by Adam Cohen
There were also good reasons to accept. The women Perkins had worked with for years were pressuring her to make history. Dewson told her that if she said no it could be another hundred years before a woman was offered a Cabinet position. Perkins felt an obligation to accept “for the sake of other women,” but a bigger factor was the responsibility she felt for workers and the unemployed. She had recently finished an article for Survey Graphic, a national social work magazine, entitled “The Cost of a Five-Dollar Dress.” In it, she declared that the real “price of the bargain dress is not paid by” the women who wear it, but “by the workers in the sweatshops that are springing up in hard-pressed communities.” Most employers wanted to maintain-reasonable workplace standards, she said, but they had to compete with “the shortsighted manufacturer who tries to evade the labor law, cuts wages, and resorts to contract labor and homework.” Perkins would be in an ideal position to fight against conditions like these if she joined the Cabinet.84
On February 1, Perkins wrote to Roosevelt, urging him not to choose her. It made more sense, she argued, to adhere to tradition and appoint a union official, sending a clear message that “labor is in the President’s councils.” She assured Roosevelt that “whatever I might furnish in the way of ideas” would be available to him “without the necessity of appointing me to anything.” Perkins did not directly mention her husband’s situation, but she said that “grave personal difficulties” might “seriously impair my usefulness.” There were all sorts of rumors about what Roosevelt would do, including a report in The Washington Post a few days later that William Green, the president of the American Federation of Labor, had been offered the position of labor secretary and had accepted. It was Perkins, however, who was invited to the Roosevelt town house on Sixty-fifth Street, and there was little doubt what the president-elect wanted to talk about. Dewson told Perkins that if she turned the job down “I’ll murder you.”85
Perkins had been compiling a list of causes she would want to fight for, writing them on slips of paper and dropping them in a drawer. At her meeting with Roosevelt, she said she would only accept if he promised to back her agenda. At the top of her list were aid to state and local governments for unemployment relief and a large-scale public works program. She also wanted a federal minimum wage and maximum hours laws, a ban on child labor, and unemployment and old age insurance.
“You know, Frances, I don’t believe in the dole and I never will,” Roosevelt said.
Perkins explained again that she meant these to be actual insurance plans, not a dole. Perkins wanted Roosevelt to hold a governors’ conference early in his administration, like the one he had held in Albany, at which they could encourage the states, where most labor laws were enacted, to promote the kind of protections she had fought for in New York. It was a remarkably ambitious agenda, and Perkins was not sure how Roosevelt would respond.86 “I suppose you are going to nag me about this forever,” Roosevelt said. Perkins assumed that he meant this as an invitation to nag him about it. “He wanted his conscience kept for him by somebody,” she would later say.87
Perkins agreed to serve as secretary of labor, but she asked Roosevelt not to make a public announcement until she could talk it over with her husband. She visited Wilson in the institution where he was living and found him in a “good, controlled mood.” He had been reading the newspapers and was aware she might be asked to be labor secretary. Wilson encouraged her to take the job, though he was worried about the publicity. “He dreaded the fact that somebody would inquire about him,” Perkins said. “That was terribly hard for him to bear.” Wilson did not want to move to Washington. She promised that they would keep the New York apartment, and she said she would come up to see him every weekend. After the meeting, Perkins went home and collapsed in tears. It was the only time, Susanna would later say, that she recalled seeing her mother cry. “To this day I don’t know why I was crying, except that it just seemed as though I didn’t want to go,” Perkins said later. “I didn’t want to venture out onto this great sea of the unknown.”88
Organized labor felt betrayed by the appointment. The unions had been promoting Daniel J. Tobin, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and they were unhappy that the job had gone to someone entirely outside of their movement. “The Secretary of Labor should be a representative of labor, one who understands labor, labor’s problems, labor’s psychology,” William Green insisted. “Labor,” Green declared, “can never become reconciled” to the choice. John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers was particularly harsh about the selection of Perkins, dismissing her as a “mere social worker.” Perkins, who had always found labor leaders to be too focused on their own members, was not surprised by Green’s strong statement. She also believed another consideration was at work. “He wouldn’t have been so excited,” she said later, “if it had been a man not from the ranks of labor.”89
Outside of organized labor, the choice of Perkins was widely acclaimed. The New Republic declared it the best of Roosevelt’s Cabinet appointments, because it was “the most courageous and sensible.” Perkins “is a better man than any Labor Secretary we have yet had,” the magazine said, “so far superior to the last two that there is no real comparison.” Felix Frankfurter wrote that the appointment “exhilarates me in the way in which the anticipation of a Kreisler concert exhilarates me.” Even some conservatives found reason to celebrate. The Los Angeles Times focused on the fact that “Miss Perkins does not carry a union card and may, therefore, be able to consider the interests of the 93 per cent of working people who do not carry union cards either.”90
Perkins tried to prepare for the spotlight that was about to fall on her. She went shopping with her friend Margaret Poole for a fancier wardrobe. They bought a simple black dress for everyday and a velvet dress with sequins for formal events. Perkins did not need to buy a new tricorn hat, since she already had an adequate supply. Her efforts to dress up for Washington would not be appreciated. The press corps would still comment uncharitably on her attire and joke that it was so drab she must have had it designed by the Bureau of Standards. Perkins packed up Susanna and said good-bye to her husband, who was reported by the press to be “ill with influenza.”9192
Perkins was already thinking about the work she would soon be undertaking in Washington. In an interview with The Chicago Tribune, she began to lay the groundwork for a large-scale public works program. “The depression is feeding on itself,” she warned, drawing on the lessons Simon Nelson Patten had taught her. “We must have mass consumption or we will never get a market for mass production.” Before leaving New York, Perkins traveled to Albany to deliver a valedictory speech to the legislature on March 1. She made a final appeal for minimum wage and maximum hours laws and for unemployment insurance, the causes for which she had been fighting for much of her adult life. She basked in applause from the packed legislative chamber before getting on a train and joining the southward migration of New Yorkers heading to Roosevelt’s inauguration.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Just So We Get a Public Works Program”
The Department of Labor that Frances Perkins inherited was a back-JL water. It was the newest Cabinet department, and one that had been created only grudgingly. Labor unions had campaigned since the dawn of the industrial age for a Cabinet office dedicated to workers. Industrial states had established their own labor departments, like the one Perkins headed in New York, as early as the 1880s, but business leaders and their allies in Congress had succeeded in blocking a federal department. In 1884, in a modest concession to organized labor, Congress established a Bureau of Labor, charged with collecting labor statistics and other data, and placed it in the Interior Department. Eventually, Congress created an independent Bureau of Labor, but the bureau did not have Cabinet status and it had little to do. After Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in 1910, Congress finally passed a bill creating a Cabinet-level department to “promote and develop the welfare of the wage e
arners of the United States, to improve their working conditions, and to advance their opportunities for profitable employment.” William Howard Taft grudgingly signed the bill into law on March 4, 1913, the final day of his presidency.1
Twenty years after its creation, the Labor Department was little more than a ragtag assortment of bureaus. The two largest divisions were the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization. There was a Bureau of Labor Statistics, the one Perkins had sparred with over employment data, and a small Children’s Bureau, but since the adoption of the exclusionary immigration acts of 1921 and 1924, 90 percent of the department’s work had been pursuing illegal immigration. Under Republican leadership, the Labor Department had done little for working men and women. Although he had once been a union official himself, William Doak supported these priorities. He did not like strikes, and he did not consider it any of his business how much workers were paid. “It was never intended that the central government should be used as a charitable institution,” he said. After the stock market crash, Doak stuck with his hands-off approach. When a reporter confronted him after a Cabinet meeting to ask what the administration was doing about the decline in wages, Doak replied with irritation, “What can be done about it?”2
There was little doubt when Perkins showed up that the department would change, something that became even clearer after she made quick work of Section 24 and the Garsson brothers. “Feathers are beginning to fly,” Clara Beyer of the Children’s Bureau wrote to a friend. “I wish you could see the men who threatened to resign if a woman was appointed; they are crawling on hands and knees.” It was not only the men who were worried. There were reports that women were coming to work in smocks rather than the inexpensive dresses they usually wore because they were afraid of being harshly judged by the author of “The Cost of a Five-Dollar Dress.”3
Perkins started to push out the cronies and the hangers-on, replacing them with employees chosen on merit. As department counsel she hired Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr., a 1930 Harvard Law School graduate and yet another Frankfurter protégé. Under Perkins, the Cabinet department that had been known for having the least capable staff began to acquire a reputation for competence, industry, and forward thinking. Among her hires in her years at the department would be Henry Hart, an influential Harvard Law School professor; Thomas Eliot, a future chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis; and Archibald Cox, the Harvard Law School professor who would decades later become Watergate special prosecutor. Wyzanski, not an entirely neutral observer, insisted that Perkins’s staff stood “as a challenge for comparison with any department of government at any time in our history.” Her allegiance to meritocracy came at a cost. Members of Congress and powerful Democrats at the state level believed they were entitled to their share of patronage jobs, an area James Farley, the postmaster general, coordinated, and they resented that Perkins had put her department off-limits. Perkins’s opposition to patronage made her powerful enemies in Congress, who retaliated over the years by cutting the Labor Department budget and insisting that new agencies created during the New Deal not be placed under her supervision.4
One part of the department that Perkins was especially intent on reforming was the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When she had her showdown with Hoover on employment numbers, the head of the bureau, Ethelbert Stewart, had broken with the president and conceded that her figures were more accurate. Perkins had been impressed by his honesty, but she had been disappointed that he had not spoken out publicly when his words could have made a difference. When she got to the department, she saw that his office was badly run and that it was full of unproductive people who were out of touch with the latest ideas in labor statistics. It was not clear to her whether the seventy-five-year-old Stewart wanted to be reappointed, but she would not consider it. Perkins asked the American Statistical Association for a list of suitable appointees, and from it she chose Isador Lubin, a young Brookings Institution economist. Lubin had strong academic credentials, and he had helped Senators Robert F. Wagner and Robert M. La Follette, Jr., draft unemployment insurance bills. She settled on Lubin, she told him, because she was convinced that he would be interested in the people behind the figures.5
Another high priority for Perkins was reaching out to organized labor. When William Green said he would never become reconciled to her appointment, Perkins had responded that she was sorry to hear it, but that she would be “reconciled to him right away.” To show that she harbored no ill will, she called his office to say she wanted to pay a visit. When his secretary said that she thought Green would want to come see her, Perkins replied, “I hope he will later, but I want to come, if I may, this afternoon.” She did, and she and Green had a friendly talk about what the administration could do for workers. From that day on, Perkins and Green got along well.6
Other union leaders were still reserving judgment. Dr. Leo Wolman, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ head of research, called Perkins to say that Sidney Hillman, the union’s hard-driving president, was “very restive” because nothing was being done for labor. The union had gotten its members, who usually voted socialist, to support Roosevelt, Wolman said, and they needed something to show for it. Perkins pointed out that the administration was still in its first week, but Wolman urged her to do “something quick—anything,” so long as it was “something that can be put in the paper.” He also said that Hillman wanted to see her. Perkins, who was going to be in New York that weekend, arranged to meet Wolman and Hillman in Pennsylvania Station Sunday night before she boarded the midnight train for Washington. The labor secretary and the union president spoke for an hour on a bench in the waiting room. Hillman said that the administration could show its concern for organized labor by convening a conference of labor leaders. Perkins was skeptical that any good would come of it, but instead of sleeping on the train back to Washington, she started planning a conference.7
Perkins wanted to reach out to the whole labor movement, which would not be easy, because it was so divided. She decided to ignore the internecine divisions and to be expansive with the guest list. She invited top officials of the American Federation of Labor, and the traditionally Republican building trades unions, which had backed Hoover. She included Hillman and the AFL leaders with whom he was at war. She also invited John L. Lewis, the combative head of the United Mine Workers, who had been so dismissive of her when she was appointed, and who could be counted on to stir up trouble. Perkins made a point of inviting women leaders, including Rose Schneiderman, the head of the Women’s Trade Union League, whose speech after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire had made such a strong impression on her years earlier. As an inducement to accept, Perkins held out the possibility that Roosevelt might meet with some or all of the leaders who attended.8
As the first woman Cabinet member, Perkins had to deal with novel issues. One of them was the question of what she should be called, a matter she found difficult to put to rest. After the first Cabinet meeting, a male reporter approached her and asked how she wanted to be addressed. Perkins said “Miss Perkins” would be fine, but the reporter insisted that since the men in the Cabinet were called “Mr. Secretary” there should be an analogous term for her. Perkins deferred to Henry T. Rainey, the Speaker of the House, who was leaving with her. He declared that she should be called “Madam Secretary,” insisting it was all laid out in Robert’s Rules of Order. Perkins said “Madam Secretary” was fine with her, but she found that reporters had trouble getting it straight. She was referred to as “The Madam Secretary,” or “Madam Perkins,” or even “The Madam,” which struck her as having “a distinctly nasty connotation.” There was also the question of where Perkins fit into Washington’s elaborate pecking order. It should have been straightforward. Cabinet secretaries were ranked by the age of their departments, which made Perkins tenth out of ten. Washington protocol dictated that the wives of Cabinet members were ranked among themselves according to the rank of their husbands. To avoid offending the Cabinet wives, Perkins decid
ed that when attending events with them, she would ask to be seated where the labor secretary’s wife would be put. When Perkins was seated next to the king of Greece at a state dinner and Mrs. Cordell Hull, the wife of the secretary of state, was given a lesser seat, Perkins called her the next day to explain that she had not asked for her prominent placement. “Oh, I know you didn’t, my dear,” Mrs. Hull replied. “I know what your ruling has been.”9
Perkins did not look for sexism. She had not been disadvantaged by her sex, she liked to say, “except in climbing trees.” Throughout her career, she told a reporter, she had mainly worked with men, and they had generally treated her well. Although she rarely mentioned it, Perkins did at times encounter unequal treatment, even within the administration. One of her fellow Cabinet members, Daniel Roper, the secretary of commerce, did not hide his concern about “the premature recognition” of women. Even Rexford Tugwell referred to Perkins in his book about the Brain Trust as “old-maidish.” One indication of a possible double standard was the attention Perkins’s colleagues paid to how much she talked. Vice President Garner made a point of telling Perkins after the first Cabinet meeting that she had not been as talkative as he feared. “You’re all right; you’ve got something on your mind,” he told her. “You said it and then you stopped.” Others found Perkins too effusive. Interior secretary Harold Ickes, who was known for his caustic nature, complained about Perkins in his diary, which he later published: “She talks in a perfect torrent, almost without pausing to take breath, as if she feared that any little pause would be seized upon by someone to break in on her.” James Farley, the postmaster general, complained to Dewson that Perkins “lectured the Cabinet at length on things they did not want to be informed about.” Perkins may in fact have talked too much, or it may have been, as Molly Dewson, Perkins’s good friend, thought, that the men around her were threatened by her intelligence. Dewson also believed, however, that Perkins’s manner might have contributed to the problem. “Perhaps she realized her intellectual superiority, and her impatience with less brilliant minds and less gifted speakers, had given her some unattractive habits,” Dewson said.10
