Nothing to Fear

by Adam Cohen

  The job exposed Perkins to the extremes of Philadelphia society. She solicited contributions from the city’s old-money elite, visiting town houses that had, as she said, “marble steps that a maid wiped off every morning.” She also went into squalid slums, notebook in hand. “Ten cent lodging houses, employment agencies, the offices of the Philadelphia political ‘gang’ and the two police courts all became my haunts,” she told her Mount Holyoke classmates. Late one night, Perkins was followed home by two owners of an employment office she was trying to close. She shouted the name of one of the men while defending herself with an umbrella. When people stuck their heads out of windows to see what the commotion was about, the men fled. The Research and Protective Association succeeded in closing down the employment office, and achieved larger reforms. The city shut down several other offices, and the police started meeting every boat that discharged new arrivals to ensure that the women were not taken advantage of.26

  While she was living in Philadelphia, Perkins went back to school. She studied at the University of Pennsylvania with Simon Nelson Patten, a renowned economist. Patten disagreed with pessimists like Thomas Malthus, who argued that resources were scarce and man’s future was bleak. Patten believed the modern economy produced enough wealth for everyone as long as it was properly managed and distributed. He was an early exponent of the idea that economies are driven by consumption, and that spending was what kept the economy strong. One article he wrote had the title “Extravagance as a Virtue.” Patten advocated social welfare programs for those in need. He was also an early supporter of the emerging field of social work, which he regarded as “a new kind of charity . . . not to undermine energy and productive ability or to create a parasitic class, but to distribute the surplus in ways that will promote general welfare.” He saw promise in Perkins and helped secure her a fellowship to pursue a master’s degree at Columbia.27

  When she arrived in New York, Perkins moved into Hartley House, a settlement house in Hell’s Kitchen, a gritty neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side. While taking classes at Columbia, she worked as an investigator on a study of poor children in the neighborhood. The homes she visited were as bad as any she had seen in Chicago or Philadelphia. Before long, she moved to Greenwich House, a settlement house in Greenwich Village that had been founded by the reformer Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch. In these prewar years, the Village was a center of bohemianism. Literary radicals were launching The Masses, a journal that promoted women’s suffrage, free love, and workers’ rights. Mabel Dodge was setting up her famous salon on lower Fifth Avenue. Greenwich House itself resembled a literary salon, with intellectuals like the philosopher John Dewey regularly stopping by to dine and lecture.28

  After receiving her master’s degree from Columbia in 1910, Perkins went to work for the New York City Consumers’ League, the local affiliate of Florence Kelley’s national organization. When Perkins joined, the league was coming off a major legal triumph. Kelley had persuaded Louis Brandeis, the Boston lawyer and future Supreme Court justice, to write his famous “Brandeis brief,” which provided the sociological data the Supreme Court relied on in the 1908 case of Muller v. Oregon, which upheld a maximum hours law for women. In addition to litigating, the league lobbied and used the buying power of its well-off members to promote safer consumer products and better conditions for the workers who made them. The Consumers’ League was an auspicious place for Perkins to land. “There were some,” The New York Times would later observe, “who said that the entire New Deal relief program was nothing more than an expanded version of the Consumers’ League platform.”29

  Perkins had arrived in New York at a tumultuous time for the labor movement. In the fall of 1909, more than twenty thousand workers who made shirtwaists, or women’s blouses, had walked out of nearly five hundred factories. The Shirtwaist Strike of 1909 protested $6-a-week wages, workdays that stretched from seven a.m. to eight p.m., and tyrannical and unsafe factory conditions. The strikers, mainly young immigrant Jewish women, took to the streets with pro-union banners and yelled “scab” at anyone who walked by to take their place at the sewing machine. The police responded brutally. Perkins was shocked to see photos in the newspaper of young women whose faces had been bloodied by police nightsticks.30

  Perkins had supported unions since her Hull House days, but she did not see them as the answer. “I’d much rather get a law than organize a union,” she insisted. Like many middle- and upper-class reformers, Perkins believed the reach of unions was too limited. A union contract only regulated working conditions for the workers covered by it, while a workers’ rights law protected everyone. Perkins also thought unions cared only for their own members, which was largely true at the time. Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor’s president, insisted that all improvements for workers had to come by union-negotiated contracts. If they were won by legislation, he believed, workers would not feel the need to join unions. Following his lead, unions opposed minimum wage, maximum hour, and workmen’s compensation laws. Perkins saw this opposition firsthand when she tried to rally labor support for the Consumers’ League’s legislative agenda. When she and a colleague spoke to a labor meeting in upper Manhattan seeking support for a bill to reform workmen’s compensation, the audience was “as near ugly to us as I ever met,” she said. It was clear to her that the men did not care about injuries to workers who were not union members.31

  Perkins spent much of her time lobbying the legislature. In January 1911, she headed to Albany with a legislative wish list that included child labor bills, a compulsory education bill, and a bill to require department stores to let women sales clerks sit down at work. The Consumers’ League’s highest priority was a fifty-four-hour bill, which would cap the workweek for women at fifty-four hours. A few years earlier, the Supreme Court had struck down maximum hours laws for men as an intrusion on freedom of contract, but in Muller v. Oregon, which invoked the special health needs of women, it had cleared the way for laws like the fifty-four-hour bill. The league had been trying for several years to get the bill passed, but Perkins brought a new energy to the cause. She spoke to legislators about the abuse women workers were subjected to and brought along pictures taken by the noted photographer Lewis Hine. The state legislature was not friendly territory for reformers, and Perkins and her fellow lobbyists had another disadvantage: many were women, and represented groups with heavily female memberships, at a time when women did not have the vote. “So the approach was ‘please help,’ not ‘we demand,’ ” Perkins later said.32

  Perkins recruited unexpected allies, notably Tammany Hall, the city’s Democratic political machine. Upper-class Protestant reformers generally disdained immigrant-dominated political machines, but Perkins had gotten to know the local Tammany leader while living in Hell’s Kitchen, and she had found that she could work with him. After the Democrats swept the 1910 elections, Tammany leader Charles F. Murphy installed Al Smith as Assembly majority leader and Robert F. Wagner as Senate majority leader. Smith and Wagner were Tammany members “in harness,” as one civic leader put it, who could be counted on to back Murphy on patronage and other issues the machine cared about. But the two men, who grew up in New York City immigrant families, had great sympathy for the poor, and Tammany Hall had no objection to their acting on it. When Perkins approached Smith about the fifty-four-hour bill, he pledged his support. At the same time, he warned her that factory owners would fight hard to block it.33

  On March 25, 1911, Perkins witnessed a catastrophe that would stay with her the rest of her life. She was having tea at a friend’s town house on Washington Square when the butler announced that there was a fire. Perkins followed the sirens to the nearby Asch Building, whose top floors were being engulfed by flames. Workers from the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, most of them young immigrant women, were standing on the ledges, trying to escape. Firemen had arrived, but their ladders were too short. They scrambled to put up nets while shouting at the women not to jump. When they could not stand
the heat, or when the flames reached them, many of the workers did jump. Others fell to the ground when they lost their balance or their grips gave out. “Never shall I forget,” Perkins would later say, “that cold, sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach as I watched those girls clinging to life on the window ledges until, their clothing in flames, they leaped to their death.” The fire was extinguished in less than half an hour, but in that time 146 people died.34

  When word spread that the bosses had locked the factory doors—to keep the employees from stealing, it turned out—the city’s sorrow turned to anger. On April 2, a mass memorial service was held at the Metropolitan Opera House, which was jammed to the rafters. The speakers included some of the city’s most distinguished religious leaders, but Perkins, like much of the audience, was most moved by Rose Schneiderman, a short, red-haired union activist who had been trying to organize the workers. “I would be a traitor to those poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship,” Schneiderman told the spellbound crowd. The only way working people could save themselves, she declared, was with “a strong working-class movement.”35

  The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire “was a torch that lighted up the whole industrial scene,” Perkins would later say. Responding to the anguished cries for reform, the city’s business and social elite established a Committee on Safety to look into factory working conditions and recommend appropriate health and safety standards. The governor and the state legislature created a second body, the Factory Investigating Commission, with Robert F. Wagner as chairman and Al Smith as vice chairman. Its mandate was to investigate unsafe factory conditions of all kinds across the state.36

  Perkins suddenly found herself in great demand. In her year at the Consumers’ League, she had become a leading expert on factory safety. She had investigated a wide array of workplace hazards, including textile machines that caught women workers’ hair and scalped them and mangles that crushed laundresses’ arms. She had also investigated two previous industrial fires. In keeping with the Consumers’ League’s mission, Perkins had also looked into conditions that endangered customers. In one investigation, she identified unsanitary conditions in one hundred bakeshops, declaring that she had seen “white pastry materials so black from the drippings of water from above that I mistook the mixture for chocolate.” After the Triangle fire, elected officials and reporters called Perkins for advice on how to prevent another such tragedy. She made enemies in fire departments and city halls when she said that there were hundreds of factories across the state at risk of an equally deadly fire. She worked closely with both the Committee on Safety and the Factory Investigating Commission, sharing what she had learned in her work for the Consumers’ League.37

  The surge in sympathy for workers after the Triangle fire gave new life to the fifty-four-hour bill. In the legislative session that began in January 1912, it seemed to be on the brink of passing. The bill had the support of most Democrats, including the Tammany Hall bloc, and many Republicans, who now wanted to be seen standing up for working people. The biggest remaining obstacle was the powerful cannery industry. The canners were insisting on an exemption, arguing that their work was seasonal and had to be done around the clock to avoid spoilage. They were threatening to block the bill if it covered them. Perkins was convinced the Consumers’ League leadership would oppose a bill that excluded canneries. Perkins, however, was more pragmatic than most of the idealistic reformers she worked with—one friend called her “a half-loaf girl: take what you can get now and try for more later.” She decided to back the compromise. “This is my responsibility,” she told a colleague. “I’ll do it and hang for it if necessary.” The fifty-four-hour bill with the cannery exemption passed. Perkins feared she would be fired when she got back to the city. After taking a midnight train and staying up all night, she reported to the Consumers’ League, where Kelley embraced her warmly and congratulated her for getting 400,000 women workers covered. A year later, the cannery exemption was removed.38

  One legislator who did not come through for Perkins was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had just been elected to the State Senate. They had met before, at a dance in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park neighborhood, and their paths had crossed at other parties. Perkins was struck by his “unfortunate habit—so natural that he was unaware of it—of throwing his head up.” That gesture, “combined with his pince-nez and great height, gave him the appearance of looking down his nose at most people,” she later recalled. Roosevelt was making a name for himself as a reformer. He had led a campaign that succeeded in blocking Tammany Hall’s choice for United States senator, a position that, before the Seventeenth Amendment, was still filled by the state legislature. But when Perkins asked Roosevelt to support the fifty-four-hour bill, he refused. His priorities, he made clear, were reform and the environment. Although he ended up voting for the fifty-four-hour bill, he did not endorse it publicly or try to win over his colleagues, even though it desperately needed help. Perkins never forgot Roosevelt’s disappointing stance. “I took it hard that a young man who had so much spirit,” she wrote in her memoir The Roosevelt I Knew, did not support a bill that “was a measure of the progressive convictions of the politicians” of that era. 39

  In May, Perkins left the Consumers’ League to become executive secretary of the Committee on Safety, which gave her a more prominent platform for promoting safe working conditions. She campaigned against hazards like flammable dust and inadequate fire stairways and promoted “measured occupancy.” There should be no more workers on a factory floor, she insisted, than could be evacuated in three minutes. Perkins did not limit herself to factories. She led an investigation of unsafe living conditions that identified forty-one loft buildings in one neighborhood, housing more than twenty thousand people, that had the same sort of unsafe conditions as the Asch Building.40

  While working for the Committee on Safety, Perkins also lent her expertise to the Factory Investigating Commission. She organized factory tours for the commissioners, so they could see firsthand how workers in the state were being put in danger. When a Republican commissioner claimed that no children were employed in New York factories, Perkins took Wagner, Smith, and the rest of the commission on a surprise visit to a cannery, where they could see workers as young as five years old snipping beans and shelling peas. On another factory visit, Perkins had Wagner climb down an ice-covered iron ladder that ended twelve feet above the ground, which the workers were supposed to use as a fire escape.41

  The Factory Investigating Commission issued a multivolume report enumerating hazardous conditions and making suggestions for reform. The legislature adopted many of its recommendations, including requiring automatic sprinklers for buildings of seven or more stories and fire drills for factories with more than twenty-five employees. The legislature would adopt no fewer than thirty-six factory safety codes over the next few years, remedying nearly all of the problems that had been present in the Asch Building at the time of the fire.42

  The Progressive Party, which was running Theodore Roosevelt for president in 1912, invited Perkins to be a delegate to its national convention. The Bull Moose party, as it was widely known, was promoting many of the causes she was fighting for. Perkins was a socialist at the time, like many people in her circle, but the party recruiters assured her it would not be an obstacle. Perkins was flattered to be asked. “Think of it!” she wrote to a friend. “F.P. actually in the game and mighty few women with that chance.” In the end, she decided she could not trade in socialism for Bull Moose progressivism. “They were shocked and pained,” she told her friend, “when I said I guessed I’d stick by the proletariat and that I believed more in the class struggle than I did in politics.”43

  Perkins’s life was not all work. The lively, dark-haired industrial reformer, who was by now in her early thirties, socialized with the journalists, intellectuals, and avant-garde artists who flocked to Greenwich Village before the World War. She went dancing with Will Irwin, a muckraking journalist who would soo
n cover the war for The Saturday Evening Post, and she met Winston Churchill through mutual friends. Perkins read early drafts of novels for Sinclair Lewis, whose books Main Street and Babbitt, and Nobel Prize in literature were still ahead of him. One summer evening, Lewis proposed marriage to her at the top of his lungs through the open windows of her apartment.44

  In the fall of 1913, Perkins got married, but not to Lewis. Paul Wilson, a wealthy Chicagoan who had attended Dartmouth and the University of Chicago, was a progressive economist working in the reform New York mayoral campaign of John Purroy Mitchel. Perkins, who had come to believe that she “liked life better in a single harness,” surprised even herself when she accepted Wilson’s proposal. When the news was announced, Pauline Goldmark of the Consumers’ League lamented the end of a promising career. “Oh dear,” she told Perkins, “you were such a promising person.” Perkins said she knew Wilson well, enjoyed his company and his friends, and had concluded she “might as well marry and get it off my mind.” Despite her unsentimental account, the letters she and Wilson exchanged revealed a deeply affectionate bond.45

  The marriage was unconventional. The thirty-three-year-old Perkins and the thirty-seven-year-old Wilson were late to wed by the standards of the day. The ceremony, which was held on September 26, 1913, at Grace Church on lower Broadway, had only strangers as witnesses. Once she was married, Perkins broke with convention and kept her own name. In a letter to Mount Holyoke’s alumnae secretary, she complained that “letters from women who do not know me by sight and who cannot possibly know or care about my marriage come addressed to me under my husband’s name.” Perkins said she wanted to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest if Wilson joined a Mitchel administration and she ended up lobbying it. It seems clear, however, that Perkins was also reluctant to give up a name that, through years of hard work, was beginning to gain some prominence. Later in life, she would say that by keeping her name she had been making a statement about women’s “personal independence.”46