Papers of Anna Rosenberg Hoffman, 1870-1983

Anna Maria (Lederer) Rosenberg Hoffman was born on July 19, 1902, in Budapest, Hungary, to Albert and Charlotte (Bacskai) Lederer. In 1912, the Lederers emigrated and settled in New York City, where Hoffman attended public schools. Selling World War I Liberty Bonds was her initiation into public affairs. Later, the publicity she received from defusing a student strike brought her to the attention of Jim Hagan, a Tammany district leader, for whom she managed several election campaigns in the 1920s.

Hoffman's success, according to one journalist, lay in her talents as an "investigator, trouble-shooter, and peacemaker." In 1924 she founded a consulting firm and soon built up a reputation as an expert on labor mediation and welfare services. She became a trusted adviser to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and New York Governor Herbert Lehman.

A staunch Democrat, Hoffman served in the New Deal as a regional director for the National Recovery Administration (1935) and the Social Security Board (1936-1943), while also sitting on various city and state boards for business, transportation, recreation, and industrial relations. During World War II, she served with the Retraining and Reemployment Administration (1941-1945), the War Manpower Commission (1942-1945), and the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services (1941-1942), and was a special presidential adviser on the problems of returning soldiers.

In the postwar period, she served on or consulted for the National Security Resources Board, the Bureau of Employment Security, and the War Mobilization and Reconversion Advisory Board. In 1950-1953, she served under George Marshall as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower and Personnel, the highest post ever held by a woman in the defense establishment. During this period she also chaired the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services.

In 1953, Hoffman returned full time to her consulting work at Anna Rosenberg Associates. She reentered public affairs in the 1960s, serving on the New York City Board of Education, the Temporary Commission on New York City Finances, the National Commission on Automation, Technology, and Economic Progress, and the National Advisory Commission on the Social Security System.

Hoffman had married Julius Rosenberg, a rug merchant, in 1919; they had one child, Thomas J. Rosenberg, born 1924, and were later divorced. In 1963, Hoffman married Paul Gray Hoffman (1891-1974), a business executive who had headed the Marshall Plan and the United Nations Development Fund. Hoffman's son became a partner in her consulting firm. Hoffman died of pneumonia in New York City on May 9, 1983.

For further biographical information, see the early editions of Who's Who Among American Women, the Schlesinger Library's biography file, and interviews in the Eleanor Roosevelt Oral History Project at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the Herbert H. Lehman Project at Columbia University, and at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas.