Frances Perkins: ‘For God, FDR and the Millions of Forgotten…Working Men’

Author Kirstin Downey discussing her biography of Frances Perkins at the AFL-CIO.

Great turnout yesterday at a book talk here by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kirstin Downey, who discussed her new biography, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience. 

At least two generations of lawyers, teachers, scholars, government workers and union activists crowded in the AFL-CIO Gompers Room in Washington, D.C., to hear about one of the union movement’s most beloved heroes—Frances Perkins, labor secretary in Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency and the first woman in American history to serve in the Cabinet.

As Downey observed: 

The AFL-CIO is a place Frances believed in so much. She wasn’t from the labor movement herself, but she was a very strong supporter of the idea that workers need to organize into unions so they can negotiate better wages and working conditions. 

The event was held on the anniversary of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed nearly 150 workers, mostly females. The fire, witnessed by Perkins, was pivotal to launching her lifetime of activism on behalf of the nation’s workers. 

Downey described Perkins’ best-known achievements, including the Social Security Act enacted in 1935—which gave us Social Security, “unemployment insurance and the system that became Aid to Dependent Children, which was originally designed to help mothers raising their children alone.” 

Then in 1938 there was the Fair Labor Standards Act that set a 40-hour workweek to prevent workers from getting broken down by exhaustion, a minimum wage that ensured they would receive a certain level of compensation, a ban on child labor and the creation of overtime pay for workers asked to work long hours. 

Perkins also was a pivotal figure in creating the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration—but what is less known is that Perkins saved thousands of people from the Nazis. 

Back then, the Immigration Department was part of the Labor Department, and she brought tens of thousands of immigrants to the United States to get them away from the Nazis before most Americans knew the dangers they faced over there. Why did she know so many people were in danger? It’s because Hitler started killing and imprisoning labor leaders right from the start, in 1933. Labor leaders here knew what was coming, and they told Frances. 

In a lively Q&A session with the audience, Downey was asked if Perkins had any proteges. The answer was: plenty. “Esther Peterson of the consumer movement was an important protege.” (Both Perkins and Peterson, incidentally, have rooms in AFL-CIO headquarters named in their honor.) And “there were secretaries of labor following her who considered themselves her proteges.” 

But some proteges who knew Perkins best were from her last years at Cornell University. She was hired as a visiting lecturer there in the late 1950s and, improbably, lived in a small upstairs room at Telluride House with a bunch of exuberant, sometimes rambunctious young men who were honors students at the school and young enough to be her grandchildren. As Downey noted: 

Frances had this unique ability to spot people with enormous potential when they were young and unformed. 

There was clearly no ideological litmus test for Frances Perkins’ friendship. “She attracted to her people who had ideas,” says Downey—some on the left, others on the right. Among those closest to her at Cornell were Chris Breiseth, later the president of Wilkes University and of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute; former deputy defense secretary and World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, who would be a pallbearer at Perkins’ funeral; the philosopher Allan Bloom; Walter Berns, then a junior faculty member at Cornell who would become an eminent conservative legal philosopher; and former Defense Department official Abe Shulsky. 

Berns and Shulsky were at the AFL-CIO for Downey’s appearance and afterward reminisced about Perkins. Berns noted that despite her status as having been the most powerful woman in the nation, “she was so practical and down to earth. She was engaged in the nitty-gritty of politics.” 

Shulsky, who was from Brooklyn (”My parents were impressed I’d met Frances Perkins,” he jokes), remembers that she 

felt a duty to take care of people, a real commitment to helping people as a vocation. She had a great mixture of idealism and realism in politics. She knew how to make deals to get this vote and that vote, but she never lost her moral compass. 

That moral compass explains a lot about Frances Perkins. As Downey asked in her talk, “Why did she do all that she did?” 

It wasn’t for riches. She ended up living in a small dormitory room. She didn’t get a lot of glory or fame by the time she died. And she suffered very badly for what she’d done. She was ridiculed and stigmatized, and even suffered an impeachment attempt. 

The real answer, according to Downey, was in something Perkins wrote to Justice Felix Frankfurter just as she was leaving office: 

I came to work for God, FDR and the millions of forgotten, plain common working men. 

If that was her goal, she succeeded as few others in this country ever have.

Annie Schneiderman Valliere, great niece of Rose Schneiderman, who helped found the International Ladies Garment Workers Union after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, performed a medley of labor songs during the AFL-CIO event. 

You can buy The Woman Behind the New Deal at The Union Shop Online here.

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