Frances Perkins: The Woman behind the New Deal

When Frances Perkins stepped into her office as labor secretary, the first-ever woman in a presidential Cabinet, her welcoming committee consisted of this: A huge cockroach. It’s a fair guess few had a rougher welcome to a high Washington position than Perkins did in 1933. In a splendid new biography of Perkins, The Woman behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience, Kirsten Downey writes: Some male Labor Department staffers threatened to resign rather than report to a woman But as The Woman behind the New Deal vividly recounts, Perkins already had faced much hostility throughout her career. She had braved a vicious mob of Ku Klux Klansmen at a Missouri campaign rally for the Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith. As a New York state’s industrial commissioner, she had spoken with angry strikers and persuaded them to give up their stockpiles of dynamite. (They “delivered loads of explosives in suitcases, bags, even a baby carriage,” Downey reports—and some creative maneuvers by Perkins soon fractured the employers’ unity and brought about a strike settlement.) She was not someone to be underestimated. The Woman behind the New Deal describes how, in the 12 years of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, this extraordinary woman not only overhauled a horribly dysfunctional and gangster-ridden Labor Department bureaucracy from top to bottom-this was the least of her achievements-but helped transform the lives of literally hundreds of millions of Americans, a legacy that continues today. There’s a fair amount of disagreement among historians about who in the New Deal was responsible for which successes. Downey makes a persuasive case that Frances Perkins, more than any other single individual, was the driving influence behind the creation and design of both the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. This really means that every senior citizen who gets a regular Social Security check, as well as every worker who depends on the minimum wage, or counts on overtime pay, or files for unemployment comp, owes a huge debt of honor to Perkins. As if that weren’t enough, she also dramatically cut back child labor, increased workplace safety and expanded the U.S. Conciliation Service. For anyone interested in the ways of politics, one of the more dramatic stories in The Woman behind the New Deal-and it has plenty of them-is the creation of Social Security. It was a project of breathtaking ambition. Perkins had begun her career as an idealistic social worker, but she also had sharp political instincts about what Americans would support and what they wouldn’t. So when Social Security was being designed, she rejected systems other countries used in which government funding was the main support of senior citizens. Instead, as Downey points out: She looked to the insurance model, in which people pay in when they are employed, so that they can get money back when they are not. That deceptively simple insight made a world of difference. It may well have been the ticket to Social Security’s long-term survival. Roosevelt-who, according to his Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard, “clearly loved and admired” Perkins-understood exactly what was going on. He said Social Security “had been constructed in a way that no future politician would be able to tinker with it because it would be funded by workers’ own contributions.” In devising Social Security, Franklin Roosevelt, a brilliant and ruthless politician, didn’t always give credit where credit was due. Kirstin Downey, a fine historian and a gifted writer, does. Yet Downey’s well-balanced account shows that not all of Perkins’s judgments were sound. When her good friend Sen. Robert Wagner of New York wanted to write legislation giving workers and their unions the legal right to collective bargaining with their employers, Perkins did her best to dissuade him. “People may be made to go into the same room, but they can’t necessarily be made to agree,” she told Wagner. Later, Perkins noted, “I did all that I could to slow the idea down.” Several major union leaders were at least as skeptical at she was. Fortunately, Wagner didn’t listen to them. He pushed forward with the National Labor Relations Act, still known as the Wagner Act and eventually won some support from most of the trade unionists and from Perkins herself (”she tepidly testified in support of the bill,” according to Downey). Wagner’s legislation turned out to be the strongest Bill of Rights that American workers have ever had in the workplace. But if Perkins was initially wrong on the National Labor Relations Act, she was magnificently right on just about everything else. It’s peculiar that “a woman whose intelligence, compassion, creative genius, and fierce loyalty made her an exceptional figure in modern American history,” as Downey accurately describes her, is nearly unknown today. Yet Perkins was little known even at the height of her considerable power. Eleven years into her career as Secretary of Labor, Collier’s magazine published an article that, in Downey’s phrase, “squarely identified the New Deal as a Frances Perkins creation”-and yet the title of the article was “The Woman Nobody Knows.” Perhaps The Woman behind the New Deal will help change that. One can hope that in addition to being a gripping read and a well-crafted biography, it will finally bring to Frances Perkins some of the attention and gratitude and admiration she never had in full measure and always deserved.