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