(1889-1975)
American war correspondent. Elisabeth May Adams attended George Washington University School of Nursing and then married Donald A. Craig, head of the Washington bureau for the New York Herald. A freak car accident changed her life. The car in which her husband was traveling, following President Warren Harding’s motorcade, plunged off a cliff near Denver, Colorado, killing the driver and leaving Donald gravely injured and unable to work. Hesitantly at first, his young wife began to file political items, and gradually, May Craig became one of the leading female political correspondents in Washington. By the 1930s, she was penning a column called "Inside Washington" for the Gannett newspaper chain. During the New Deal years, fond male colleagues called her Quoddy, in reference to her advocacy of the Pas-samaquoddy power project in Maine. She became one of the few women accredited for President Franklin Roosevelt’s press conferences.
When First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt breathed fresh life into Washington, among her innovations was holding press conferences at which only female reporters were allowed. A dismissive male press corps derided these women as "the incense burners," but Craig became one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s inner circle of reporters. A suffragist, Craig had participated in a women’s suffrage parade on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in 1913. She ardently advocated women’s rights, but her stance was strictly that of liberal feminism; she felt and said emphatically that equality demanded that male reporters should be allowed access to Mrs. Roosevelt’s press conferences. Joseph Alsop observed that he never thought of May Craig as a woman. Instead, to him, she was a reporter.
Craig’s insistence on gender fairness continued into the war years when she served on the five-woman committee to credential reporters who could attend Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conferences after demand had swollen attendance. Her insistence on absolute fairness later led her to advocate successfully the barring of two longtime female veterans of the first lady’s press conferences from asking questions because they had taken war jobs with the government. May Craig feared planted questions and opposed "any hint of government propaganda" (Beasley 1987, 154). Advocating for her sex, she filed a protest in 1944 as president of the Women’s National Press Club, when female White House reporters were barred from the annual dinner of the Correspondents’Association.
During World War II, May Craig filed stories from Europe, reporting on buzz bomb raids in London, the progress of the Normandy campaign, and the liberation of Paris. In the Cold War years, she flew in the Berlin Airlift and covered truce talks in Korea. It was a point of pride that in 1949 she was the first woman allowed on a battleship at sea. Late in her career,, she noted wryly that "Bloody Mary of England once said that when she died they would find ‘Calais’ graven on her heart. When I die, there will be the word ‘facilities,’ so often has it been used to prevent me from doing what men reporters do" (Library of Congress n.d.).
In her later years, Craig enthusiastically covered the rise and career of Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith. Craig was always noted for her personal charm and attractiveness, as well as what one fellow correspondent called her "mind as sharp as cider vinegar and as retentive as a lobster trap" (Marzolf 1977, 59). She died in 1975.
