Frances Perkins

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. On Saturday, March, 4, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated to his first term as president. After the inaugural parade, his cabinet officers were all sworn in at the White House in the yellow oval room on the second floor, and for the first time in United States history, this cabinet included a woman. That day, Frances Perkins, was sworn in as the fourth Secretary of Labor. She would serve for the entirety of Roosevelt's presidency, one of only two cabinet secretaries to do so, and to this day, she is the longest serving Secretary of Labor. Born Fannie Coralie Perkins, in Boston, Massachusetts, on April 10, 1880, Perkins, who later changed her first name to Frances, could trace her ancestry back to colonial New England. After attending Classical High School in Worcester, she earned her bachelor's degree at Mount Holyoke College in 1902 in chemistry and physics. After teaching for a few years near Chicago, Perkins attended first, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania,and then Columbia University in New York City, where she earned a master's degree in economics and sociology in 1910, plus serving as the Executive Secretary of the Consumers League in New York City. Perkins witnessed the fire at the Triangle Waist Company garment factory in lower Manhattan that killed 146 workers on March 25, 1911. Many of the deaths were preventable, caused by working conditions in which the factory owners locked the employees in to keep them from taking breaks. The horrific events helped galvanize Perkins' efforts toward reform. In 1913, Perkins married economist Paul Wilson, although she kept her maiden name so that her political career would not affect his. In December, 1916, their only child, a daughter named Susanna, was born. After holding several positions with the state of New York, including under FDR while he was governor, Perkins stepped into her role as Secretary of Labor, with a big job ahead of her, in the midst of a banking crisis and high unemployment. When Roosevelt first asked Perkins to serve as Secretary of Labor, she came to him with a detailed plan, saying she would only take the job if she could work to put into place policies that would set maximum hours and minimum wages, end child labor, develop unemployment relief through public works, provide unemployment insurance, and create an old age pension and a national health insurance program. Roosevelt agreed, and as Secretary of Labor, Perkins, got to work. In June of 1934, Roosevelt created a cabinet level Committee on Economic Security, chaired by Perkins, which created what became the Social Security Act, signed into law by Roosevelt on August 14, 1935. Perkins was also instrumental in the development of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and her ideas contributed to the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. Perkins regretted that her one major goal that she was unable to achieve was the establishment of a national health insurance plan. Prior to 1933, both the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization were housed in the Department of Labor. Early in her tenure, Perkins requested an executive action to combine the two bureaus, and on June 10, 1933, Immigration Naturalization Service, or INS, was created. Perkins and herCommissioner of Immigration, Daniel McCormick, took a more humane approach to immigration than their predecessors, at least to the extent that they were able within the confines of immigration law. During the refugee crisis, as Jews fled Nazi Germany, Perkins pushed Roosevelt to combine the German and Austrian immigration quotas, after Germany annexed Austria, to allow for increased immigration. After Kristallnacht, with Roosevelt's support, Perkins extended the visas of Germans and Austrians already in the United States, against the opposition of the State Department. Perkins also worked with activists from the German Jewish Children's Aid Incorporated to coordinate a Child Refugee Program through the Children's Bureau in her Department of Labor. The program relied on corporate affidavits to guarantee support for the children while they were in the United States, something that was possible because the Attorney General had ruled in Perkins' favor in a dispute with the Department of State as to whether Perkins had the discretion to override a consulate's decision as to whether an immigrant was likely to become a public charge.During her tenure as Secretary of Labor, Perkins made her share of enemies. In an effort to discredit her, anti New Dealers in Congress brought a resolution to impeach her. Because immigration was under the Department of Labor, the Secretary of Labor oversaw deportations. An Australian immigrant labor organizer named Harry Bridges had led a strike in California in 1934. Perkins' failure to deport Bridges despite a lack of grounds for doing so, was their evidence that she was trying to overthrow the United States government. The House Judiciary Committee exonerated Perkins in 1939, but she lost much of her political capital in the process. In 1940, Roosevelt moved  Immigration and Naturalization Service from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice, limiting Perkins' ability to push for humane approach to the refugee crisis. After Roosevelt's death, President Truman appointed Lewis B. Schwellenbach to be his Secretary of Labor. Perkins' term ended on June 30, 1945,when Schwellenbach was sworn in at President Truman's request. Perkin served on the United States Civil Service Commission until 1952. In 1946, she published a memoir titled, "The Roosevelt I Knew." After leaving government work, Perkins lectured at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University until her death at age 85 in 1965. She is buried in Glidden Cemetery in Newcastle, Maine, near the Perkins homestead. On December 16, 2024, President Joe Biden established the Frances Perkins National Monument in Newcastle, Maine, at a signing ceremony with Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haalland and Acting Secretary of Labor, Julie Su. The accompanying statement noted, "Few Americans have had deeper influence in shaping labor and social policy in the United States than Frances Perkins." Joining me in this episode is Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham, a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University and author of, "Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins' Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany."

Frances Perkins  11:17  
I am delighted to be here tonight and to have this opportunity of discussing with you the question, "Should we plan for Social Security?" And certainly that question deserves the thought and consideration of all intelligent people in the United States. As the chairman of President Roosevelt's Committee on Economic Security, upon which the report of the present Social Security Act is based, and from my own experience of some 15-odd years in studying this question in its various phases, my answer to the question will be unreservedly in the affirmative. The obvious and readily admitted economic problems of the individual life are involuntary unemployment, unprovided for old age, childhood without minimum financial safety and dependency due to special physical handicaps, due to blindness, crippling and the like. There are all those, of course, but these stand out accusingly in our modern civilization, and challenge us to make a social plan that will provide individuals with a life net in case they are caught within one of these hardships, which are all too common. No one of us knows on which one of us these hardships may fall, but suddenly they will fall on some of us. Let us therefore use the old reliable means of cooperation and mutuality in which we all know contribution of some sort, so that a systematic and ordinary provision may be made as a matter of cost for those of us who in the future suffer one or more of these afflictions. There has been a progressive feeling of public responsibility for these hazards, which passing through the pure philanthropic stage, and we've seen a great deal of it in the last five years, now manifests itself in a roaring demand and understanding of the need for practical and systematic assistance on a general basis for all of these handicaps. The security of the wage earner has become a definite matter of national concern.  Part of what is seen at economic health of the country depends on economic stability of the whole community and upon regular purchasing power of the lower income groups who are so numerous, who form the largest part of our population. The cost of insecurity in the loss of internal markets is a very large one, either they go forward with no pay envelope to spend, or people without normal purchasing power do not encourage the increase in the production and activity of our industries. Experience in many countries has shown that it is possible, through the development of social insurance methods to check much of this waste and somewhat to stabilize internal market even in a depression. The operation of the present Social Security Act and its development by experience will not only carry us a long way toward the gold economic security for the individual, but also a long way toward the promotion and stabilization of mass purchasing power, without which the present mass production system cannot permanently be maintained.

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:45  
Hi, Rebecca, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham  14:49  
Nice to see you again. Kelly.

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:51  
Yes, I am so thrilled to be talking to you and to be discussing Frances Perkins. So tell me a little bit about how you came to write this book. This is actually not the topic of your dissertation. So you wrote a whole dissertation, and then you wrote this whole book. So tell me a little bit about this process.

Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham  15:10  
The topic is Frances Perkins' refugee policy. She was first woman cabinet secretary, and happened to work in FDR's administration when there was a German Jewish refugee crisis. Personally, I came to this topic twice. The first time was for my undergraduate thesis topic back in 2014 to 2015 and I came to it because Mount Holyoke, where I went and where Frances Perkins went, class of 1902. I was class of 2015, she was class of 1902, and she had this home in Maine, which is now the Frances Perkin center in Newcastle, Maine. And they had a new partnership with Mount Holyoke College archives, where they would choose an undergraduate, often a history major, to be their joint intern. And I was the first person to participate in that program. I was the inaugural Mount Holyoke intern for the Frances Perkin Center. So that was way back in 2014, I was doing that work, and that was when I came across this topic for the first time. It was my undergraduate thesis topic. It made me fall in love with historical research and writing. But then, as you mentioned, it was not the topic of my dissertation for a variety of reasons. Usually, dissertation topics are not focused on a singular historical figure, especially if the department or the committee wants you to have broad range so that you might get some type of job in any industry. Anyway, I ended up dissertating on a completely separate topic, which I also loved. There are points of commonality. There's the Jewish history component, and also the federal history, federal records. It's not like it was, and they're both US history. They're both the past few 100 years. There are pieces of overlap, at least in my understanding of like the turn of the 20th century, when Frances Perkins was alive and when mail was arriving on Sundays, which was the topic of my doctoral dissertation. So the second time I decided to work on this project was in Fall, 2021, after finishing my PhD in Summer, 2021. The story, as it goes, which really happened, is that I was wandering around clearance at Barnes & Noble. I stumbled upon a book that had relevance to the Frances Perkins topic, and flipping through the index and the footnotes, I realized, why am I flipping through the index and footnotes of something that hasn't been part of my life for six years, and I realized that I cared about it enough to do it again. A couple more months passed. I was toiling away at a chapter for someone's edited collection, which ended up getting canceled, but that helped me establish some of the writing habits that would then go on to allow me to write this while I was working full time as a high school history teacher. That was how I figured out that I wanted to work on the topic again. And literally, one of the notes for why I actually wanted to do this was there is no book on topic, and I still care about it, and that seems like a good enough reason for me.

Definitely. So I want to hear a little bit about the the sources. You talk in the book, about how Frances Perkins herself didn't make it easy to study her life. She didn't keep a diary or anything. But of course, anything in the federal government, there's going to be a lot of paperwork. So could you talk some about what what it is you're able to look at as you're piecing the story together?

My sources are more than correspondence, but it's definitely a correspondence heavy archives space. Perkins' records from being Secretary of Labor are at the National Archives at College Park in Maryland, right outside of Washington, DC, according to the Presidential Records Act. So that's where her papers in her formal official capacity as Secretary of Labor are. I also spent a week at the Columbia University, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and that is where she donated her personal papers from her whole life. And then there's another setting that has Frances Perkins' papers, and that is Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections, which is actually even more useful than one might think. It does have her papers from when she was a student, literally, like, one time she turned in an essay and the professor was like, "I can't read this. Your handwriting is terrible. Either rewrite it or don't." I don't think she actually rewrote it. In addition to her college papers, Mount Holyoke actually collected and photo copied like any press or publication that came from Perkins throughout her entire career. It has the energy of a proud grandparent or something, and Mount Holyoke was also really valuable in terms of the different types of sources. Like I said, it's correspondence heavy. There's the "Dear Miss Perkins" letters from the National Archives that are behind the title, and also chapter seven. But there were other sources. I was I benefited from reading a lot of secondary sources, a lot of books on related topics. There are not that many right in the realm of mine. And also, I love talking to people about relevant topics in the book. There are three chapters at the end of "Dear Miss Perkins" about historical memory, how we remember the Holocaust, how we remember American immigration law and how we remember Frances Perkins. And the inspiration about the structures of those chapters came largely from talking to people about "When did you realize that the US wasn't really great to immigrants for most of its history? Or have you heard of Frances Perkins?"

Kelly Therese Pollock  21:00  
Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about what, what it was in Frances Perkins'background, before she becomes the Secretary of Labor that leads her to the kind of stance she takes, the the way that she's incorporating kind of a social work ethos into thinking about immigration and how she can help people, the same kind of thing she's doing with development of the Social Security Act. So can you talk some about that, like where she goes from Mount Holyoke to becoming Secretary of Labor, that that leads her to this stance?

Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham  21:38  
Frances Perkins was born in Boston, or educated at Mount Holyoke, and between college and becoming Secretary of Labor, there were a few decades and several important moments that pushed her in the direction that you just mentioned. The first is that while in college, a history professor, Annah May Soule, took students to the mills in Holyoke, Massachusetts to witness difficult, dangerous working conditions and to understand that poverty was not working people's fault. Then Frances Perkins tried to get a job in what she called social justice, and she didn't have any experience, so she ended up teaching science at a high school, because that's what she had majored in in college, and frankly, there weren't that many substantive careers for highly educated women yet. That took her to Chicago, where she worked at a girls' high school. On the side, she volunteered at the settlement home, Hull House. It was founded by Jane Addams, a pioneering social worker; and Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, who was also involved there and was a political organizer for ideas like workplace safety, a minimum wage, and an end to child labor, all which Frances Perkins would help to legislate in the New Deal. She learned a lot from the women that she worked with at Hull House, but even more from the populations that she was serving. She came into contact with immigrants and poor people and single mothers, generally people in need, who came there for shelter and food, but also education, entertainment and a sense of community. That was all part of the Hull House settlement home movement, which tied into a rising social work movement that was truly a labor movement beyond the white male rank and file labor union leaders who were the face of American labor at the time. So labor activism was branching out, and she became part of that. She was working for the National Consumers League in New York City, when she happened to witness the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911. She was literally across the street and saw people jumping to their deaths, which was, of course, traumatizing, devastating. It could have been prevented, because the workers had been advocating for their own interest just weeks before they died tragically, and that really shaped her. She moved from the National Consumers League to a position where she would travel around the state of New York, investigating factory conditions and reporting back to the state. And then, after that position, Governor Al Smith of New York in the 1920s appointed Perkins to the state's Industrial Commission. That involved helping to mediate labor disputes across New York state, all the while aiming to ensure fair labor conditions. And when she took that position, it felt like a really big deal. She actually reached out to one of her mentors, Florence Kelley, who was thrilled that somebody from her own movement, once again, this labor movement  that was not the traditional rank and file labor union, that someone from her movement was serving in this important position to implement labor reforms from a public policy standpoint. That was new, and then she did such a good job at that that when Al Smith ran for president in 1928 and lost catastrophically, his friend, soon-to-be friend, Franklin D. Roosevelt became governor of New York, and he appointed Frances Perkins to become Industrial Commissioner. Another way of thinking about that position is she was essentially Secretary of Labor for the state of New York. So when Franklin Roosevelt won the presidential election in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression, all of these events culminated in the nomination of the first woman cabinet secretary.

Kelly Therese Pollock  25:53  
Which is an amazing thing, but she didn't want the position, right? Or at least she said she didn't want it. Can you, can you talk a little bit about that, her reluctance to take, what is this amazing position?

Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham  26:07  
She was responsible for taking care of her husband, who was in a mental health facility in New York State, and he ended up staying there. She was essentially single parenting her daughter, Susanna, who was a relatively high maintenance child for a variety of reasons. She was worried about Susanna, and those were just the personal reasons. Professionally, the Secretary of Labor position had always come from the white male labor movement, which sounds maybe a little counter intuitive now, but they were always from the AFL or CIO or something connected to those. And she was worried that people wouldn't take her seriously, because even if you took her gender out of it, which, of course, we can't do, she was a non traditional choice. Also becoming in charge of the Labor Department and jobs at the height of the Great Depression, I'm sure that she well, I'm certain that she understood the gravity of what she was being asked to do, and she had good reasons not to run toward it, but she ended up accepting.

Kelly Therese Pollock  27:17  
So listeners may now be asking themselves, okay, great. So she's the Secretary of Labor. What in the world does this have to do with immigration and a refugee crisis? So what in the world was immigration doing within the Department of Labor?

Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham  27:32  
Frances Perkins became Secretary of Labor in March, 1933, and throughout the previous 20 years, since the creation of the department in 1913, it had focused its resources on deporting people. The traditional white male labor movements had lobbied in favor of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Johnson-Reed act of 1924, and the thinking was that by decreasing the number of workers, there would be more jobs for the US citizens. Unfortunately, that line of reasoning will not sound new to listeners in 2024 or 2025. The Immigration Bureau, therefore, was in the Department of Labor. The Naturalization Bureau, which was thought of as separate because, once again, the focus was on deporting immigrants, the Naturalization Bureau was also in the Department of Labor. So one of Frances Perkins' first actions in her first month as Labor Secretary, was asking the president, who took her advice very seriously, for an executive order to combine the immigration and naturalization bureaus to create the Immigration Naturalization Service, which we still know as the INS. It moved to the Department of Justice in 1940, which is actually also part of this story, and then it moved to the Department of Homeland Security when that was created in the 21st century. That's why immigration was in the Labor Department. And in addition to the bureaucratic reorganization of combining those bureaus, there was also a wide range of issues of the allocation of funding. Whatever limited funds Congress was giving, she needed to reorganize it. And also the organization of personnel was really confusing. A famous within the small lands of Frances Perkins's biographies, example is that the first day she came to the Labor Department, in early March 1933, several different men informed her that they were in charge of immigration. And she thought, "Okay, this is, this is a red flag."

Kelly Therese Pollock  29:48  
You mentioned earlier, the "Dear Miss Perkins" letters. That's the title of your book. So tell me about that, what are these "Dear Miss Perkins" letters? And you, you've said that what, what immigration was doing up until this point was largely deporting people. So how does this all tie together? Why are people writing to her? What is she trying to do with this social justice lens, and what is she able, in small ways, at least able to achieve?

Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham  30:19  
Between 1933 and 1935, there were multiple ways that Frances Perkins gave people reason to believe that she was on the side of immigrants and refugees. She was definitely not the only Cabinet Secretary receiving these types of letters. The President was. The First Lady was. People who worked for her were receiving these letters on behalf of refugees; but there were a couple of important episodes in the first two years of the FDR administration. The first one was a legal battle over charge bonds, which isn't part of the question that you asked, but she did win that legal battle, and it set precedent for the Labor Department to have a say in immigration, because the Attorney General decided that, yes, the INS is an important part of the immigration process here. And the second episode was the start of a robust child refugee program in coordination with Jewish activist groups and several 100 refugee children immigrated to the US successfully as a result of this program. Part of the strategy behind that program, which began in November, 1934, was not to publicize it, because the bulk of the American public would be opposed to it, and she did not want to draw negative attention to the program, or to the Department of Labor or to the Roosevelt administration. And that takes us to 1935 where the situation was also worsening for refugees trapped in Nazi territory. So there's a sprinkling of letters starting in 1935 and then through 1936, 1937, and then 1938 is when the folders start overflowing. And something that I've always found so gripping about these letters is that, because they're organized in the archive chronologically and foldered by year, you can see without any archival training, like I was a I was looking at these for the first time a decade ago when I was 20 years old, and you can see the weight of the situation piling up in her mail. The letters were typically not from the refugees themselves, though in some cases they were. They were typically from mutual acquaintances, people who knew Perkins and knew a refugee. For example, journalist Dorothy Thompson had spent time in Germany as a journalist, and then she was living in the US in the 1930s. Adolf Hitler had actually banished her for writing about him, and she wrote to Frances Perkins on behalf of a refugee. And in that particular correspondence, Perkins's role was actually to make a confusing process clear to somebody who wanted to help, to someone who wanted to advise the refugee. In another example, the letterhead was from Hull House in Chicago, where, where Perkins had volunteered a couple decades earlier. And there was a social worker there who was also a philanthropist who wanted to sponsor a refugee or two, and he was like, "I'm prepared to pay for this person. Where, where does the money need to go?"And there are just so many cases. Some of them are relatively famous papers relating to the Von Trapp Family Singers are there, also Bertrand Russell and there are, there's many names that we've heard of, but there are also so many that we have not heard of, and just a wide variety of different types of cases. She was the secretary in the department that had the INS in it. People had good reason to think that she would try to help. And there are so many examples of her intervening, sometimes just sending a note to someone who was technically employed by her department. Sometimes forwarding a note to the Department of State, if the problem was the consul overseas, and maybe they had a different reason why they didn't want to upset the Secretary of Labor that day, so she would swing her political capital in different directions in an attempt to help refugees. Unfortunately, in early 1939, she lost a lot of that political capital because there was a resolution to impeach her, and for no good reason, literally for treason, and there was, I mean, Frances Perkins, not a traitor. But she did have to sit through a resolution to impeach her in the House of Representatives for possibly being a traitor. And then that was a step in the direction of in 1940 the INS moved to the Department of Justice. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  35:18  
And these were, most of the things she was able to accomplish were relatively small. You know, is helping individuals. You mentioned the childhood refugees that helped a few 100 people. There were a couple of instances that you outline in the book of attempts to pass legislation that would have helped larger numbers that Frances Perkins was supporting. Of course, she was, you know, this at the same time, as you just mentioned, losing some of the political clout that she had because of this impeachment, ridiculous impeachment effort. But these are fascinating stories nonetheless. Could you talk a little bit about the Alaska efforts, because this is just a fascinating story?

Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham  36:03  
There were two ideas that she had in the early 1930s that became bills in Congress in the late 1930s, after she was no longer a an opening credit character in the story. The first was a child refugee bill called the Wagner-Rogers bill, which rose and fell in 1939 after Kristallnacht in November, 1938, and that bill would have made it so 10,000 child refugees could enter the US in two separate years. So 20,000 total, and that would have been an extreme help to those people and an expansion of the child refugee efforts that she was already facilitating through the Children's Bureau in the Department of Labor. The second one that you mentioned was the King-Havenner Bill in 1940, and after the Wagner- Rogers Bill had failed, the Congresspeople who wanted to help refugees from Nazi Germany turned their attention from child refugees, who they thought would be sympathetic, but that turned out not to be the case, to settling refugees in an American colonized territory that was not even the US. Alaska. Alaska had been purchased from Russia in the 1860s, and it was still sparsely populated. So proponents of refugee policy in the Department of Labor, the Department of Interior and in Congress, thought that maybe they could carry out American efforts to imperialize Alaska, like use it for military defense and economic development, while also providing refuge for people trapped in Nazi Germany. It turned out that the anti immigrant lobbying groups were still more powerful than this American habit of imperializing, which is actually really incredible when you think about it, in the long history of American imperialism, that usually nothing would stand in the US way of settling colonized territory with people of European ancestry. But it turned out that the xenophobia, and especially the anti semitism in this case, were stronger than the drive to imperialize Alaska.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:38  
Yeah, that is fascinating to think about what might have been. All right, so this is just a fascinating story. Tells us so much more about Frances Perkins, tells us so much more about the not always very happy story of immigration in this country, and expands our understanding of World War II and the the picture of the refugee crisis that the United States did not respond to in the way that it could have been should have during World War II. So I would love to tell listeners how they can pre order your book. So can you please do that?

Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham  39:18  
It's available wherever books are sold. The title is, "Dear Miss Perkins," and on my website, RebeccaBrennerGraham.com, there's a link to my publishing company, which is Kensington. Also, if you go directly to the Kensington site, it gives links to all the places where books are sold. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:37  
Rebecca, thank you so much for speaking with me. It's been just a pleasure, and I've loved learning more about Frances Perkins.

Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham  39:44  
Thank you so much.

Teddy  40:20  
 Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!