Woman Behind the New Deal : The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience

by DOWNEY, KIRSTIN

• ISBN13: 9780385513654
• ISBN10: 0385513658
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-03
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Summary

Written with a wit that echoes Frances Perkins's own, award-winning journalist Downey offers a riveting exploration of the woman who was named Secretary of Labor by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, and how and why Perkins slipped into historical oblivion.

Author Biography

KIRSTIN DOWNEY joined The Washington Post in 1988 and has won Press Association awards for her business and economic reporting. Most recently she shared in the 2008 Pulitzer Prize awarded to The Washington Post for its coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. She was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, where her research into the country’s economic history led to this biography. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Prologue	p. 1
Childhood and Youth	p. 5
Becoming Frances Perkins	p. 16
The Young Activist Hits New York	p. 25
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire	p. 33
Finding Allies in Tammany Hall	p. 37
Teddy Roosevelt and Frances Perkins	p. 46
A Good Match	p. 54
Married Life	p. 61
Motherhood	p. 67
The Indomitable Al Smith	p. 75
FDR and Al Smith	p. 88
With the Roosevelts in Albany	p. 96
FDR Becomes President	p. 106
Frances Becomes secretary of Labor	p. 114
The Pioneer	p. 126
Skeletons in the Labor Department Closet	p. 138
Jump-Starting the Economy	p. 149
At Home with Mary Harriman	p. 160
Blue Eagle: A First Try at "Civilizing Capitalism"	p. 172
Refugees and Regulations	p. 187
Rebuilding the House of Labor	p. 197
Labor Shakes Off Its Slumber	p. 206
The Union Movement Revitalizes and Splits Apart	p. 218
Social Security	p. 230
Family Problems	p. 246
Court-Packing, Wages, and Hours	p. 256
Impeachment	p. 270
War Clouds and Refugees	p. 285
Frances and Franklin	p. 303
Madness, Misalliances, and a Nude Bisexual Water Sprite	p. 313
The War Comes	p. 319
Last Days of the Roosevelt Administration	p. 334
Harry Truman	p. 341
The Truman Administration	p. 352
Communism	p. 362
End of the Truman Era	p. 374
Many Transitions	p. 377
Last Days	p. 394
Notes	p. 399
Bibliography	p. 433
Index	p. 445
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter 1
Childhood and Youth

Fannie Coralie Perkins knew by the age of ten that she would never be a conventional beauty, that unlike many women of her day she could not rely on physical attractiveness to open doors to her future. Her mother, Susan Bean Perkins, delivered the message when she took her daughter shopping for a hat. It was 1890, and the day's fashionable hats were slim and narrow, festooned with colorful ribbons and topped with flowers and feathers that added inches to a woman's height.

Susan Perkins passed by the pretty hats and pointed instead to a simple three-cornered tricorn style, similar to the ones worn by Revolutionary War soldiers.

"There, my dear, that is your hat," she told the girl in a matter-of-fact way. "You should always wear a hat something like this. You have a very broad face. It's broader between the two cheekbones than it is up at the top. Your head is narrower above the temples than it is at the cheek bones. Also, it lops off very suddenly into your chin. The result is you always need to have as much width in your hat as you have width in your cheek bones. Never let yourself get a hat that is narrower than your cheekbones, because it makes you look ridiculous."1

The hat would come to symbolize the plain, sturdy, and dependable woman who became Frances Perkins, and the mother's blunt advice to an awkward young girl left a lasting impression. From her earliest days, Fannie felt strangely out of step with the women of her time, her mother and sister included. She realized that rather than beauty, she must find other qualities and skills to set her apart, to help her achieve her idealistic goals. The dour-looking figure in the tricornered hat-the image seen throughout the years in filmstrips and photographs--disguised a woman whose intelligence, compassion, creative genius, and fierce loyalty made her an exceptional figure in modern American history.

Her mother's verdict on her looks, seared in memory for life, almost certainly overstated the case, for pictures from the time depict a child romantic in appearance, with long curls and a thoughtful look. Still it became fact that when people spoke of Frances Perkins, they almost always spoke of her character, not her outward appearance.

Fannie Perkins was born on April 10, 1880, on Beacon Hill, a few blocks from Boston Common, but her birthplace was almost a technicality. The place she considered home was where she spent her childhood summers, with her beloved grandmother at a homestead pioneered in the early 1700s by her great-great grandfather.

It was perched on a sweeping bend of the Damariscotta River in Newcastle, Maine, at a site filled with historic debris grown over into green meadows, sprawling over hundreds of acres to a place known as Perkins Point. Frances played amid the rubble pile left from the old stockade, erected in the years when families defended themselves against Indian attacks, and among the remains of discarded, half-baked bricks, reminders of the family's riverfront brick-making factory, which had made the family wealthy for a short time.

Perkins bricks had built many of the buildings in downtown Newcastle and as far away as Boston. The boom came in the 1840s. But the business failed a decade later after Boston financiers bought out the brick production of a number of local companies, including the Perkins operation, and merged them into a single corporation. The new business owners arranged for a large order from the Newcastle area to Halifax, Nova Scotia; the bricks were shipped, only to have the financiers disappear with the money. Every area brickyard went bankrupt. Afterward, all that remained of the once-prosperous Perkins business was the family home, built by their own hands, known as the Brick House.2

The family looked back at its glorious past while its present went to seed. By the 1870s, the decade before Fannie's birth, the f

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Excerpted from The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience by Kirstin Downey
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