A Better Society: The Legacy of Frances Perkins

Frances Perkins, Time Magazine Cover, August 14, 1933

When I studied economics in college during the late 1970s, I learned about supply and demand, how competitive markets are supposed to operate, the impact of monopolies and oligopolies on free trade; I studied evolving theories of price inelasticity and economies of scale, and debated differing views of monetary and fiscal policy. The study of economics helped me understand the foundations of a capitalist economy. But what was frequently missing was the real-world impact of our economic system, its successes and failures, winners and losers, and how different economic policies affected the lives of everyday people.

It was only when I combined economic theory with history and began to examine how economics applies in real life that I fully appreciated the initiative-taking ingenuity of the New Deal under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The New Deal was not just a slogan, but an ambitious and comprehensive set of government programs aimed at rescuing the United States from the Great Depression, countering record-high rates of unemployment, homelessness, hungry people in bread lines, mass bank failures and foreclosures, and an economic system that had failed so many Americans. From public job programs and unemployment insurance to improved workplace safety and health requirements, the FDR government showed that people mattered, that hope survived, and that the common good was an essential component of a compassionate society.

“The test of our progress,” said FDR, “is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” That, to me, is the true test of a nation’s character. What kind of country and society do we aspire to be? It is why, for most of my life, I have believed in the power of government to do good and provide a basic level of economic security for those left behind.

I also believe in the power of private sector innovation and ingenuity and understand the limitations and inefficiencies that have burdened certain government programs. But when I see how badly corporate America repeatedly has failed the working class and how easily and cold-heartedly companies let go of thousands of loyal and dedicated employees to improve profit margins by even a little bit, I come back to the values that inspired me throughout my life, faith-based values of compassion for those in need and a belief that government exists for the common good.

One significant, often overlooked, figure of twentieth century American history who shared this view is Frances Perkins. Appointed by President Roosevelt as Secretary of Labor in 1933, Perkins was the first woman in U.S. history to serve in a presidential cabinet, a position she held for the next twelve years. When FDR appointed her, Perkins was known as a social reformer who had advocated better working conditions for factory workers and an end to child labor. But only after I read The Woman Behind the New Deal by Kirstin Downey (Vintage Books, 2009), did I understand just how fundamental she was to the creation and implementation of the most important legacies of the New Deal—social security, unemployment insurance, and the minimum wage, to name a few.

Although Perkins had a privileged upbringing, from an early age she aligned herself with the Christian Social Gospel movement and believed her mission in life was to help the poor and those in need. Her first real exposure to poverty was when she worked at Hull House in Chicago, a settlement house founded by Jane Addams that provided social and educational opportunities to lower and working-class people. Settlement houses were communal boarding houses where social workers and community activists lived and ate together as they served individuals and families in need. As described by Downey, “Hull House offered job training, health services, childcare, a library, and a savings bank. It operated a kindergarten, day care center, English-language and U.S. citizenship classes, and clubs for new mothers, camera enthusiasts, and aspiring artists and musicians.” It brought hope and dignity to those in need and lifted the spirits of the people impacted.

The success of Hull House inspired a national movement and eventually led to hundreds of settlement houses across the United States. Working at Hull House changed Perkins’s life. She witnessed firsthand the problems experienced every day by the urban poor—people living in overcrowded conditions without basic sanitation services in decaying city tenements, in neighborhoods regularly exposed to contagious diseases. From that point on, Perkins devoted her life to improving the lives of the poor and those left behind by an unforgiving economic system.

Perkins eventually received a master’s degree in social economics from Columbia University and worked for the National Consumers League in New York, where she focused on child labor, poor wages, excessively long workdays, and unsafe workplaces. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, young children were frequently employed for twelve hours a day in factories and sweatshops, and thousands suffered serious injuries from work unsuitable for their small, undeveloped bodies. In the lower east side, women worked in unsanitary and harsh conditions in garment factories at excessively low wages. In most factories and workplaces around the country, if a worker became sick or was injured on the job, they were left to fend for themselves. The government offered no protection. There was no unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, social security, or disability insurance.

On March 11, 1911, Perkins was having tea near Washington Square Park when she learned that the ten-story building that housed the Triangle Shirtwaist factory had caught fire. She rushed outside and saw flames coming from the windows of the building as the women, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrants, were trapped inside with no means of escape. Fifty women jumped to their deaths rather than burn to death, their bodies landing one on top of another on the street below. Before the fire department extinguished the flames, 146 workers died. It was later discovered that workers complained to management about the unsafe working conditions two years before the fire. The company ignored the complaints, fired the complaining workers, and did nothing to address their concerns. For Perkins, this was another turning point in her life.

After the fire, Perkins’s advocacy led to the creation of the New York State Factory Investigation Commission, whose first order of business was to investigate the causes of the fire. The Commission held hearings and learned that the factory’s managers had padlocked exits to all but one stairwell to prevent workers from leaving with leftover scraps of cloth. To compound the danger, the door to the stairwell swung inward making it nearly impossible to open when frightened workers attempted all at once to flee the rapidly spreading fire. The factory building contained no automatic sprinklers, and flames quickly consumed the only open stairwell. A rickety fire escape, built to accommodate only a few people at a time, collapsed as panicked workers piled on. With no way out for the remaining workers, their only hope was to be rescued by the fire company, but the firefighter’s ladders only reached the sixth floor, thirty feet below the igniting flames.

Based on the Commission’s findings, the New York Legislature passed a series of bills that prohibited smoking in factories, required mandatory fire drills, required automatic sprinklers in all buildings taller than seven stories, and established a system of building registrations and regular inspections. At the time, these were pathbreaking reforms. The legislature eventually required all factories to provide washing facilities, clean drinking water, and sanitary restrooms. All these measures mirrored the reforms advocated by Perkins.

Perkins caught the attention of New York Governors Al Smith and, later, Franklin Roosevelt, who recognized that this intelligent, industrious woman understood the issues facing the poor and working classes in American society. In 1930, at the start of the Great Depression, Perkins convinced Governor Roosevelt to appoint a state commission to study unemployment and propose solutions, and she pushed him to create a system of unemployment insurance. When Roosevelt was elected president, he asked Perkins to become his Secretary of Labor.

Before Perkins accepted, however, she needed assurances that Roosevelt would support her policy ideas and initiatives. By then, a third of the workforce was unemployed. There was no public assistance. Charities were running out of money and forced to turn away the hungry. One in six homes was lost to foreclosure. Sick people stopped going to doctors because they could not afford medical care.

Perkins wanted Roosevelt to agree to a public works program to immediately address unemployment, a national labor policy to protect the rights of workers, a forty-hour workweek, a federal minimum wage, workers compensation to ensure that people injured at work did not desperately slide into poverty, a national system of unemployment insurance, an old-age pension (Social Security), a revitalized public employment service, and a system of national health insurance.

As Downey notes in A Woman Behind the New Deal, “The scope of her list was breathtaking. She was proposing a fundamental and radical restructuring of American society, with enactment of historic social welfare and labor laws. To succeed, she would have to overcome opposition from the courts, business, labor unions, conservatives.” Roosevelt agreed to all of it. And except for national health insurance, which the American Medical Association fought with all its might, Perkins and Roosevelt achieved all her original demands.

When Perkins took over the Labor Department, she found an ineffective agency filled with malfeasance. She worked diligently to cleanse the department of inept and corrupt management. She professionalized the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which permanently improved the accuracy of employment and wage statistics, and modernized the cost-of-living index. One of her first official acts as secretary was to racially integrate the department’s cafeteria. Frances Perkins was truly a woman ahead of her time.

She collaborated closely with the president to help alleviate the suffering of millions of Americans who were out of work. Under her leadership, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was established within days of inauguration. As Downey notes, by August 1933, the CCC had put 300,000 men to work “planting trees, building bridges and fire towers, restoring historic battlefields, and beautifying the country’s National Park System.” Soon, the government created other public works agencies, and millions of people were employed building dams, tunnels, bridges, roads and parkways, schools and hospitals, playgrounds and public parks. Although the economy continued to stagnate, the unemployment rate declined, and New Deal programs built much of the nation’s infrastructure that contributed to the dramatic expansion of the U.S. economy in the years to follow.

Although Roosevelt treated Perkins as a peer of equal importance and intelligence, she faced frequent sexism, condescension, and disrespect from the male dominated ranks of labor leaders, Congress, and the Cabinet. Although she did more to advance the cause of workers than anyone else at that time in U.S. history, the heads of major labor organizations treated her with disdain and never accepted a woman as Secretary of Labor. Even the press often failed to recognize that Perkins drafted the New Deal’s most important and enduring laws, helped get them enacted, and then administered them fairly and effectively.

Perkins was instrumental in the drafting and passage of the Social Security Act of 1935, which the Washington Post proclaimed as the “New Deal’s Most Important Act.” It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the Act, for to this day it affects the lives of every man, woman, and child in the United States. Another of Perkins’s signature achievements was the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which introduced a federal minimum wage, restrictions on child labor, and an eight-hour workday. The law, as described by Downey, “ushered in a new way of life for many workers, permitting them an opportunity for rest and relaxation.”

If that were not enough, Perkins stood alone as the administration’s most vocal advocate for the admission of Jewish refugees throughout the 1930s. In the face of strict immigration quotas, an isolationist Congress, and an obstinate State Department, Perkins worked behind the scenes to relax the formal requirements to bring tens of thousands of German Jewish refugees to safety, thus rescuing them from the calamity of the Holocaust.

Perkins achieved what she did, as Downey describes, “selflessly, without hope of personal gain or public recognition.”

It is a great historic irony that Frances is now virtually unknown. Factory and office occupancy codes, fire escapes and other fire-prevention mechanisms are her legacy. About 44 million people collect Social Security checks each month; millions receive unemployment and workers’ compensation or the minimum wage; others get to go home after an eight-hour day because of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Very few know the name of the woman responsible for their benefits.

The lives of all Americans are significantly better over the past ninety years because of Frances Perkins. Her legacy remains with us to this day. Despite the efforts of the current administration, it is imperative that we not aspire to resurrect the wrongs corrected by the wisdom, compassion, and tenacity of Frances Perkins. Our failure to protect her legacy may determine the kind of country we will have for the next ninety years.