Pod Insights Throughline Frances Perkins Goes To Washington About this episode This week, we explore the life of the first woman Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, and how in the midst of the Great Depression she helped reshape the nation by fighting for minimum wage, Social Security, and unemployment insurance.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:21 Rund Abdelfatah? This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and Throughline. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago.
0:38 Rund Abdelfatah? In 1911, a deadly fire broke out in a factory in Manhattan, where hundreds of workers, mostly young immigrant women, were employed. On the night the fire broke out, the building's exit doors were locked.
0:52 Speaker 02 The owners of the company had closed some of the other doors to prevent people from stealing.
0:58 Rund Abdelfatah? And the building became a trap for the workers inside. Bysanders started to gather in the streets.
1:06 Speaker 02 And witnessed, the first of the women, jumping out of the windows to escape the flames.
1:12 Rund Abdelfatah? On that night, 146 workers died. 62 of them jumped to their death. It was the worst industrial accident in New York City up until that point, and hundreds of people witnessed it, including a young woman named Frances Perkins. What she saw disturbed her and led her on an epic journey that would ultimately transform the country.
1:37 Speaker 02 The things that she created remain fundamental pieces of our social security and safety net today. Without her, what would we have? It's hard to even imagine.
1:49 Rund Abdelfatah? Frances Perkins did so much in her lifetime. She was the first woman to serve in the presidential cabinet, creating programs that have transformed the way we all live today: social security, unemployment insurance, the 40-hour work week. She's behind all of that.
2:08 Rund Abdelfatah? Today on the show, how Frances Perkins reimagined the nature of work and helped build the country's social safety net. That's coming up, right after a quick break.
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3:56 Rund Abdelfatah? After the factory fire in 1911, Frances Perkins went to work. She and other activists in New York pushed for a commission to investigate what happened and proposed regulations to prevent it from happening again. And then she started making recommendations on how to change things permanently.
4:15 Speaker 02 Some of the things that they got done are smoking in factories banned. They established a requirement that factories should have automatic water sprinklers. They required safe fire escapes. They required adequate elevators. They required the thing that we all completely live with. With all the time now is requiring exit signs so we know how to get out and make our way to safety in the event of a fire.
4:41 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Kirsten Downey, author of The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins.
4:48 Speaker 02 And she started really to become an expert on all aspects of labor law administration. Think of how many times in your life something has felt kind of overcrowded or you feel a little nervous and you look around and you look for that exit sign. You know how to get out. That's Frances Perkins' work.
5:06 Rund Abdelfatah? And people took notice. At this point, she was in her 30s, living in New York, married with kids. And there was a new governor in town.
5:15 Speaker 02 Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
5:17 Speaker 04 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or as he's known today, FDR. Frances Perkins had first met him at a social event years before.
5:26 Speaker 05 And she thought he was a huge loser.
5:31 Speaker 05 He had lots of ambitions without a lot of talent to back it up, in her opinion.
5:37 Speaker 04 But even so, she acted as a political adviser to FDR during his campaign for governor of New York. During that time, she got to know a different version of the man. In the years since she'd first met him, he contracted polio and now used a wheelchair.
5:56 Speaker 05 And that is when she said she felt a real change in him, that polio had knocked him between the eyes. He had suffered. And suddenly, she felt that he had matured and that he had learned to care about people in a way that he had never done so before.
6:14 Speaker 04 This go around, they became fast friends.
6:17 Speaker 05 They got along marvelously. They had very similar senses of humor and they enjoyed a lot of the same sort of things.
6:26 Rund Abdelfatah? With her help, FDR won the governorship. And he rewarded Frances by making her New York's Industrial Commissioner, one of the most powerful officials in the state. Frances got to work, and she got results. And then...
6:41 Speaker 06 This is a day of national consecration.
6:45 Speaker 04 After four years as governor, FDR turns around and runs for president of the United States, and he wins.
6:54 Speaker 04 About 10 days before he officially took office, FDR asked Frances Perkins for a meeting.
7:02 Speaker 05 The newly-elected president called her to his townhouse in New York City.
7:06 Speaker 04 She arrives and is escorted to one of the many rooms in the house.
7:11 Speaker 05 This is a wood-paneled room. The door opened.
7:20 Speaker 07 Roosevelt said to me, "I guess you know what I want you for."
7:25 Speaker 05 He got pretty much directly to the point and said, "I'd like you to be my Secretary of Labor."
7:31 Speaker 07 He said, "I really mean it, Frances."
7:34 Speaker 04 She responds by being coy.
7:36 Speaker 07 "Of course I made the usual courteous remarks about how honored and surprised I was." He said, "Oh, come on now. Don't say surprised. You're no fool."
7:50 Speaker 05 She had a little list of programs and priorities in her pocket. She hands him the list and she says, "You don't want me for your Secretary of Labor unless you want me to do these things."
8:05 Speaker 02 And what we know it was on that list was: work hour limitations, ban on child labor, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, social security.
8:19 Speaker 05 He looked at the list
8:23 Speaker 05 and he agreed to basically everything except...
8:27 Speaker 04 Unemployment insurance and social security.
8:31 Speaker 07 At that point, of course, he begins to object by saying, "You know, Frances, I don't believe in the dole and I never will."
8:38 Speaker 05 She said, "Frances, that's crazy."
8:42 Speaker 07 She didn't think so, but she dropped it for the moment and focused on the decision she had to make. If she accepted, she'd be the first woman cabinet secretary in American history.
8:55 Speaker 05 And she was so frightened that she would ruin everything for other women. She felt that she would somehow mess up and that no other woman would be invited to this position again for many, many years. She went to her bishop to actually ask whether or not he thought she should take the job.
9:20 Speaker 04 He wrote to her.
9:22 Speaker 05 You know, if you were a soldier and you had a talent that could save the nation during war, wouldn't it be your moral responsibility to serve? We need you. And so she felt as if God had called her to it and that she did not really have a choice.
9:37 Speaker 04 She called FDR and accepted the job.
9:48 Rund Abdelfatah? When Frances Perkins arrived in Washington DC in 1933, her very presence made an impact.
9:56 Speaker 02 When she became Secretary of Labor and joined the cabinet, it's all so odd to people that they don't even know what to call her. You know, what do you call a woman in that role? And so they came up with the idea of calling her Madam Secretary.
10:13 Rund Abdelfatah? Madam Secretary Perkins was taking over a department that people in Washington barely thought about.
10:21 Speaker 02 She found the Labor Department when she arrived to be almost defunct. Very quiet, very few people working.
10:30 Rund Abdelfatah? But with FDR's blessing, she was going to change that.
10:34 Speaker 02 That meant that she could reshape it.
10:37 Speaker 05 So she worked the room. She knew how to work the politicians in Washington DC.
10:43 Speaker 04 But this was DC in the 1930s. To say it was a boys' club would be an understatement.
10:49 Speaker 05 Within the cabinet, she was worried that she would be viewed by her fellow cabinet members as an intrusive woman or a silly woman. And so she wanted to be taken very seriously. She was very calculating about how she was going to operate politically with men.
11:07 Speaker 04 She had this folder full of papers that she called Notes on the Male Mind.
11:14 Speaker 05 One of the things that she came to conclude is that men would take women more seriously if they reminded them of their mothers. That they respected their mothers, they would not sexually harass their mothers, and that they might listen to the opinions of their mothers. So Frances started dressing like their mothers. And it's calculating, it's manipulative, and it's extremely effective.
11:41 Speaker 04 Almost right away, she became one of the most important members of the cabinet.
11:46 Speaker 05 FDR always listened to her. And this is something we know because one of her fellow cabinet members, Secretary Ickes, wrote in his own diary that the men in the room would get frustrated with Frances Perkins lecturing, and yet the president was always at raft detention to her.
12:21 Speaker 07 The people are what matter to government. And a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.
12:39 Rund Abdelfatah? When the Roosevelt administration began in 1933, the United States was in the middle of the worst economic calamity in its history.
12:49 Rund Abdelfatah? What we today call the Great Depression.
12:55 Speaker 02 One of the horrors of the Great Depression is that it exposed a lot of the dark realities of the workplace.
13:03 Rund Abdelfatah? Especially for older people.
13:05 Speaker 02 It had been bad for everybody, but had been even worse for the elderly. People would see elderly people eating out of trash cans. They were starving to death.
13:21 Speaker 02 They needed to have a system that would provide some income support for people when they get to the phase of their lives where they're simply less employable.
13:31 Rund Abdelfatah? And Frances Perkins saw an opportunity. FDR had rejected the idea of Social Security when she first proposed it, but not now.
13:46 Speaker 02 Just as the fire had been a crisis that was a buildable moment, so the Great Depression was.
13:56 Speaker 07 You've had a streak of bad luck. We're going to deal the cards over again. We'll have a new deal.
14:02 Speaker 04 In 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act into law.
14:08 Speaker 07 It was an appeal to Lady Luck, with the hope that springs in every man's heart when you say, "I'll give you some new cards."
14:16 Speaker 04 Social Security was the crown jewel of Frances Perkins' ideas. Here's how it works.
14:22 Speaker 02 You pay into Social Security when you're young and strong so that you can get it when you're old and frail. It wasn't charity. It's you worked for it, you earned it, you'll get it later. It's an insurance system. It's not an entitlement.
14:38 Speaker 04 It wasn't, as FDR had once put it, "the dull." But many people in America thought Social Security was a huge government overreach as creeping socialism into the United States, a point Frances Perkins disputed.
14:54 Speaker 07 What we intended to do was not to turn over the pattern of American life. What we did was to correct certain obvious defects. It's just as though when you have a leaky pipe, you mend the pipe. You don't pull out the plumbing.
15:11 Rund Abdelfatah? Social Security helped pull millions of elderly people out of poverty.
15:17 Speaker 02 Perkins considers this her single biggest victory of her life.
15:21 Rund Abdelfatah? But it wasn't the only victory. Over the next few years, nearly every idea Perkins had presented to FDR before taking the job became law. Unemployment insurance, restrictions on child labor, minimum wage, work hour limitations. Whether she intended to or not, Frances Perkins had imagined a new America and made it a reality.
15:44 Speaker 02 Most people generally have a really hard time imagining what could be. They only know what is. But what Perkins had was a great imagination for what could be and what would be the steps involved in getting there.
16:05 Rund Abdelfatah? Frances Perkins would stay in FDR's cabinet until his death in 1945, just months before the end of the war.
16:13 Speaker 04 She still remains the longest-serving Secretary of Labor in American history. Eventually, she became a lecturer at Cornell University and spent the rest of her career there until her death in 1965.
16:34 Rund Abdelfatah? That's it for this week's America in Pursuit. If you want to hear the full story of Frances Perkins, check out the full-length episode, "The Woman Behind the New Deal." And be sure to join us next week when we revisit a difficult time in US history: Japanese internment during World War II, an internment that changed the lives of many people, including a woman named Yuri Kociama.
16:59 Speaker 02 She talked to a lot of people inside the camps. She listened to discussions of more politicized Japanese Americans inside the camps. And I would say she started to grow a social consciousness, a sense that problems in the United States had social
17:17 Rund Abdelfatah? Structural origins. The story of civil rights activist Yuri Kocayama. That's next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Mogadem and edited by Christina Kim with help from the Throughline production team. Music by Ramtin Arablouei and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna. I'm Rand Abdelfattah. Thanks for listening.
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