by Adam Cohen
Against the odds, the thirty-four-year-old Mitchel defeated the Tammany Hall candidate, becoming the youngest mayor in New York City history. When he took office, he ushered in a new era in City Hall. Wilson became budget secretary for the “boy mayor,” and while he threw himself into municipal reform, Perkins added women’s suffrage to her list of causes. She had always been more interested in workers’ rights than women’s rights, but when suffragists put a referendum on the 1915 New York ballot to allow women to vote in state elections, she gave it her support. She attended teas and club events, spoke at public meetings, and joined tens of thousands of women and men in a parade up Fifth Avenue. The all-male electorate defeated the referendum by nearly 200,000 votes.47
In December 1916, Perkins gave birth to a daughter, Susanna. Now that she was a mother, Perkins became more interested in maternal health. She helped form the Maternity Center Association, which ran clinics in poor neighborhoods that offered prenatal care and child-care education. She became executive secretary of the group, a job that allowed her time to care for her own child.48
The 1917 election brought mixed news. The state passed a women’s suffrage amendment, but Mitchel was defeated. He had undertaken significant reforms, notably in taxation and transportation, but he had also alienated key constituencies and was seen as too high society. His problem, Theodore Roosevelt said after the returns came in, was “too much Fifth Avenue; too little First Avenue.” Wilson had to find a new job. 49
Unemployment was, however, the least of Wilson’s troubles. He was starting to show the first signs of what Perkins called “an up and down illness.” He ricocheted between excitement and depression, the start of a lifelong struggle with mental illness. From this point on, Perkins said of her husband, “there were never anything but very short periods of reasonably comfortable accommodations to life.” Wilson would hold down a series of jobs over the next decade, though Perkins was never sure how much real work he was doing. He cycled in and out of institutions. When he was home, he often had an attendant. Wilson’s disorder made him reckless, including with money. He had considerable family money, but during his manic spells he had squandered it. Wilson’s condition caused great anguish for Perkins, who was intensely private. She kept it a secret from everyone except Henry Bruere, a close family friend, who had worked with Wilson in the Mitchel administration. 50
Perkins suddenly had to take responsibility for supporting the family. Her career got a boost in the next election, when Al Smith ran for governor. It was the first New York election in which women could vote, and Perkins did outreach to this new voting bloc for the campaign. When Smith was elected, he offered his old factory tour guide a seat on the state’s five-member Industrial Commission. Smith admired Perkins a great deal, but he also saw the political advantages of appointing a woman. Critics argued that it was inviting trouble to name a woman to a position that required giving orders to working men, but the women activists Perkins had worked with for years were delighted. When she told Florence Kelley the news tears ran down her mentor’s cheeks. “Glory be to God,” Kelley said. “I never thought I would live to see the day.”51
It was not only the gender breakthrough that made Perkins a daring choice. Her advocacy for safer factory conditions had made her enemies among manufacturers and their allies in the legislature. The State Senate confirmed Perkins, but half of the Republicans voted against her, including one senator who charged that she did not represent employers, workers, or even women, only “agitation.” On the Industrial Commission, Perkins found herself setting policy for the first time, instead of merely lobbying those who did. The job required her to hear workmen’s compensation appeals, which gave her new insight into the exploitation workers faced. One old carpenter whose arm had been crushed had gotten his medical bills paid, but had not received the $6,000 he was due for loss of an arm. When Perkins asked why not, the carpenter said that his employer told him it was all he was entitled to. “It never occurred to him,” Perkins said, “that a man who had had the advantages of good education and an opportunity to know what was going on in the world would fool a poor old man like him.”52
Perkins was not as radical as her critics feared. Industry was pleasantly surprised, but workers were disappointed to learn that they could only count on her support when they had the law on their side. “The conflict of opinion among the workers—those who bless Miss Perkins for her tenderness, and those pretenders and malingerers who get short shrift—creates a tornado around her,” one profile observed. “She is their beautiful lady or their grim force, according to their fortunes.” Perkins helped persuade her fellow commissioners to adopt an array of reforms. They cracked down on lawyers who overcharged workmen’s compensation claimants and required hearing officers to notify workers that they did not need a lawyer. The job put Perkins in close contact with irate factory owners and disgruntled workers. At one hearing, a worker jumped up, cursed the insurance company representative, and pulled a gun. Perkins calmly got the man to give up the weapon.53
At the time of the appointment, Smith asked Perkins to become a Democrat. He succeeded where the Bull Moose party had not. In June 1920, Perkins traveled to San Francisco for the Democratic National Convention. She did not have credentials, but her Tammany Hall friends got her inside. Ohio governor James Cox won the nomination, but Perkins’s greatest memory was of his running mate. Franklin Roosevelt appeared to have matured a great deal from his days as a haughty young legislator. He had served as Woodrow Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy, and his stint in Washington seemed to have made him more adept at interacting with people. Perkins saw him on the convention floor chatting easily and slapping backs. He had also grown into his looks, she noticed. “Nobody who saw it will ever forget how handsome Franklin Roosevelt was,” she said later.54
That fall, a Republican tidal wave swept Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge to victory over Cox and Roosevelt. It also dislodged Al Smith as governor. Perkins suddenly found herself looking for work. The Merchants’ Association, a league of progressive businessmen, asked her to head up a new group it was forming to help immigrants. The offer came from the group’s president, William Woodin, who would later serve with her in Roosevelt’s Cabinet. Perkins accepted. As executive secretary of the Council on Immigrant Education, she promoted night school classes for adults and other programs designed to help immigrants assimilate.55
Smith was elected governor again in 1922. His Republican successor had replaced the Industrial Commission with a single industrial commissioner, who was in charge of the Labor Department, and a three-member Industrial Board, which took on the old commission’s quasi-judicial duties. Smith named Perkins to be one of the three commissioners. She used her position to enlarge the scope of workmen’s compensation. In one case, she ruled that a worker was entitled to benefits when he broke his leg on the steps of the building in which he worked, even though he had not yet reached the machine he operated.56
In 1924, Smith sought the presidential nomination, and Perkins went to the convention to support him. This time, as chair of the Women’s Democratic Union platform committee, she had credentials and a seat on the floor. The highlight of the convention was Roosevelt’s speech nominating Smith. Roosevelt had contracted polio since the 1920 campaign, and his appearance had changed dramatically. “To those of us who remembered the strong, radiant, successful Roosevelt of the San Francisco convention of 1920,” Perkins recalled, “the man who appeared at Madison Square Garden in 1924 was deeply moving.” Roosevelt made his way to the podium while leaning on his son James. Despite the difficulty of the walk, he threw his head back and flashed the broad smile that would become his trademark. He then delivered his famous speech hailing Smith as a “Happy Warrior.” Smith battled his main rival for the nomination, William Gibbs McAdoo, Wilson’s treasury secretary, through seventeen days and 103 ballots. In the end, after Will Rogers admonished the delegates that “New York invited you people here as guests, not to live,” the conve
ntion broke its deadlock by nominating Wall Street lawyer John W. Davis. Davis lost to Coolidge in a landslide, but fortunately for Perkins, Smith held on to the governorship. 57
The 1920s were shaping up as a deeply conservative decade. The World War had left disillusionment in its wake, as writers like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein were reporting from Europe. In America, the postwar generation turned inward. Jane Addams noted that young people, who had been the lifeblood of the settlement house movement, had “gone back to liberty for the individual” and lacked “reforming energy.” With Republicans in control of the White House and Congress, progressives had little hope of scoring victories in Washington. Even if they could eke out a win, the aggressively pro-free-market Supreme Court was likely to take it away. In 1922, the court struck down a tax on factories that employed workers under age fourteen, ruling that it would “completely wipe out the sovereignty of the states.”58
Progressives’ only hope of advancing their agenda was working at the state level, and Smith was a leader in this effort. He built low-cost housing and improved public schools and hospitals. To win over the Republican-dominated legislature, Smith took his case directly to the voters, speaking to them over the radio. After the broadcasts, he could look out his office window and see piles of letters and telegrams arriving for legislators. His plainspoken radio talks were a forerunner to the fireside chats that Roosevelt would deliver as president. In 1926, Smith promoted Perkins to chairman of the Industrial Board. She continued to speak out for more humane working conditions. When a social work journal held a debate on the question “Do Women in Industry Need Special Protection?” Perkins took the affirmative position. The work world was set up for men, she said. Women’s “only hope of a reasonably satisfactory life in industry,” she argued, “is on the basis of the prevention of fatigue by short hours, good wages and healthful conditions.”59
In 1928, Smith won the Democratic nomination for president. He persuaded Roosevelt to run for governor, convinced that he could do the most to help the Democratic ticket carry New York. Roosevelt, who was working on his rehabilitation at Warm Springs, was reluctant. It seemed to him that 1928 would be a Republican year, and he thought he would be better off concentrating on his health and waiting to run in 1932. Roosevelt eventually warmed up to the idea and, on the strength of Smith’s support, his own record, and his family name—he once joked to Perkins that she should do nothing to dissuade upstate voters that he was not his distant cousin Theodore—he won the nomination by acclamation.60
Campaigning across the country, Smith met with hostility from voters who were skeptical of his New York accent, his Tammany Hall ties, and, most of all, his Catholic faith. When his train pulled into Oklahoma City, the Ku Klux Klan had placed fiery crosses along the tracks. Perkins campaigned for Smith, and tried to reassure her fellow Protestants. She brought one Ohio audience to tears with her assurances that Smith was a true Christian, but the obstacles were enormous. Perkins found herself having to refute false rumors that Smith’s wife was a drunk and that Smith had purchased an estate near the White House for the pope’s use. In Independence, Missouri, Perkins was greeted by protesters throwing tomatoes, one of which landed on her dress.61
Perkins also campaigned in New York for Roosevelt. He had grown, she could see, from his Albany days, and now proudly claimed Smith’s progressive mantle. It also seemed to her that he had been transformed by his illness. Roosevelt came across as warmer and more empathetic, and she noticed that he now listened to ordinary people when they spoke to him, even when they rambled on. Perkins was moved by the courage and dignity he displayed on the campaign trail. At an appearance in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood, the only way he could get into the hall where he was to speak was to be carried up the fire escape. Perkins was overcome with emotion on seeing his helplessness, but she noticed that he smiled the whole time.62
Smith lost to Herbert Hoover in a landslide, failing to carry even New York. Roosevelt, who ran ahead of Smith upstate, won the governorship by 25,000 votes. After the election, he invited Perkins to Hyde Park and, while she was there, he offered her the job of industrial commissioner. The appointment would be a breakthrough. As industrial commissioner, in the new configuration, she would run the Labor Department, supervising the state’s workers’ compensation judges and factory inspectors. In their drive around Hyde Park, Roosevelt noted the pioneering nature of the appointment, but Perkins refused to congratulate him on his open-mindedness. “It was more of a victory for Al to bring himself to appoint a woman, never appointed before,” she told Roosevelt, “than it is for you when I have a record as a responsible public officer for almost ten years.”63
Perkins was not sure she wanted the promotion. As Industrial Board chairman, she was in charge of the Labor Department’s judicial and legislative work, which allowed her to put legally binding safety codes in place and to set standards for how workmen’s compensation cases were decided. As industrial commissioner, she would have more power in the bureaucracy but not necessarily more ability to affect policy. In the end, she followed her grandmother’s advice that “if anybody opens a door, one should always go through.” Before accepting, Perkins got Roosevelt to promise to back her up when she clashed with insurance companies and Republican legislators. Perkins told Roosevelt that she would not talk about the job offer until inauguration day in case he wanted to change his mind. If he did, she said, he should appoint someone else “and don’t give me a moment’s thought.” Roosevelt laughed and insisted the job was hers, but he told people that he had been impressed with how Perkins had put his political concerns ahead of her own ambitions.64
In early 1929, Perkins took charge of the nation’s largest state labor department, with 1,800 employees. Not long after taking office, she was honored at a luncheon at the Hotel Astor, attended by nearly 1,000 people. The event was not to celebrate her as a person, she told the gathering, but “Frances Perkins as the symbol of an idea.” That idea, she said, was “that social justice is possible in a great industrial community.” Perkins laid out a vision for her tenure as industrial commissioner that was the complete opposite of the business-oriented, laissez-faire policies coming out of the Hoover administration. In addition to safer working conditions, minimum wage and maximum hour laws, and the abolition of child labor, she said she would fight to affirm the dignity of work. It was critical, she said, that workers not be turned into “robots,” a word that had been introduced earlier in the decade by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek. “We are committed to the belief that the human race is not destined for that kind of efficiency,” she said.65
In his first message to the state legislature, on January 1, 1929, Roosevelt endorsed much of the Smith-Perkins agenda. He called for a maximum hours law that would limit the workweek of women and children to forty-eight hours, and for creating an advisory board for minimum wages, both issues that Smith had promoted but failed to get through the Republican legislature. Perkins was pleased that Roosevelt was promoting what she regarded as the right platform, but she could see that he was not like other progressives she had worked with. Perkins was used to people who thought about social problems at a theoretical level, contemplating the interaction of labor and capital, or the goals of the regulatory state. Roosevelt’s focus was narrower. He preferred to take on specific problems and try to solve them. “He was not a scientific mind and he never had a scientific approach,” she later said, and she was struck by how “illiterate” he was “in the field of economics.” Perkins also discovered that she could not always count on Roosevelt to sympathize with workers. When she told him of her effort to get a bill through the legislature to guarantee women the right to sit on the job in seats with backs, he “roared with laughter.” Perkins lectured him on how much it hurt women to operate machinery with no support for the small of the back. He looked back at her, she recalled later, with “bewilderment.”66
Perkins scheduled an hour-long meeting with Roosevelt at least every ten days t
o keep him apprised of her work and to lobby him on issues. Even if he did not begin with all of the sympathies of an old-time progressive, she found that he was open to persuasion. Roosevelt did not “respond to hammering,” she said, but he could be “manipulated.” The best way to convince him, she discovered, was repetition. She first brought him a brief written proposal. After explaining the case for it, she laid out the disadvantages. When he agreed to the proposal, she repeated it and asked him to repeat it. With this “trick,” she said, her idea became fixed in his memory, and he could make the point himself later. She found that Roosevelt was most receptive to stories of real people. To enlist his support for factory safety laws, she told him about men who contracted silicosis from polishing glass milk tanks and women who came down with radium poisoning from using their lips to point fine hair brushes while painting luminous dials on clock faces.67
Everything changed in October, when the stock market crashed and people of every economic class suddenly found themselves in dire straits. New Yorkers were losing their jobs and struggling to pay rent and buy food. Americans looked to Washington for help, but the Hoover administration insisted that the economy was recovering on its own. Perkins was riding to work on January 22, 1930, when she saw a front-page headline in The New York Times: “EMPLOYMENT TURNS UPWARD, HOOVER REPORTS; CHANGES FOR FIRST TIME SINCE STOCK SLUMP.” Hoover had declared, based on information from his Department of Labor, that for the first time since the crash, “the tide of unemployment has changed in the right direction” and the Depression was in retreat. The secretary of labor, James J. Davis, insisted that the nation would soon be “well on the way to complete recovery.” Perkins did not believe Hoover’s employment numbers or Davis’s upbeat prediction. The data she was seeing from New York State indicated that joblessness was as bad as ever. She was affronted by what she saw as Hoover’s dishonesty, and worried that the inaccurate report would mislead people about how bad conditions were.68
