy Daly Pizzo

Carter Administration 1977-1981

https://www.lifteachotherupllc.com

President Jimmy Carter oversaw a White House policy staff that included African Americans and women, in a break from decades, even centuries, of Presidential traditions.[1] I was fortunate enough to be one of the women.

Recruited onto the White House Domestic Policy Staff (DPS) by the Head Start-loving Deputy Director of the Presidential Personnel Office, Harley Frankel, my job was to staff Stu Eizenstat, the head of the DPS and the chief domestic policy advisor to the President.

That meant researching and writing both options and decision memos for Stu to consider and to pass on to the President with his own recommendations. These were entirely focused on Head Start; child care (especially the need for better protections for low-income children in federally funded child care through the 1980 Federal Interagency Day Care Requirements); and child welfare, especially the enactment of the 1980 Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, along with issues concerning the prevention and treatment of child abuse and neglect.

I was expected to interact with other (wonderful) colleagues on the Domestic Policy Staff who were covering economic, health, transportation, income maintenance, employment policy, and a myriad of other issues for Stu and the President.[2] I loved doing this because it gave me the opportunity to learn and to underscore the historic, broad view of Head Start and child care as whole-child, family support programs.

I was also tasked with requesting and coordinating perspectives on these child and family policy areas from Cabinet Secretaries, Assistant Secretaries, and the principal Presidential appointees overseeing key agencies such as the Administration for Children, Youth and Families. I had already served in ACYF as the special assistant to the ACYF Commissioner, Blandina (Bambi) Cardenas, now Blandina Cardenas Flores. Bambi, an accomplished civil rights pioneer in the LatinX community, was the first Latina Commissioner of ACYF and Chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau.

Finally, I served as an informal liaison to the child and family policy advocacy community on these issues. And on occasion, I would be asked to brief key staff on Capitol Hill.

I had a personal history of working directly in Head Start and child care programs in low-income communities; a master’s degree in child development and early care and education; and experience working as a writer and researcher in the child and family policy advocacy community.

This is how I first met Harley Frankel, interviewing him, as the first director of the Head Start and Child Care division of the Children’s Defense Fund. Previously, Harley had spent several years administering the Head Start Bureau and the then-Child Care Division of what was then the Office for Child Development (later ACYF), under the late Dr. Ed Zigler, long known as the Father of Head Start.

To fulfill these responsibilities, I was given an office in the historic (and beautiful) Old Executive Office Building.[3] When our presence was required in the West Wing, which housed the Oval Office and the President’s most senior staff, we simply walked the short distance there.

Stu Eizenstat and myself in The West Wing of the White House, 1980

I was also an avid reader of all I could find about President Abraham Lincoln. So, I was aware that the OEOB had been partly built on the site of Lincoln’s War Department Building. Lincoln had spent many a restless hour in that building, which then housed a telegraph office. Worried about the progress of the Civil War—and concerned for the mounting casualties—he walked the halls, intent on keeping up with the latest reports from the field.

So, for me, the OEOB was sacred ground. I was the granddaughter of Irish immigrants, and I had brought to my understanding of the Civil Rights Movement a deep acquaintance with the oppression of the Irish in Ireland and an acute sense of the injustice of that. In 1963, I committed myself to the Civil Rights Movement the instant I learned of the bombing of the Birmingham church which killed four little girls.

When Head Start was established two years later, I worked in the program in one of its earliest summers. As a 19-year-old college student, as a teacher’s aide, I began to experience Head Start as a wonderful, multicultural pathway to justice for African Americans, Latinas/os; Asians; Native Americans, and the many impoverished rural and urban White Americans who were served by the program. I began a lifelong commitment.

Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, but also by childhood mentoring from Rachel Clark, an African American woman who lived and worked on the farm owned by his father,[4] President Jimmy Carter was profoundly committed to education as a pathway to greater social justice—and to Head Start in particular. In a lyrical 1980 departure from a prepared speech that President Carter gave in honor of the 15th Birthday of Head Start, in the East Room of the White House, President Carter showed his strong commitment to Head Start.

In the presence of Lady Bird Johnson and many dignitaries, experts, and founders of Head Start at all levels, he described his experiences with the Head Start program in Georgia, from 1965 onwards. Speaking of his visits to Head Start classrooms he says that in those racially integrated classrooms, (not easy to sustain in the south Georgia of that era), the children could see:

….what it could mean to be gratified in intense, young, human desires and to see dreams realized and to hear a voice of a teacher who knew how to teach and who genuinely loved them and to be provided with the practical things that make a day in a Head Start program so exciting and so successful—I think most important of all, they learned, many of them for the first time, that they were important to the world.

I came home several times—and my wife would vouch for this—with tears in my eyes as I told her about my day's experience. I was a tough, young, struggling, conservative, south Georgia farmer, but this program touched my life. And since then I've seen literally thousands of not only children but teachers and parents and the community itself involved in a program that has indeed transformed the interrelationship among human beings. [5]

I was present in the East Room that March day in 1980. I could clearly hear the emotion and the steely commitment in the President’s voice as he vowed, despite inflation, to propose both additional funding for and the traditional five-year reauthorization for Head Start. He also spoke about the importance of reaching children before three years of age.

There was already mounting opposition in Congress and in the U.S. population at large to social spending that benefitted low-income people. But I have not the slightest doubt that had he won the 1980 election, President Carter would have proposed—and fought for--the largest funding increase for the program in Head Start history—and paid attention to the needs of the program for substantial cost of living increases and better staff compensation.[6] He was prepared to propose the first billion dollar budget for Head Start.

But—what does all this have to do with The Sweater Ladies? And who were the Sweater Ladies, anyway? Well, here goes—the first telling of this story in print.

In that era, Head Start was beginning to transport more and more children in small school buses. Migrant children especially needed this kind of transport. There was a growing awareness in the public health community about the importance of child-appropriate car seats and safety restraints in school buses, including those transporting very young children. This would mean coordinating with transportation policy experts, to explore possible funding and procurement options.

I knew that the Transportation Cluster on DPS was staffed by Myles Link, a hugely respected attorney, and a graduate of Harvard Law School. Since Myles was also African American, I knew that making his way with honors through Harvard College and Harvard Law School in the early 1970s had taken determination as well as brains. He was brilliant, tall, very serious, with huge gravitas.

I was thinking about how I might best approach him to ask for some of his scarce time to discuss the Head Start transportation issues when I received a call from my mother. How she had figured out a way to call me at my White House office, I do not know. The daughter herself of an Irish immigrant mother who had worked as a domestic before marriage, my mother had first been silent when I called her the day I was appointed to the White House Domestic Policy staff. Then she said, “Well, does this mean you will be in charge of the domestics that work at the White House?”

This day she got right to the point. “You have to talk to Myles Link,” she said. You need to do that today!” Just as I was beginning to wonder (not for the first time) if maybe she really was psychic, I said, somewhat cautiously, that I was in fact planning to talk to Myles about some Head Start issues.

“Good,” she said. “You need to do that today. His mother is a friend of mine. She teaches in the same school as I do. We do the sweaters together—you know, with your Aunt Gerry, when she works as a substitute teacher here.”

At midlife, as each of her 7 offspring had begun to go off to college, my mother had begun to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a New York City schoolteacher. Beginning first with community college, she steadily acquired courses, while working for pay as a school secretary and continuing to raise the rest of the offspring still at home When she acquired her (first) master’s degree she landed herself a job in a South Bronx elementary school.

There she teamed up with several other teachers for The Sweater Project, a team that included my aunt, who sometimes taught there as a substitute teacher. Concerned that the low-income children in their school did not have enough warm clothes during the frosty winter months, they managed to find a wholesale dealer of children’s sweaters somewhere in NYC; bought the sweaters, and then sold them at inexpensive prices, as the parents came to pick up the children after school.

“Mrs. Link is a good friend of mine,” she said. “We work on the sweater project together. And she says that her son Myles works at the White House for President Carter.”

The odds that she could be right, I mused, were long. I mean, how often did it happen that two teachers in a South Bronx school—one with an African American son and one with an Irish American daughter—would actually have both offspring working at the White House, on the relatively small Domestic Policy Staff?

I started to say this but then thought better of it. One really did not argue with a woman who thoroughly enjoyed the phrase “stubborn Irish American woman” when it was applied to her. And I mean thoroughly.

“You need to go talk to him. Today!” she said,” “I told his mother you would.”

Murmuring that I would seek out Myles as soon as I could—and that I had to get back to work right now, I ended the call.

As I stepped out into the corridor of the Old Executive Office Building, to visit the office of another colleague, I glimpsed Myles at the end of the corridor walking in my direction. He appeared lost in thought, very serious, as always. I was sure he had a lot on his mind; was probably working on an important memo for the President and would not welcome a sudden intrusion.

But I squared my shoulders and walked towards him. When I was standing next to him, I looked up at him and said, “Myles, you are probably going to think this is impossible—and it probably is—but my mother says she knows your mother. They apparently teach at the same school.”

He inclined his head gravely and then smiled. “The Sweater Lady?” he said. “My mother has been telling me about her.” And there, standing in the corridors of the Old Executive Office Building, we just smiled and shook our heads at each other—knowing that our mothers had prevailed, after all.

And that is how some new thinking about Head Start transportation policy began to get a, well, head start!

I tell this story because it also illustrates how President Carter (and Mrs. Carter’s) commitment to equal opportunity caused them to break with centuries of traditions of White House appointments that had excluded people of color and women.

It also, to me, illustrates what it might have meant to Lincoln to know, as he struggled through the agonies of the Civil War, that a white Southern man would be appointed president and would support racial integration in schools and educational opportunity for all Americans, including African Americans.

It illustrates how public policy really gets made. Sometimes it is the surprise connections. But always, at its core, good public policy advances depend on knowledge, commitment, competence, integrity—and relationships.

Finally, it also illustrates the influence and power of teachers, from early educators (including family child care providers like Rachel Clark) to teachers at all levels of the U.S. education system. We need to honor and support our educators more. And, of course, it illustrates the influence of mothers, who also need to be honored more!

This is the first time I have ever written publicly about my years in the Carter Administration. I should not have waited so long. President and Mrs. Carter deserved to have all of the staff who worked for them lift up the commitment and accomplishments of their remarkable partnership. Somehow, it felt it might be too self-promotional for me to do this.

But I am thinking of writing more, in the hopes that my own family and circle of friends will enjoy these stories—but that also –maybe--those who one day will find themselves in government, trying to craft public policy that benefits many, especially children and families, might find them helpful.

[1] Harley Frankel, former Deputy Director of the Presidential Personnel Office in the Carter White House informs me that “Pres. Carter hired more women and people of color for high level positions than all previous Administrations COMBINED” (personal communication, 2023). [2] Stu Eizenstat has written a very comprehensive book on the Carter Presidency Stuart E. Eizenstat, President Carter: The White House Years (St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2018). Stu was also deeply committed to advancing both Head Start and child care policy. In recent years, he had asked me to assist with some sections of his book that would relate to both Head Start and child care, but personal health challenges prevented my doing so at the time. [3] The Old Executive Office Building (OEOB) has a fascinating policy and architectural history, some of which is detailed here: Artstor, “State, War and Navy Building; Old Executive Office Building; Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building,” Artwork, accessed February 26, 2023, https://library.artstor.org/public/HSAHARA__1113_31234293. [4] Rachel Clark was an informal family child care provider and mentor to Jimmy Carter during his childhood. More information about her can be found here: “Rachel Clark,” Jimmy Carter, March 25, 2016, accessed February 27, 2023, https://jimmycarter.info/2016/03/25/rachel-clark/. [5] The full speech can be found here: “15th Anniversary of Project Head Start Remarks at a White House Reception. | The American Presidency Project,” accessed February 26, 2023, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/15th-anniversary-project-head-start-remarks-white-house-reception. A beautifully written book by Edward Zigler and Susan Muenchow about the history of Head Start gives more details about this speech--some of them hilarious. See Edward Zigler and Susan Muenchow, Head Start: The Inside Story Of America’s Most Successful Educational Experiment (Basic Books, 1994).The Carter Library and Museum “About Us - The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum,” accessed February 27, 2023, https://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/about_us is a treasure trove for those interested in any aspect of President Carter’s Administration. Finally, a book published in 2010 by Ed Zigler and Sally Styfco, builds on the Zigler and Muenchow book to provide further detail about the history of Head Start, including during the Carter Years. See Edward Zigler and Sally J. Styfco, The Hidden History of Head Start (Oxford University Press, USA, 2010). [6] Researchers interested in the preparation of the Carter White House for this kind of significant support for Head Start (and child care) can find memoranda detailing pre and post 1980 election options in the Carter Presidential Library. With the help of the Library’s research librarians, these can be accessed virtually as well as in-person. https://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/