Pod Insights Throughline The Woman Behind The New Deal About this episode From Social Security and the minimum wage to exit signs and fire escapes, Frances Perkins transformed how people in the U. S. lived and worked. Today on the show: how a middle class do-gooder became one of the savviest and most powerful people in American politics — and built the social safety net we have today.
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Transcript 6,598 words · 24 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:17 Speaker 01 Prologue The Fire
0:28 Speaker 02 March 25th, 1911, Washington Square in Manhattan.
0:40 Speaker 02 Pauline Pepp arrives at work on the eighth floor of a high-rise building. She sits at her station, an industrial sewing machine.
0:51 Speaker 03 Well, it was a very big place. Oh my God, I couldn't even... Just a big place with machines and windows, a lot of windows with chaise, that's what they had.
1:03 Speaker 02 This is her voice, recorded years later in an interview.
1:07 Speaker 03 Lot of young girls, lot of Jewish young girls who were married, engaged. They were lovely girls.
1:13 Speaker 02 Pauline was one of hundreds of workers, mostly young women, employed by the Triangle Waste Company.
1:21 Speaker 04 That made the very popular Gibson Girl blouses, fluffy high neck, big sleeves.
1:29 Speaker 03 They used to have tables full of material, that very fine lingerie, you know, those were beautiful blouses.
1:35 Speaker 02 The work was constant.
1:37 Speaker 04 Maximizing the use of space was very important to boosting the profitability of the business. So the workers were actually working at their sewing machines shoulder to shoulder. Their forearms were practically brushing each other as they did their work.
1:53 Speaker 02 Today, we call this kind of place a sweatshop.
1:57 Speaker 04 There were slots in the back of the machines, just holes, and the excess cloth and the strings and threads would be pushed down into sort of a trash slot at the back of the desk so that the debris could be brushed away quickly without having to be removed.
2:15 Speaker 02 It was hot, it was loud, it was not safe.
2:20 Speaker 04 They would be frequently oiling the machines to make sure that the machines worked as quickly as possible.
2:27 Speaker 02 An overcrowded room, filled with people and machines, all on top of piles of oily cloth.
2:35 Speaker 04 Meanwhile, they were supervised with, generally by men, who smoked cigars while they worked. Cigar ash fell onto the fabric, went onto the oily cloths. So what you had is a circumstance where it wasn't if a fire would start, it was when a fire would start.
3:09 Rund Abdelfatah? At 4:40 PM, right before Pauline was about to wrap up her shift, a fire started on the eighth floor and quickly spread. Pauline watched in horror.
3:29 Speaker 03 That lingerie was so so white, it went in a blaze in a minute.
3:34 Speaker 03 The windows got caught, the shades, everything. Oh my God.
3:40 Speaker 04 And the workers began fleeing.
3:45 Speaker 04 The fire escape collapsed.
3:48 Rund Abdelfatah? There was only one exit door.
3:51 Speaker 04 The owners of the company had closed some of the other doors to prevent people from stealing.
3:58 Rund Abdelfatah? The factory became a trap.
4:01 Speaker 04 Inside of the building was basically a towering inferno.
4:05 Rund Abdelfatah? Bystanders started to gather in the streets.
4:09 Speaker 04 And witnessed the first of the women jumping out of the windows to escape the flames.
4:18 Speaker 06 I guess the sky must have been black and...
4:20 Speaker 03 Oh, the smoke. Oh, it was terrible. I'll never forget that time. Never, never forget it.
4:32 Rund Abdelfatah? Pauline survived. Many others didn't. As many as 62 people jumped to their deaths. In total, 146 workers died. Most were women immigrants. It was the worst industrial accident in New York City history up to that point, and hundreds of people witnessed it.
4:54 Speaker 04 It happened in front of New York.
5:03 Rund Abdelfatah? One of the people watching that day was a young woman named Frances Perkins. What she saw disturbed her and changed her. It led her on an epic journey that would ultimately transform the country. In the years that followed the fire, Frances Perkins became the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet. She was a mastermind of programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance, the 40-hour work week, minimum wage, and many more.
5:36 Speaker 04 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.
5:48 Rund Abdelfatah? On this episode of Throughline from NPR, the story of Frances Perkins, the woman behind the New Deal.
6:06 Speaker 06 Hi, my name's Alissa. I'm in Madison, Wisconsin, and I actually work in public radio. And shows like this one just keep me really engaged and inspired. It's my favorite one. So you're listening to Throughline from NPR.
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7:41 Speaker 01 Part one, A Bold Front.
7:47 Speaker 11 May 6, 1955.
7:52 Speaker 11 Dear sir, in depositing the memoir which I have prepared in the Oral History Project with the Department of American History at Columbia University, I hereby specify that this memoir is not to be opened, except by my express permission, until 20 years after my death.
8:13 Speaker 11 Yours very truly, signed.
8:17 Speaker 11 Frances Bergens.
8:43 Rund Abdelfatah? Frances Perkins stepped off the train in South Hadley, Massachusetts, a small town on the banks of the Connecticut River. The year was 1898, and she was 18 years old. She was just starting her freshman year of college at Mount Holyoke. She soon fell in love with the school's rolling green lawns, iconic bells, and Gothic buildings.
9:12 Speaker 11 It's a wonder that I got any liberal education. Not many girls went to college in those days.
9:18 Speaker 04 It was even thought to be somewhat dangerous for a woman's health to pursue higher education. She might have fits or fevers. It might overexert her.
9:28 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Kirsten Downey, author of
9:30 Speaker 04 The Woman Behind the New Deal, which is a biography of Frances Perkins.
9:34 Rund Abdelfatah? Perkins had grown up in a home where education was prized.
9:38 Speaker 11 I had a classical education before I went to college. My father taught me Greek when I was eight years old. He read it for pleasure.
9:46 Rund Abdelfatah? At Mount Holyoke...
9:48 Speaker 04 She ends up studying science.
9:50 Rund Abdelfatah? She was popular at school. Her classmates nicknamed her Perk.
9:55 Speaker 04 She became the president of her senior class, where their motto, by the way, was "Be ye steadfast." And her experience going to college at Mount Holyoke really opened her eyes to many things.
10:10 Speaker 12 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.
10:18 Rund Abdelfatah? Frances had grown up just 50 miles from Mount Holyoke in a middle-class religious family. As a kid, she spent every Sunday with her parents and sister at the congregationalist church in town.
10:32 Speaker 13 Her family also valued their family legacy, which went back to the American Revolution.
10:40 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Stephanie Dre. She writes historical fiction, including a book about Frances Perkins called
10:46 Speaker 13 Becoming Madam Secretary.
10:48 Rund Abdelfatah? To write her book, she did extensive archival research into Perkins' life.
10:52 Speaker 13 Her family was steeped in the building of America, and she felt a strong patriotic urge.
11:04 Rund Abdelfatah? That patriotism alongside her faith formed a strong sense of duty to others. Her parents were generous when it came to helping the poor. But Frances was also raised to believe that the people her family helped were in poverty because of their personal failings, like laziness, loose morals, or alcoholism.
11:24 Speaker 04 By going to Mount Holyoke, she found herself in an environment where she was beginning to raise questions.
11:37 Speaker 04 She had some professors that took she and other classmates into factories to actually see what the working conditions were.
11:47 Rund Abdelfatah? I was astonished and fascinated by what I saw. It opened the door to the idea that there were some people much poorer than other people, and that the lack of comfort and security in some people was not solely due to the fact that they drank, which had been the prevailing view in my parental society. When Perkins graduated in 1902, she headed straight for New York with her renewed sense of activism to a place she'd heard about in college called the Charity Organization Society. She marched right into their office and demanded to see the man in charge. I had a round face, wide-eyed look. That makes you look younger than you really are. When the man in charge came down, they talked.
12:32 Rund Abdelfatah? She said she wanted to get a job. He asked her what she'd like to do. She told him she wanted to help the poor. He said, "What would you do if you were sent out to a family who had applied for some help, and you came into their tenement, you found the father drunk on the bed, the children sick, and no food in the house?" Promptly, I said, "Well, I'd send for the police at once." Wrong answer.
13:02 Rund Abdelfatah? He explained to me in words of one and two syllables that, in the first place, they wouldn't hire anybody so young as I was. And in the second place, I hadn't enough life experience to have any judgment at all about what to do with the poor, the needy, and those who were in trouble. He told her to try teaching instead. So she did. She took a job in Chicago at an all-girls academy. But the bug for activism never left her.
13:31 Speaker 04 And she began volunteering at a pioneering institution called Hull House.
13:38 Rund Abdelfatah? Hull House was a place where activists lived together and organized together around social issues.
13:44 Speaker 04 Hull House was also a place that poor people could come and get help.
13:48 Rund Abdelfatah? Hull House was where the writer Upton Sinclair was based while he was researching the Chicago meatpacking industry for his famous book...
13:56 Speaker 04 The Jungle.
14:03 Speaker 09 There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms, and thousands of rats would race about on it.
14:10 Rund Abdelfatah? This was the reality for many of the people Perkins helped at Hull House.
14:15 Speaker 09 Anguish would seize the workers, more dreadful than the agony of death. They were lost, and there was no deliverance for them, no hope. For all the help it gave them, the vast city in which they lived might have been an ocean waste, a wilderness, a desert, a tomb.
14:45 Speaker 04 Perkins would go out with older social workers, and they would go to the homes of some of these families that were living through terrible social breakdown.
14:55 Rund Abdelfatah? The mother was sick, the father was drunk, the children were crying, the dishes were piled up in the sink, the water didn't run and hadn't run for days.
15:05 Speaker 04 Hungry, cold, a lot of alcoholism, a lot of child abuse.
15:15 Rund Abdelfatah? These families lived in crowded tenement housing, sometimes without windows or plumbing.
15:21 Speaker 04 And everyone was struggling for survival. We had had a very large influx of immigrants.
15:26 Rund Abdelfatah? From countries like Germany, Poland, Italy, and Ireland.
15:30 Speaker 04 Many of whom were financially desperate and would take work on whatever conditions that it was offered.
15:36 Rund Abdelfatah? Such things as holidays were not known. If the boss said you worked on a Sunday, you worked on a Sunday. There was no overtime. No one ever heard of overtime.
15:49 Rund Abdelfatah? But all those hours of work didn't earn people enough money to get by. So families that couldn't make ends meet sent their children to work as well.
15:59 Speaker 04 For the children, it was very bad.
16:02 Rund Abdelfatah? Because of their small size, they were often tasked with dangerous jobs that nobody else could do.
16:08 Speaker 04 Industrial injury rate was very, very high. And of course, what was happening is many, many children were being injured.
16:19 Rund Abdelfatah? The experience made Frances less naive and more determined. In 1907, she packed up and moved to Philly.
16:28 Speaker 13 Girls were coming to cities like Philadelphia on trains.
16:34 Rund Abdelfatah? Many of them were young black women fleeing Jim Crow laws in the South.
16:39 Speaker 13 And when they would arrive, there were often pimps and other human traffickers waiting on the platforms to trick them into going to boarding houses or false employment agencies that would in fact turn out to be brothels.
16:57 Rund Abdelfatah? Frances Perkins went undercover. She pretended to be one of those migrant women searching for a job.
17:04 Speaker 13 She would go into the employment agencies and expose the people who were trying to kidnap these girls.
17:12 Rund Abdelfatah? It was dangerous work.
17:16 Speaker 13 She was actually chased by thugs that pimps sent after her on one rainy night.
17:30 Speaker 11 I was considerably alarmed because it was relatively late, 11 o'clock or so, and I was alone on a quiet street.
17:39 Speaker 11 I remember thinking, what shall I do?
17:44 Speaker 11 What I did was what my father had always recommended that you do.
17:49 Rund Abdelfatah? She kept walking, but she could hear them gaining on her. Their footsteps coming closer and closer.
18:06 Rund Abdelfatah? She spun on her heel and thrust her umbrella out at them.
18:10 Speaker 13 She made them run into the pointy end.
18:13 Rund Abdelfatah? And she screamed. People poked their heads out of windows to see what was happening, and the attackers fled.
18:22 Speaker 11 It gave me the feeling that if you put up a bold front, people will turn and run.
18:27 Speaker 11 What else would you do? You can't run and let them stab you.
18:39 Speaker 02 Where does this come from, this spirit in her?
18:42 Speaker 13 I think it came from her deep faith.
18:46 Speaker 13 She believed that she was on a mission from God. She believed it was her Christian duty to help her fellow Americans lead a better life.
18:58 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, Frances Perkins takes her mission back to New York City, where she would witness a tragedy that would change the course of her life.
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20:58 Speaker 01 Part Two. Frozen Horror.
21:17 Speaker 02 When Frances Perkins arrived in New York City in 1909, she immediately started making friends.
21:24 Speaker 04 She was an enormously gifted networker.
21:28 Speaker 04 She's engaging with people of all economic levels. Artists, workers, government officials, heiresses.
21:38 Speaker 02 All while pursuing her master's degree in sociology and economics at Columbia University. She thought it would help her advocate for workers' rights.
21:48 Speaker 04 And it happens that on March 25th, 1911, she's actually at the home of a very wealthy woman.
21:55 Speaker 02 In Lower Manhattan, the Greenwich Village neighborhood.
21:59 Speaker 04 Facing Washington Square.
22:01 Speaker 02 They're having afternoon tea.
22:02 Speaker 04 Chatting, having a good time, and suddenly they hear
22:09 Speaker 04 all this noise from the street.
22:23 Speaker 04 They run out the front door to see what it is.
22:31 Speaker 04 It was just as the fire trucks were just arriving.
22:38 Speaker 02 Hundreds of workers, mostly young women, were trapped inside the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory as it burned.
22:49 Speaker 11 We rushed into the square, just as they started to jump.
22:54 Speaker 02 This is how Frances Perkins later described what she saw.
22:59 Speaker 11 The firemen kept shouting to them not to jump, but they had no other choice. The flames were behind them.
23:09 Speaker 11 The frozen horror which came over us as we stood with our hands on our throats, watching that horrible sight.
23:17 Speaker 13 This was a sight and a sound that she never forgot.
23:27 Speaker 02 The neighborhood around Washington Square was lined with beautiful, large townhomes and industrial buildings, like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which meant that
23:38 Speaker 04 Not just poor people or working people saw this terrible tragedy. Rich, powerful people saw this. And there was widespread horror and a desire to make change.
23:53 Speaker 02 Frances Perkins wasn't going to let it go. She wasn't just horrified. She was angry.
24:00 Speaker 11 Something was wrong in that building, or it never could have happened.
24:05 Speaker 02 She and other activists in New York pushed for a commission to investigate what happened and proposed regulations to prevent it from happening again.
24:15 Speaker 04 They held hearings all around the state of New York, and they brought in hundreds and hundreds of witnesses to talk about industrial conditions, focused very much on fire. But all kinds of other things. Child labor came up, working hours came up, sanitary conditions.
24:32 Speaker 02 Frances Perkins worked on the commission for several years, and she knew there was no substitute for seeing something firsthand.
24:40 Speaker 04 She also took the commissioners to workplaces themselves, for example, at a cannery or a factory, and see for themselves how many children were employed there, or under what conditions the women were working, or how long the men were being asked to work and at what pay.
25:03 Speaker 02 The commission's 1915 report was thousands of pages long. It included detailed policy recommendations, recommendations that Frances Perkins pushed to become law.
25:17 Speaker 04 Some of the things that they got done are smoking and 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 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.
25:43 Speaker 02 Today, it's really easy to take for granted how revolutionary these reforms were. New York State had enacted the most progressive regulations for worker safety in the country. And in the following years, other states began following their example.
25:59 Speaker 04 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.
26:12 Speaker 02 And people took notice.
26:19 Speaker 04 She became pretty famous in New York because of the successes that she was having. But the big thing that happened is that Al Smith, who she'd worked with so closely with the Factory Investigating Commission--
26:32 Speaker 02 He was a New York City politician with a ton of ambition.
26:35 Speaker 04 --was elected governor of New York.
26:38 Speaker 02 And when he took office in 1919, he named her to the New York State Industrial Commission, which was a pretty big job.
26:45 Speaker 04 And she became one of five commissioners overseeing working conditions throughout the whole state. And she started, really, to become an expert on all aspects of labor law administration.
26:58 Speaker 02 So at this point, Frances Perkins is in her 30s. She loves New York. She'd also gotten married and had a kid. She was settled. But her life would be upended again when Al Smith, her mentor, and the governor of New York decided not to run for reelection in 1928.
27:17 Speaker 04 He was replaced by a wealthy man who had an estate on the Hudson River.
27:24 Speaker 02 His name?
27:25 Speaker 04 Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
27:26 Speaker 02 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or as he's known today, FDR. Frances Perkins had first met him at a social event years before.
27:35 Speaker 04 And she thought he was a huge loser.
27:42 Speaker 13 He had lots of ambitions without a lot of talent to back it up, in her opinion. He was not very compassionate, in her opinion. She must have thought he was quite a lightweight, that he was living up to the nickname that some gave him, which was Feather Duster Roosevelt.
28:04 Speaker 02 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.
28:17 Speaker 02 In the years since she'd first met him, he contracted polio and now used a wheelchair.
28:25 Speaker 13 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.
28:43 Speaker 02 This go around, they became fast friends.
28:46 Speaker 13 They got along marvelously. They had very similar senses of humor, and they enjoyed a lot of the same sort of things.
28:54 Speaker 02 With her help, FDR won the governorship, and he rewarded Frances Perkins by making her New York's Industrial Commissioner, one of the most powerful officials in the state.
29:07 Speaker 04 And she felt like it was very important for her to live up to his hopes for her.
29:16 Speaker 02 So she got to work, and she got results.
29:20 Speaker 04 The labor reforms that Perkins was implementing got him a lot of very good publicity all around the country. So she became a key adviser.
29:30 Speaker 02 He must have really believed in her. They must have really developed a close relationship at that point.
29:35 Speaker 04 Yes, he knew that she would never betray him. He knew he could trust her completely. She never surprised him. If something happened and there was a problem, she told him the truth, and they talked it through. And she would tell him, here's what my solution is.
29:55 Speaker 18 This is a day of national consecration.
29:59 Speaker 02 After four years as governor, FDR turns around and runs for president of the United States, and he wins.
30:07 Speaker 18 And I am certain that on this day, my fellow Americans, expect that on my induction into the presidency, I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impels.
30:25 Speaker 02 And he ran mostly on a platform of recovering from the Great Depression.
30:30 Speaker 18 Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
30:43 Speaker 02 About 10 days before he officially took office, FDR asked Frances Perkins for a meeting.
30:51 Speaker 13 The newly-elected president called her to his townhouse in New York City.
30:55 Speaker 02 She arrives and is escorted to one of the many rooms in the house.
31:00 Speaker 13 This is a wood-paneled room. The door opened.
31:09 Speaker 11 Roosevelt said to me, "I guess you know what I want you for."
31:14 Speaker 13 He got pretty much directly to the point and said, "I'd like you to be my Secretary of Labor."
31:20 Speaker 11 He said, "I really mean it, Frances."
31:23 Speaker 02 She responds by being coy.
31:25 Speaker 11 "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."
31:39 Speaker 13 She had a little list of programs and priorities in her pocket.
31:43 Speaker 11 I had about a day's notice before having to show up at Roosevelt's house. It was in that 24-hour gap that I wrote out the list of things that I thought I would like to try to do.
31:54 Speaker 13 Which he thought were probably so extreme that he would never commit to them.
32:00 Speaker 11 I did not know then, actually, how deeply his heart was involved in some of these things. I did not know how deeply he gave a damn about whether the working girls backache or not.
32:11 Speaker 13 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."
32:21 Speaker 04 And what we know it was on that list was work hour limitations, ban on child labor, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, social security.
32:35 Speaker 13 He looked at the list.
32:39 Speaker 13 And he agreed to basically everything except.
32:43 Speaker 02 Unemployment insurance and social security.
32:47 Speaker 11 At that point, of course, he begins to object by saying, you know, Francis, I don't believe in the dole and I never will.
32:54 Speaker 13 He said, Francis, that's crazy.
32:57 Speaker 02 She didn't think so, but she dropped it for the moment because FDR had called her bluff, which meant she had a big decision to make. The stress brought her to tears.
33:10 Speaker 13 Her husband suffered from what we now call bipolar disorder, and he had to be committed. And so suddenly Francis found herself a single mother of a teenage daughter who needed her.
33:24 Speaker 02 And then there was the pressure. If she accepted, she'd be the first woman cabinet secretary in American history.
33:32 Speaker 13 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.
33:56 Speaker 13 She went to her bishop to actually ask whether or not he thought she should take the job.
34:03 Speaker 02 He wrote to her.
34:04 Speaker 13 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.
34:21 Speaker 02 She called FDR and accepted the job.
34:25 Speaker 04 And then she became Secretary of Labor. She was sworn in.
34:32 Speaker 02 Coming up, Francis Perkins goes to Washington in the middle of the greatest economic crisis ever to face the US.
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36:18 Speaker 01 Part Three. In the Garden of the Lord.
36:25 Speaker 22 When Frances Perkins arrived in Washington, DC in 1933, her very presence made an impact.
36:34 Speaker 04 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.
36:51 Rund Abdelfatah? Madam Secretary Perkins was taking over a department that people in Washington barely thought about.
36:58 Speaker 04 She found the Labor Department, when she arrived, to be almost defunct. Very quiet, very few people working.
37:07 Rund Abdelfatah? But with FDR's blessing, she was going to change that.
37:11 Speaker 04 That meant that she could reshape it.
37:14 Speaker 13 So she worked the room. She knew how to work the politicians in Washington DC.
37:20 Speaker 02 But this was DC in the 1930s. To say it was a boys' club would be an understatement.
37:26 Speaker 13 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.
37:44 Speaker 02 She had this folder full of papers that she called "Notes on the Male Mind."
37:51 Speaker 13 One of the things that she came to conclude is that men would take women more seriously if they reminded them of their mothers,
38:04 Speaker 13 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.
38:18 Speaker 02 Almost right away, she became one of the most important members of the cabinet.
38:23 Speaker 13 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 rapt attention to her.
38:59 Speaker 11 The people are what matter to government. And a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.
39:17 Rund Abdelfatah? When the Roosevelt administration began in 1933, the United States was in the middle of the worst economic calamity in its history. What we today call the Great Depression.
39:32 Speaker 04 One of the horrors of the Great Depression is that it exposed a lot of the dark realities of the workplace.
39:40 Rund Abdelfatah? Especially for older people.
39:43 Speaker 04 It had been bad for everybody, but had been even worse for the elderly. People would see elderly people eating out of trashcans. They were starving to death.
39:58 Speaker 04 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.
40:08 Rund Abdelfatah? And Frances Perkins saw an opportunity. FDR had rejected the idea of Social Security when she first proposed it, but not now.
40:23 Speaker 04 Just as the Triangle Fire had been a crisis that was a buildable moment, so the Great Depression was.
40:33 Speaker 11 You've had a streak of bad luck. We're going to deal the cards over again. We'll have a new deal.
40:39 Speaker 02 In 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act into law.
40:45 Speaker 11 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."
40:53 Speaker 02 Social Security was the crown jewel of Frances Perkins' ideas. Here's how it works.
40:59 Speaker 04 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.
41:15 Speaker 02 It wasn't, as FDR had once put it, "the dole."
41:21 Speaker 02 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.
41:33 Speaker 11 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.
41:49 Rund Abdelfatah? Social Security helped pull millions of elderly people out of poverty.
41:54 Speaker 04 Perkins considers this her single biggest victory of her life.
41:58 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.
42:21 Speaker 04 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.
42:43 Rund Abdelfatah? But making major changes to the government came with a price. As Frances Perkins' national profile grew, she became a target.
42:52 Speaker 04 A labor leader named Harry Bridges, a longshoreman in San Francisco, was born in Australia but became a very effective labor organizer. And a lot of business people in California wanted him deported.
43:06 Rund Abdelfatah? At this time, the Labor Department was in charge of the US's immigration enforcement. So it was Frances Perkins' call to make.
43:15 Speaker 04 So she said that they needed to follow the process of the law, and she insisted on him getting full due process.
43:23 Speaker 02 Bridges had been a member of the Communist Party in the past, and many argued that he was dangerous. Perkins testified before Congress that regardless of Bridges' ideology or past, he deserved his day in court. That due process mattered.
43:41 Speaker 04 This was obviously controversial. In some circles, articles of impeachment were brought against Perkins for her failure to enforce immigration law.
43:52 Speaker 02 Did FDR support her through this? What happened?
43:55 Speaker 04 He said nothing.
43:57 Speaker 02 So what does that mean?
43:59 Speaker 04 She just twisted in the wind until the effort was dropped.
44:03 Speaker 02 Wow, so, wait a minute.
44:07 Speaker 02 Was this a betrayal a bit of FDR of her? Like, did he not go out on a limb for her in that situation?
44:14 Speaker 04 Well, she kept a stiff upper lip about things. She said about FDR, "Well, we're both Yankees, so he knows I'm not supposed to start crying."
44:24 Speaker 02 So Frances Perkins kept her job, but her reputation had taken a hit, and FDR decided to act.
44:33 Speaker 04 Ultimately, he takes immigration and naturalization away from the Labor Department, and they moved it into the Justice Department. And it became an issue of criminal enforcement.
44:43 Speaker 02 At this point, Frances Perkins was one of the most famous women in America. And here she was, basically being demoted by FDR.
44:53 Speaker 04 He needed, at that point, to look like he was going to be tough on it.
45:04 Speaker 11 I submitted a resignation and pressed very hard for the acceptance of that resignation because I really didn't want to go on with it.
45:14 Speaker 04 The cruelty of it, very painful and lonely. Her life was often lonely. She was constantly being challenged with terrible questions that she had to try to resolve. She found the job so exhausting and depressing.
45:31 Speaker 11 I'm bored to death by power. I think it's terrible to have it.
45:37 Speaker 11 The more authority you have, the more impossible situations you're going to be up against. And the more your conscience is going to be boiling all the time and keeping you awake nights.
45:49 Speaker 04 At one point, she even packed her stuff up and sent it back to New York. But FDR just said, "I can't, I can't have you go. I absolutely need you."
46:06 Speaker 02 Perkins stayed on as Labor Secretary. But soon, all her policy ideas would take a backseat. World War II was coming to the United States.
46:27 Speaker 04 She's going to be part of FDR's War Cabinet.
46:31 Speaker 02 And this would be where she made her final major move as part of the Roosevelt Administration, keeping women out of the draft.
46:45 Speaker 04 Women had been given the right to vote in 1920. There was a very large constituency of people that said, "It's only just to send women to war now." But Perkins took a different stand on that. Perkins said, "Women play a much bigger role socially than as workers. They care for children, they care for relatives, they care for aging family. If we take young, able-bodied women and draft them and send them to war, who's going to take care of everybody they left behind, who they've been taking care of?"
47:24 Speaker 02 She ended up being correct, at least economically, because it was women in the factories and across the country that fueled the effort here.
47:32 Speaker 04 And it changed how women in America viewed themselves. And it was yet another thing that allowed for a huge expansion of prosperity in America.
47:46 Rund Abdelfatah? Frances Perkins would stay in FDR's Cabinet until his death in 1945, just months before the end of the war. When Harry Truman took over as president, she stepped down as Labor Secretary and was appointed to the Civil Service Commission.
48:02 Speaker 02 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.
48:22 Speaker 13 Something Frances wrote at the end of her life is that she's a day laborer in the garden of the Lord. So you're always giving over the project to a new generation. You can only do your part and hope that it matters in the future, even if it isn't successful during your lifetime.
48:43 Speaker 02 We've been reading you Frances Perkins' words throughout this episode. Here's the woman herself.
48:50 Speaker 23 One thing I know, that no politician, no political party, no political group could possibly destroy this act and still maintain our democratic system. It is safe. It is safe forever and for the benefit of the people of the United States.
49:19 Speaker 04 She gives us hope. She faced problems that seemed intractable, and she found solutions.
49:30 Speaker 04 She was very conscientious about realizing that it isn't just recognizing a problem, it isn't just passing a legislation. The legislation has to work. The program needs to feel like it's fair.
49:45 Speaker 04 I think that was a part of why so many of the things that she's done have really stood the test of time.
49:58 Speaker 23 We will go forward into the future, a stronger nation because of the fact that we have this basic rock of security under all of our people.
51:06 Speaker 02 That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.
51:09 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Randa Fatah, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
51:18 Speaker 02 This episode was produced by me.
51:20 Rund Abdelfatah? And me and.
51:21 Speaker 02 Lawrence Wu.
51:22 Rund Abdelfatah? Julie Kay.
51:23 Speaker 17 Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Kristina Kim.
51:27 Speaker 11 Devin Kadyama. Irene Noguchi.
51:31 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Julia Marolas, and I played Frances Perkins.
51:34 Speaker 02 If you want to learn more about Julia's work as a filmmaker and actor, you can visit juliamarolas.com.
51:42 Rund Abdelfatah? Thank you to Michael Parrish, Hannah Chin, Carolyn Crouch, Washington Wox, and Amity Shlaes.
51:51 Speaker 02 Excerpts of the Frances Perkins Oral History Interview from 1955 was given to us courtesy of the Oral History Archives at Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
52:05 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanks also to Johannes Sturgie, Edith Chapin, Nadia Lancy, and Colin Campbell.
52:11 Speaker 02 Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. The episode was mixed and mastered by Robert Rodriguez.
52:19 Rund Abdelfatah? Music for this episode was composed and performed by Ramtin, with additional music from Hania Rani.
52:25 Speaker 02 And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected] . And make sure you follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode.
52:40 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanks for listening.
52:59 Speaker 15 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
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