Frances Perkins Goes To Washington

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. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:21Rund 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.

• 0:38Rund 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.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  The owners of the company had closed some of the other doors to prevent people from stealing.

• 0:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  And the building became a trap for the workers inside. Bysanders started to gather in the streets.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  And witnessed, the first of the women, jumping out of the windows to escape the flames.

• 1:12Rund 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.

• 1:37Speaker 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.

• 1:49Rund 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.

• 2:08Rund 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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• 3:56Rund 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.

• 4:15Speaker 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.

• 4:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Kirsten Downey, author of The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins.

• 4:48Speaker 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.

• 5:06Rund 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.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or as he's known today, FDR. Frances Perkins had first met him at a social event years before.

• 5:26Speaker 05

  And she thought he was a huge loser.

• 5:31Speaker 05

  He had lots of ambitions without a lot of talent to back it up, in her opinion.

• 5:37Speaker 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.

• 5:56Speaker 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.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  This go around, they became fast friends.

• 6:17Speaker 05

  They got along marvelously. They had very similar senses of humor and they enjoyed a lot of the same sort of things.

• 6:26Rund 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...

• 6:41Speaker 06

  This is a day of national consecration.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  After four years as governor, FDR turns around and runs for president of the United States, and he wins.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  About 10 days before he officially took office, FDR asked Frances Perkins for a meeting.

• 7:02Speaker 05

  The newly-elected president called her to his townhouse in New York City.

• 7:06Speaker 04

  She arrives and is escorted to one of the many rooms in the house.

• 7:11Speaker 05

  This is a wood-paneled room. The door opened.

• 7:20Speaker 07

  Roosevelt said to me, "I guess you know what I want you for."

• 7:25Speaker 05

  He got pretty much directly to the point and said, "I'd like you to be my Secretary of Labor."

• 7:31Speaker 07

  He said, "I really mean it, Frances."

• 7:34Speaker 04

  She responds by being coy.

• 7:36Speaker 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."

• 7:50Speaker 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."

• 8:05Speaker 02

  And what we know it was on that list was: work hour limitations, ban on child labor, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, social security.

• 8:19Speaker 05

  He looked at the list

• 8:23Speaker 05

  and he agreed to basically everything except...

• 8:27Speaker 04

  Unemployment insurance and social security.

• 8:31Speaker 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."

• 8:38Speaker 05

  She said, "Frances, that's crazy."

• 8:42Speaker 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.

• 8:55Speaker 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.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  He wrote to her.

• 9:22Speaker 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.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  She called FDR and accepted the job.

• 9:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  When Frances Perkins arrived in Washington DC in 1933, her very presence made an impact.

• 9:56Speaker 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.

• 10:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  Madam Secretary Perkins was taking over a department that people in Washington barely thought about.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  She found the Labor Department when she arrived to be almost defunct. Very quiet, very few people working.

• 10:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  But with FDR's blessing, she was going to change that.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  That meant that she could reshape it.

• 10:37Speaker 05

  So she worked the room. She knew how to work the politicians in Washington DC.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  But this was DC in the 1930s. To say it was a boys' club would be an understatement.

• 10:49Speaker 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.

• 11:07Speaker 04

  She had this folder full of papers that she called Notes on the Male Mind.

• 11:14Speaker 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.

• 11:41Speaker 04

  Almost right away, she became one of the most important members of the cabinet.

• 11:46Speaker 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.

• 12:21Speaker 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.

• 12:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  When the Roosevelt administration began in 1933, the United States was in the middle of the worst economic calamity in its history.

• 12:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  What we today call the Great Depression.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  One of the horrors of the Great Depression is that it exposed a lot of the dark realities of the workplace.

• 13:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  Especially for older people.

• 13:05Speaker 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.

• 13:21Speaker 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.

• 13:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  And Frances Perkins saw an opportunity. FDR had rejected the idea of Social Security when she first proposed it, but not now.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Just as the fire had been a crisis that was a buildable moment, so the Great Depression was.

• 13:56Speaker 07

  You've had a streak of bad luck. We're going to deal the cards over again. We'll have a new deal.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  In 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act into law.

• 14:08Speaker 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."

• 14:16Speaker 04

  Social Security was the crown jewel of Frances Perkins' ideas. Here's how it works.

• 14:22Speaker 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.

• 14:38Speaker 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.

• 14:54Speaker 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.

• 15:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  Social Security helped pull millions of elderly people out of poverty.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Perkins considers this her single biggest victory of her life.

• 15:21Rund 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.

• 15:44Speaker 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.

• 16:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  Frances Perkins would stay in FDR's cabinet until his death in 1945, just months before the end of the war.

• 16:13Speaker 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.

• 16:34Rund 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.

• 16:59Speaker 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

• 17:17Rund 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.

• 17:53Speaker 03

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