Nothing to Fear

by Adam Cohen

  Perkins was ushered into the secretary’s office, whose chief features were an unattractive portrait of Doak, a beaten-up desk, and a spittoon. Doak, a railroad yardman turned railroad union official, explained that the men in the outer office were “the boys from the labor unions” who hung out there all of the time. Perkins found Doak’s knowledge of the department limited, and his views on labor issues disturbing. There was a lot of talk about public works, Doak told her, but it was a bad idea. “It’ll cost a lot of money and wreck the treasury,” he said. What interested him was immigration, especially illegal immigration. Pursuing illegal immigrants was, Perkins concluded, “the only thing anybody could think to do around the Department of Labor.”3

  Doak had not made any effort to pack up. He “just thought you wouldn’t come for a while and things would go on as usual,” his assistant secretary, Robe Carl White, explained. Perkins told Doak that she would have his assistant begin putting his things in boxes. His driver could take him to lunch, she said, but afterward he would report to her. When Perkins opened a drawer in her new desk, she discovered that the office was infested with larger cockroaches than she had ever encountered. The next time Miss Jurkowitz went to New York, Perkins asked her to buy J-O Paste, a potent insecticide. “They often talk about a new broom coming in and cleaning house when a new administration comes in,” Perkins said. “We actually had to sweep, clean and get rid of cockroaches before we could do much of any important work.”4

  The Labor Department required a lot more cleaning up. It was a sink-hole of corruption and cronyism, perhaps the worst in the whole federal government—a “happy hunting-ground,” as one contemporary account put it, “for superannuated labor union officials and the headquarters of some of the dirtiest deals in the history of the United States.” The department’s fetid reputation reached as far as New York. Before Perkins left for Washington, a New York City police lieutenant had warned her about the “awful strange mess” she would find on her arrival. In the first days of the administration, while Roosevelt was consumed with the banking crisis, Perkins had to focus on rooting out corruption.5

  The center of the “awful strange mess” in the department was Section 24, the special immigration unit. It took its name from the section of the Immigration Act of 1917 that made it illegal for employers to bring in foreign workers to do contract labor. Section 24 was run by Murray and Henry Garsson. The Garsson brothers presided over a team of agents that they dispatched to locate and deport illegal immigrants, particularly alleged Communists. Section 24 agents regularly overstepped their legal authority. In one notorious case, they raided homes in Detroit and imprisoned more than six hundred immigrants on charges of being in the country illegally. Only two of the immigrants turned out to be legitimately subject to deportation. Section 24 agents were as corrupt as they were lawless. When they raided homes, workplaces, and social halls, they regularly shook down the immigrants they found for bribes, threatening them with deportation if they did not pay up.6

  Section 24’s misconduct was well known, but no one had been willing to take the unit on. Its agents had been allowed to operate by their own rules, traveling the country on expense accounts and handling their cases with almost no supervision. Doak had steered clear of Section 24, Assistant Secretary White explained to Perkins, because the Garsson brothers “have something on him.” Rather than try to rein in Section 24, Doak had entrenched it further by recommending to Hoover that its agents get civil service protection. But Section 24 had a major vulnerability, White told Perkins. It had spent virtually all of the $200,000 that Congress had appropriated for it. If the unit did not get new funding, it could be eliminated. White warned Perkins, though, that if she intended to take the Garssons on she should act quickly “because they’ll plant something on you.”7

  Perkins called Murray Garsson in and confronted him with what she had heard about the unit. When he was unable to defend his unit, she decided to put an end to it right away. She met with Roosevelt and told him she did not intend to renew the unit’s funding. He told her she was “lucky” to have “thought of that way of doing it.” Perkins mentioned that there could be agents in the unit with ties to powerful Democrats in Congress, but Roosevelt told her not to worry. “Anybody who works in that kind of an outfit ought not to be protected, no matter who he is,” he said.8

  On March 8—the day Douglas was presenting Roosevelt with a final draft of the Economy Act, and Wallace and Tugwell were meeting at the White house to propose a farm bill—Perkins asked Murray Garsson for his resignation. She terminated Section 24 and ordered that its work be returned to immigration officials at the state level. The next day, Perkins returned to the department after dinner. When she arrived, she heard voices. An elderly security guard told her that Garsson was on the fourth floor. Perkins found him and the other members of Section 24 rifling through files. She asked Garsson why he was still in the building, since he no longer worked there. He insisted he had come back to retrieve personal correspondence, but the files he was rummaging through looked like immigration files. Perkins could not tell if the Garssons were looking for files that were incriminating to them, or information that could be used to blackmail others, but she told them to leave at once and take nothing. She took Murray Garsson’s key, locked the file room, and sent for an extra guard to watch over it. The next day, she had the locks changed.9

  Perkins quickly fell into a grueling work schedule, arriving at the office at nine a.m., eating lunch at her desk, and returning after dinner to work until midnight. In her first days at the department, she was inundated with a steady stream of family, old acquaintances, and favor-seekers. While greeting this wave of visitors, Perkins accidentally snubbed a powerful senator, Pat Harrison of Mississippi, the incoming chairman of the Finance Committee, who stopped by without an appointment. Doak’s secretary had not bothered asking who he was. After waiting briefly, Harrison stormed off. Perkins managed to catch him at the elevators to apologize, but word quickly spread on Capitol Hill that he had not been received properly. Perkins would later say that she learned two things from the encounter: that it was important to have competent staff and “that no Senator can even comprehend that there is anybody in the world who doesn’t know him.”10

  If Perkins was still confused by Washington, the feeling was mutual. The capital, particularly its press corps, did not know what to make of a woman Cabinet member. Profiles invariably focused on Perkins’s physical appearance, which made her uncomfortable. Time magazine was struck by her “dark and brilliant” eyes and “shapely white hands that flutter expressively as she talks,” but seemed taken aback that she used “no powder, no rouge, no perfume” and dressed “mostly in severe blacks and dark browns.” A popular newspaper column, “The Once Over,” informed its readers that Perkins’s appointment would “keep profanity down to a minimum at Cabinet meetings.” Other press accounts simply ignored her gender. The Chicago Tribune used the headline “LEADERS LIST 8 MEN LIKELY TO GET POSTS” to report the imminent appointment of seven men and Perkins.”11

  To those who knew Perkins the attention to her sex was misplaced. It was her background and personal qualities, more than anything else, that made her selection significant. Roosevelt had taken a department that had been the preserve of corrupt labor insiders and handed it to one of the nation’s leading advocates for working people. Perkins had spent a lifetime fighting for factory safety, workmen’s compensation, minimum wages and maximum hours laws, and relief and public work. Her successes in New York, where she had been Roosevelt’s industrial commissioner, had helped make the state a model for other states. Now, she had arrived in the president’s Cabinet at an ideal moment to bring these fights to the national level.

  After her first few days of cleaning up the Department of Labor, Perkins was ready to take on bigger issues. When she met with Roosevelt about closing down Section 24, she had also pressed him to put in place “some kind of quick relief program.” Perkins had brought it up, she later said
, because the unemployment situation was grave and “there was no one else to help him with it.” Roosevelt was interested in establishing a system of relief, as he had done when he was governor, but he had no plans for getting it done. “Go ahead and get together everything you can,” he told her. “Keep your eye on this and try and help develop something.” From that first meeting, Perkins would be the driving force within the administration for relief. That would come as no surprise to people who had followed her career. It was inconceivable that she would “confine her activities to routine departmental affairs,” The New York Times observed at the time of her appointment. “ ‘Social justice’ is more than a shibboleth with her; it has been the maxim of her life.”12

  Fannie Coralie Perkins was born in Boston on April 10, 1880. She was descended through both parents from old New England families. Her most famous ancestor was the American patriot James Otis, the author of the 1764 tract The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. The Perkins family had farmed in Maine since colonial times, and they had long manufactured brick in the coastal town of Newcastle. Maps still designated the site of the ancestral home and the family brickworks as “Perkins Point.”13

  Perkins’s parents were Congregationalists, steeped in the Yankee virtues of simple living, hard work, and thrift. She would carry the family’s ways into adulthood—the Maine accent, with a vague upper-class intonation, and the plain, dark clothing she had seen while growing up. Perkins’s unmistakable New England manner would not stop political opponents, later in her life, from questioning her lineage. Clare Hoffman, a Republican congressman from Michigan, attacked her as “the wife of someone, though God alone knows what her true name may be, and no man yet has published the place of her birth.” The DAR would launch an investigation, at the height of the New Deal, into whether Perkins was actually a Russian Jew. Perkins produced the prominent doctor who had delivered her, while insisting “I know that I am I.” She further infuriated the DAR by declaring that had she been Jewish, she would have been proud of it.14

  Perkins’s father, Frederick, left Maine for Boston to study accounting, and ended up in Worcester, running a stationery store. In the summers, the family vacationed on the family farm in Maine, where Perkins came under the tutelage of her father’s mother. Cynthia Otis Perkins was an unsentimental woman whose stolid life lessons included, “If you walk through a room and there are bodies on the floor, just keep walking.” The advice that Perkins quoted most often was “if anybody opens a door, one should always go through. Opportunity comes that way.”15

  The Perkins family had enough money to employ an Irish maid and cook, and to move into successively nicer homes. In his spare time, Perkins’s father studied law and read poetry and drama in the original Greek. Perkins grew up sharing her father’s interest in the classics. She had less in common with her mother, a large and exuberant woman who sketched and hand-painted china. Susan Perkins guided the less intellectual aspects of her daughter’s development. When Perkins was twelve, her mother took her to Lamson & Hubbard, Boston’s leading milliner, and bought her a tricorn, which would become her trademark. “There, my dear, that is your hat,” her mother declared. “Never let yourself get a hat that is narrower than your cheekbones, because it makes you look ridiculous.”16

  Perkins graduated from Worcester Classical High School, a private academy that sent many of its male students on to Harvard. In 1898, a time when few women attended college, she enrolled at Mount Holyoke, which had started out as a female seminary. Mary Lyon, the school’s founder, tried to instill in her students a drive to improve the world, and many became missionaries or social workers. Perkins majored in chemistry and physics. Later in life, after years of touring factories and poring over technical reports, she would tell the Alumnae Quarterly that she had made the right choice. Science courses “temper the human spirit, harden and refine it, make it a tool with which one may tackle any kind of material,” she said. The course that changed her life, though, was Elements of Political Economy. Professor Annah May Soule sent her students into the local mills and had them write a report on the lives of the workers. Perkins had been brought up to believe that people were poor because of some kind of moral failing. Soule’s class made her realize that people could fall into poverty due to harsh circumstances and not simply, as her parents believed was generally the case, because they were lazy or drank too much.17

  In Perkins’s senior year, Florence Kelley, the head of the National Consumers’ League, came to campus to speak. Kelley, the daughter of a Pennsylvania congressman, had worked in Illinois as a special investigator of child labor conditions. The Consumers’ League fought against sweatshops and in favor of minimum wage and maximum hours laws. Perkins, who helped organize a school chapter of the National Consumers’ League, would later say that meeting Kelley was what convinced her to dedicate her life to social reform.18

  “Perky,” who was elected president of the senior class, graduated in 1902. She was offered a job as a factory chemist but her father would not let her take it. The one field he would let her enter was teaching, and in 1904 she accepted a position at the exclusive Ferry Hall School in Lake Forest, Illinois. She taught physics and biology and began educating herself about poverty, reading books like Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives. Her new life took her far from her parents’ world. If her father had read Riis’s study of New York City tenement life, she was convinced, his reaction would simply have been, “Oh well, that’s New York.” Perkins found herself “deeply moved” by Riis’s stark black-and-white photographs, and “sure something was wrong.”19

  In her time teaching at Ferry Hall, Perkins began reinventing herself. She replaced her girlish given names, Fannie Coralie, with the more sober Frances. She also joined the Episcopal Church, which was more upper-class, and had more elaborate rituals, than the austere Congregationalism of her parents. Perkins also threw herself into the lives of the poor. She spent her 1905 Christmas vacation at Chicago Commons, a settlement house in Chicago’s impoverished seventeenth ward. “I never got so many ideas in my life as I did in those three weeks,” she wrote to friends. She spent weekends and vacations there and at Hull House, Jane Addams’s legendary settlement house, which served immigrants of many nationalities out of a run-down mansion on Chicago’s Near West Side. Hull House looked like an ordinary charity mission. Addams’s goal, though, was not merely to hand out relief, but to take on the root causes of urban poverty.20

  Perkins was drawn into Hull House’s vibrant intellectual community. It was, a history of the settlement house movement noted, “a place where one might meet a distinguished visitor, a statesman, writer or scholar from almost anywhere in the world,” and one where university graduates could “meet other young men and women just getting started on careers in writing or business, or city planning.” The thinkers who passed through helped open the nation’s eyes to the immigrant poor. Robert Hunter, the social reformer who wrote the classic 1904 book Poverty, was inspired by several years of living at Hull House. Henry Demarest Lloyd, a prominent muckraking journalist who lectured at Hull House, called it “the best club in Chicago.”21

  In an era in which government provided little in the way of social services, Hull House delivered food and provided visiting nurses to needy families. It ran an employment bureau and housed the Jane Club, a cooperative residence for working women. Addams also believed in filling the educational and cultural voids of working-class life. Hull House ran a library and offered classes in music and lectures on Shakespeare. It established Chicago’s first playground, and prodded the city to open municipal playgrounds. Addams and her colleagues lobbied for the poor in the state legislature. Since Hull House’s neighborhood was full of sweatshops in which children worked up to sixteen hours a day, child labor was a particular priority. Advocates from Hull House played a major role in the passage of the Illinois Factory Act of 1893, which put restrictions on the use of child labor and mandated regular factory inspections.22

&nb
sp; Perkins’s assignments at Hull House brought her into contact with desperate poverty for the first time. She went out with nurses on visits to squalid homes full of sick children and drunken husbands. She also helped neighborhood residents extract their paychecks from sweatshops, which often refused to pay their workers. One day, after helping put on a show for the neighborhood, she wondered aloud how more systemic change could be brought about. “Is this going to go on forever,” she asked a colleague, “these people being so poor that we have to give out free milk, . . . free nursing services, the babies die, [and] there’s nothing to do on a Sunday afternoon but get drunk?” The young man replied that the only answer was organizing people into trade unions. Perkins had never given much thought to unions, which she had considered “an evil to be avoided,” but she found herself wondering if they were the answer.23

  Perkins would soon be exposed more directly to labor unions. Most of Chicago’s unskilled workers, especially in the needle trades, were not organized. Nonunion workers were often made to work twelve-hour days and longer, and wages were low. Perkins was assigned to help Gertrude Barnum, a prominent organizer from the Women’s Trade Union League who was focusing on “bundle women,” sweatshop workers who carried home bundles of unfinished garments so they could continue to sew at night. Perkins helped round up women to hear Barnum’s pitch, which gave her many opportunities to hear it herself. “I was quite unprepared for the things that she said and for the very emotional drive that she made,” she would later say. Perkins was also struck by how hard it was to organize poor workers. The audience was “pretty well worn down,” she said, and they “didn’t have much energy left.”24

  By now, Perkins was ready to leave teaching behind. She found a job, through a college friend, with the Philadelphia Research and Protective Association. The fledgling group worked with Philadelphia’s poor and, in keeping with the Progressive Era ethic, did social science research that could be used to promote reform. One of the association’s projects was meeting women who arrived in the city by boat, especially black women from the rural South, before they could be lured into prostitution. The group rescued these women from the pimps who gathered by the docks, and it worked to close down the unscrupulous “employment offices” and rooming houses that were in on the racket. Perkins had found her calling. “Don’t worry about me,” she wrote to her mother, “because while I realize that I’m not so well off financially as I would have been in teaching, I’m much happier and am really on the track of work that will amount to something in the end.”25