Kirstin Downey. The Woman Behind the New Deal: the Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins — Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and the Minimum Wage. Random House 2009. 458 pages.
I happened upon the story of Frances Perkins quite by accident about the time I was asked to write briefly for Women’s History Month. You can find that essay under another tab. Her brief appearance in the Flint Sit Down Strike of 1936-37 made me want to know more. So I ordered a bio.
Turns out, she was pretty badass. Born in 1880, and somehow with a heart for the poor from her earliest middle class days, she became a reformer of all that needed reforming in America. Labor was her particular passion — a desire for workers to be treated fairly, have safe and stable employment, and some autonomy in deciding what their work should be like.
The bulk of the book tells her years in the gubernatorial and presidential administrations of FDR, but her formation at Hull House and in the government of New York’s Tammany Hall was equally fascinating and made her ascent to a US Cabinet level position seem almost inevitable — though not completely delightful. I began with the impression that FDR chose her because her agenda aligned with his; I concluded that she made his agenda align with hers. We read about Roosevelt as a malleable man, somewhat politically timid and guided by Frances to follow his better angels. She, in fact, appears to have been his primary “better angel.”
In the sexist world that was (is?) the federal government, she had to put up with a lot of shit to accomplish anything at all. Her intuitive approach to people and her ability to work more hours than a day has combined to make her a force for good. Over and over we learn how she would read people in power and then approach them from their soft spots, even through their mothers as needed. Moved by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, she could never let go of the desire to make workers’ lives better.
After the crash of ‘29, which she took as “a symptom of underlying problems, not the cause,” she wanted old age insurance, some stipend for workers who lost their jobs, a minimum wage, collective bargaining, a federal source of reliable information about employment (which eventually became the Bureau of Labor Statistics). During the Depression, she advocated a jobs program which became the PWA, the WPA and the CCC. She desperately wanted universal health care, but couldn’t get FDR past the AMA’s opposition. The sheer number of federal programs she initiated and pushed through FDR’s office and Congress should win her a prize.
As Secretary of Labor, she also oversaw America’s immigration policy through the Hitler era, and worked around the law as she could to save German Jews. She exposed corruption; she intervened in labor disputes (like the Flint Sit-Down Strike), she made enemies and she made friends, including labor leaders, men she pushed into Cabinet roles, and once and future Supreme Court justices; she was impeached by Congress, she tried to resign multiple times (but FDR wouldn’t hear of it), and after his death, Truman accepted her resignation because the men in the cabinet said “they would need to restrain their comments if a lady were present and that she would inhibit their deliberations.” To be clear, they said this throughout FDR’s three-plus terms, but he didn’t care.
She did all this while tending to her mentally ill husband back in New York and supporting her bi-polar daughter through two marriages. She was bisexual, and after being emotionally estranged from her husband (though still financially providing for him), she made a life with a woman in Washington, who died in an accident in 1934, just as Frances was finishing the proposal that would become Social Security. Frances could not publicly grieve, and she lost her home after Mary’s death. Nevertheless, she persisted. She died in obscurity and near-poverty in 1965.
This is a moving story of a powerful woman I had never heard of.
The author, Downey, tells a great story, and mostly supplies sources of her info, including personal letters and family archives that let us into the life of this remarkable woman. She may have undone her “unbiased historian” schtick with the bible quote on the opening page. There were moments I saw her conservatism especially pronounced or wondered about her source, particularly times when she expressed her own not-so-subtle disdain for liberal politics. She seems not to hold communists in high regard, which I found bothersome — an attitude that seems to be shaped more by all-American paranoia about lingering Stalinism than clear-eyed academic inquiry into the value of an alternative to capitalism. She also perpetuates in one instance the belief that women find welfare attractive enough to have extra babies. She has a source for this, but I haven’t run it down.
Generally, the book was a pleasure and an interesting read. If you like bios and politics, you’ll enjoy this.
And Frances is definitely name you want to consider for your children.