Nothing to Fear

by Adam Cohen

  One area where Perkins was at a distinct disadvantage compared to her male colleagues was in finding a place to live. With her heavy workload, and her travels to New York every weekend, she was having trouble locating a house, and unlike her fellow Cabinet members, she had no one to help her. “Having no wife is a great handicap to a public official,” she lamented. Perkins believed on principle that she should avoid extravagance in her social life and her living arrangements. “How terrible it would be to read in the paper that the Secretary of Labor attended a dinner at the White House,” she said, “or a dinner at the British Embassy, which was set with the gold plate, the sweetheart roses, the gladiola ferns, and all the elaborate nonsense that the newspapers would write.” After the inauguration, Perkins moved out of the Willard Hotel and into the Women’s University Club, while she searched for a permanent home. The club was “not a plush hotel,” Perkins reasoned. “Nobody can write up about how you are living in the magnificent gold-plated bathroom fixtured rooms of the Willard Hotel.”11

  Perkins seriously considered moving into a convent. There would be no telephones to disturb her, she reasoned, and the doors would close at night, so she would not have to worry about accepting social invitations. The only convent she knew in the area, the Visitation Convent in Georgetown, did not have any rooms available, and in any case, Perkins had decided that if she moved into a convent, the press corps would never stop writing about it. Instead, she decided to share a house in Georgetown with her old friend Mary Rumsey, the eldest daughter of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman. Rumsey’s husband, Charles Cary Rumsey, a sculptor and polo player, had died in an automobile accident. Rumsey was extraordinarily wealthy, but she was not extravagant. She was “altogether a remarkable person to be the daughter of one of our biggest railroad builders,” one profile noted. “Democratic and informal, she is a terrific worker, and will call people up at two o’clock in the morning if she has an idea she must discuss with them.” Perkins and Rumsey had met years earlier, when Rumsey served on the board of the Maternity Center Association. Rumsey had founded the Junior League, to encourage young society women to help the poor, and now she was a committed New Dealer who would soon chair the National Recovery Administration’s Consumer Advisory Board. The house that the two women shared in Georgetown was simple, and Perkins insisted on paying her share. The arrangement worked out well for Perkins, providing her with companionship and the financial resources to entertain, which she and Rumsey did frequently.12

  Perkins also found a spiritual home in Washington, St. James, an Episcopal church. Perkins remained as religious as ever, and during her time in Washington, St. James was one of her great sources of solace. Attending morning services was the best way she knew, she would later say, “to adjust myself to the painful realities of life, and to assure myself of the help and support of God.” Perkins told Henry Wallace, who was always in search of spiritual sustenance, about the church, and he and his family also attended regularly. Perkins also paid regular visits to an Episcopal convent in Maryland, often staying overnight. She spent much of her time praying, and observed the convent rule about keeping silent for all but two hours of the day. The nuns knew who Perkins was, but she registered as Mrs. Wilson to avoid attracting attention.13

  While she was putting her department in order, Perkins began moving forward on relief. There were about 15 million unemployed people, and the limited resources available to help them were running out fast. Community chests, which had been carrying much of the burden, were not able to keep up with demand. While the number of people who needed their help continued to climb, many private charities were missing their fund-raising goals because the incomes of their donors were declining. State and local governments, whose tax revenues were plummeting, were also short of funds. Hoover had long resisted any kind of federal relief program. When he did agree to support one, the Emergency Relief and Construction Act of 1932, the conditions he imposed rendered it ineffective. The small amount of money it sent out to the states, in the form of loans, did little to meet the enormous need for relief.14

  Roosevelt was prepared to do more, though it was unclear how far he would go. He told progressive senators Robert La Follette, Jr., of Wisconsin and Bronson Cutting of New Mexico that he intended to have some kind of relief program, but he did not offer details. There was reason to believe that he would establish a national program along the lines of the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration that he had set up in New York, but there was also reason to believe that he might not. He was reluctant to make relief a federal responsibility, both because of his views on the role of the federal government, and because of his commitment to government economy. On March 6, Roosevelt had told the Governors’ Conference that when it came to unemployment relief “the primary duty is that of the locality, the city, county, town.” If the localities could not manage the burden, he said, “the next responsibility is on the States and they have to do all they can.” Only if localities and states could not meet the needs of their unemployed, he insisted, was it “the duty of the Federal Government to step in.”15

  Perkins had always assumed when she joined the Cabinet that she would need to be the driving force pushing for a federal relief program. After her meeting with Roosevelt about Section 24 and the Garsson brothers, at which he had told her to “keep your eye” on relief and “try and help develop something,” she felt that this role was official. Perkins went into Cabinet meetings carefully monitoring where her colleagues stood, and she was on the lookout for a good relief plan to bring to Roosevelt. At the first Cabinet meeting, the only subject was the banking crisis, but at the second one, Perkins recalled, “the question of relief was discussed with considerable intensity.” She was pleased to see that when Roosevelt polled the Cabinet, all of them said “that relief and quick relief must be given.” Even the more conservative members, like Claude Swanson, the secretary of the navy, and Cordell Hull, supported relief. Vice President Garner, whose views Perkins had been unsure of, pounded the table and shouted a little too loudly that they had to “do something for the poorer kind of people. By George! We’ve got to do it! And we’ve got to do it quick!” The discussion stalled, however, because there was no agreement about how to proceed or how much money should be allocated.16

  Lewis Douglas did not oppose relief, or at least he did not speak out against it. He was intent, however, on keeping it modest in scope and inexpensive. Douglas argued that aid should be handed out as “relief-in-kind”—food, clothing, and other items that the unemployed might need. It was a position Roosevelt had expressed some sympathy for. Perkins led the opposition, arguing for cash payments. In-kind relief “was inefficient, awkward and so slow that people would die of hunger before we got it done,” she said. The goods that were offered might not be what the recipients needed. If they had good shoes, left over from better times, they would still take new shoes if the government were giving them away, Perkins said, even though they would be better off if they were given the four dollars the shoes cost so they could spend it on “medicine for little Johnny.” In addition to being inefficient, in-kind relief was demeaning to the people who received it, she argued. Perkins’s side won the debate, and it was agreed that relief should be provided in the form of cash payments.17

  Although she supported cash relief, Perkins’s real goal was to establish a large-scale public works program. Public works was different from “work relief.” Relief programs sometimes made people work off their benefits, but in these work relief programs, a social worker determined how much money a family needed and the recipient had to work off the value of the benefits. What Perkins and her fellow progressives wanted was public works, in which the government paid people real salaries at prevailing wage rates to take on real jobs, constructing government buildings, repairing infrastructure, and taking on other projects that promoted the public good. Perkins had been publicly advocating large-scale public works since the spring of 1930, when she encouraged the Committee for the Stabiliz
ation of Industry to recommend them. She believed that with jobs as scarce as they were, the government had a duty to provide work to the unemployed, so they could support themselves and their families and have the dignity of working for their livelihood. She had also argued, before John Maynard Keynes made it a matter of economic orthodoxy, that large-scale public works would “prime the pump,” creating economic activity that would restore the economy to life.18

  While Perkins was promoting public works inside the administration, progressives in Congress were fighting for it there. New York senator Robert F. Wagner, Perkins’s old ally from the Factory Investigating Commission, had introduced a bill authorizing $2 billion in spending on public works, a cause he had long been fighting for. The “anciently stated first law of nature,” Wagner declared, was “the right to work.” Wagner also believed that public works would “prime the economic pump” and help move the nation toward recovery. Senators La Follette of Wisconsin and Edward Costigan of Colorado had introduced a bill to spend $5 billion on public works at both the federal and state levels. Neither bill had moved forward. Hoover had initiated some public works programs, but they were relatively small in scope, and they were limited by a requirement that most of the projects be “self-liquidating,” or able to pay for themselves over time. With Roosevelt’s election, progressives had begun to believe that the time for large-scale public works had finally arrived. “The best hope for the immediate future,” The New Republic declared, “is the launching of the largest program of federal public works that can be financed, bringing immediate jobs to many thousands of persons all over the country, and pouring rivers of new money through the dried-up channels of trade.”19

  It was not clear, however, that Roosevelt agreed. Large-scale public works programs were in conflict with the government economy campaign that he was waging. Funding major construction projects, which meant paying for materials as well as labor, was far more costly than simply providing the poor with enough money to get by. Nor was it clear where the Roosevelt Cabinet stood. At the early Cabinet meetings, Perkins paid close attention to what her colleagues said about public works. A core group, including Wallace, Ickes, James Farley, and George Dern, the secretary of war from Utah, seemed to support it. Commerce secretary Daniel Roper, Navy secretary Claude Swanson, Attorney General Cummings, and Vice President Garner appeared to be more skeptical. The biggest skeptic of all was Douglas.20

  Douglas was intent on blocking public works, but he was worried about where Roosevelt stood. Douglas objected to the expense of a public works program. In a letter to William Matthews, his newspaper friend back home in Arizona, he had argued that when Arizona tried public works, “the state and counties” had been “broken by the sheer weight of interest and amortization charges.” Douglas’s resistance, however, was more than just budgetary. His concerns about expensive government programs came from a deeper place, Tugwell found, one that “was not touchable by argument.” Douglas lived in constant dread that society was unraveling, that socialism was on the march, and that capitalism was in mortal danger. Proposals for large-scale public works were the embodiment of all of his darkest fears. Douglas, who was prone to seeing things in apocalyptic terms, was alarmed by what he called “these forces that are being released” and “the philosophical base upon which they rest.” He had, he said, “great apprehension for the future of my country.”21

  There was surprisingly little ill will between the liberal labor secretary and the conservative budget director. Douglas found Perkins, who sat next to him at Cabinet meetings, to be “gay” and “engaging,” and he thought she “spoke beautifully.” He would later say that “one couldn’t help but being fond of her.” Perkins had similarly positive feelings about Douglas and respected his abilities as a budget director. On the matter of public works, however, the battle lines between them were clearly drawn. Douglas had not “shown his hand” in the first Cabinet discussion of public works, Perkins later said, but she knew where he stood. She decided that she would “have to watch out for him,” because “he had great influence with the President.” It was not clear who would prevail. Roosevelt understood why Perkins and the other progressives wanted a large-scale public works program, but as Tugwell observed, “he was still open to the arguments of Douglas and the business leaders who insisted that economizing would restore confidence.”22

  Whatever happened with public works, it was not a short-term solution for the problems of the unemployed. Even if Roosevelt could be persuaded to back a large-scale public works program, it would take time to draw up plans for post offices, bridges, and other projects, and to work out the logistics. There was still an immediate need for a program of relief. Perkins had begun looking for a relief plan, as she promised Roosevelt she would, but she had not found anything yet. There was no shortage of ideas. Two thousand proposals had landed in her office and more were bouncing around the federal bureaucracy. “Some were pretty wild,” Perkins said. They had strange notions about how to help the victims of the Depression, and bizarre names, like the “Schenectady Guaranteed Income Plan.” It was not surprising that so many of these plans found their way to Perkins, given her advocacy for the disadvantaged and her openness to new ideas. This openness was not always an advantage. “Miss Perkins was a very natural point of approach for a large number of crazy people,” her young counsel, Charles Wyzanski, recalled.23

  About a week after the inauguration, an answer fell into Perkins’s lap. Two social workers from her past showed up unannounced with a plan for creating a national system of relief for the unemployed. Harry Hopkins had set up the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration for Roosevelt, and he was still running it for Governor Herbert Lehman. William Hodson was the head of the New York City Welfare Council. No one had invited them to Washington, Perkins later recalled, “they just came,” and they said it was “absolutely essential” that she see them. The capital was teeming with freelance depression fighters, who were finding it impossible to get a hearing in the White House, and Hopkins and Hodson were two of them. Despite his work at the TERA, Hopkins did not know Roosevelt well enough to get past his gatekeepers. Perkins had a dinner conference scheduled the day Hopkins and Hodson contacted her, but she agreed to meet with them before it.24

  Perkins invited the two New York social workers to the Women’s University Club, where she was then living. She was surprised that when they met all of the tables were already full with, as she put it, “the kind of people who ate dinner at six o’clock.” They found a bench and dragged it under a stairway. While the three of them sat on the bench, “cramped up” and “bent over,” as Perkins recalled, Hopkins and Hodson presented their plan. They proposed creating a joint federal-state program. The funds would come from the federal Treasury and be distributed by the states according to federal rules. Roosevelt needed to act right away to get the money from Congress, they said, and an agency had to be created to hand it out as quickly as possible. The plan struck Perkins as “well thought out” and “practical.” She had not mastered the fine points in the conversation under the stairs, but she believed there was no time to agonize over the details. Perkins agreed to present the proposal to Roosevelt and said she would get him to commit to it. “It’s got to be done quickly or the country won’t hold,” the two social workers insisted.25

  Perkins made an appointment to meet with Roosevelt and brought along Hopkins and Hodson. Roosevelt readily agreed that the administration should adopt their plan as its official program for unemployment relief. He asked Wagner, La Follette, and Costigan, the Senate’s biggest supporters of relief, to draw up a bill modeled on the Hopkins-Hodson plan, which would become the Federal Emergency Relief Act. When Perkins asked Hopkins and Hodson who should be brought on to run the new relief agency that would be created, they said they thought it should be one of them, since no one else had as much experience with programs like it. As for which of them it should be, they told Perkins that Roosevelt should choose.26

  While Perkins
was working on the emergency relief plan, she continued to fight for large-scale public works. The signs Roosevelt had sent so far on the subject were not encouraging. Early in 1932, he had criticized Al Smith, who was challenging him for the Democratic presidential nomination, for taking a strong stand in favor of public works. In the general election, progressives had urged Roosevelt to come out for a $5 billion public works program, but he had resisted. He did not think there were enough projects worth undertaking to justify a major public works program, and he did not subscribe to the “pump priming” theory that many supporters of public works were using to justify the sizable expenditures. In early March, Moley had dinner at the Capitol with Senators La Follette and Costigan, and they had asked him whether he thought Roosevelt could be persuaded to back a large-scale public works program. Moley was not optimistic. He believed Roosevelt was “frankly leery of the arguments for public works.” Moley told La Follette and Costigan that it might be worth trying to bring the subject up casually, but he advised them not to press Roosevelt too hard.27

  When Moley asked Roosevelt about relief on the morning of March 14, he got a response he had not expected. Roosevelt launched into an enthusiastic description of a specialized public works program that he had been planning for some time. Roosevelt wanted to send unemployed young men out into the nation’s forests to do conservation work. He was calling the program, which he had initially proposed to include in the Economy Act, the Civilian Reclamation Corps. The idea was Roosevelt’s own, but it had historical antecedents. It was similar to what the Harvard philosopher William James had suggested in an influential essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War.” James had argued for drafting young men into an “army enlisted against Nature,” rather than a military army. Moley suggested to Roosevelt that he might have been influenced by vague student memories of Professor James. When Tugwell heard the idea, he startled Roosevelt by saying that Mussolini already had such a corps in place in Fascist Italy. The similarity “was never mentioned publicly,” Tugwell later wrote, “for obvious political reasons.”28