by Adam Cohen
After his defeat, Wallace retreated to upstate New York, where he and Ilo had a sprawling farm. He broke with the Progressive Party in 1950, supporting the United States’s response to Soviet-backed aggression from North Korea. In the McCarthy Era, Wallace was frequently red-baited. He defended himself in an appearance before a Senate subcommittee and in public statements. More and more, Wallace dropped from sight and devoted himself to farming. When The New York Times checked in on him in 1960, it found Wallace enjoying life on the farm, “where he hybridizes strawberries, gladioli and chickens, some of which lay brown eggs and others—a Chilean strain—green eggs.” Wallace died of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, on November 18, 1965, at the age of seventy-seven.41
When the Hundred Days were over, Frances Perkins played a key role in implementing the NIRA. At meetings of the Special Board for Public Works—which included the secretaries of labor, interior, agriculture, war, the Treasury, and commerce, and the budget director—she helped ensure that the public works programs began on the right footing. Perkins was one of the board members who overruled Douglas’s suggestion that not all of the money allocated by Congress had to be spent. At the same time, she opposed board members who argued that the important thing was putting people to work right away, regardless of what they did. Perkins insisted that public works money be spent on socially useful projects like schools and housing, a position the board adopted. “Fortunately, she won the argument and transformed the face of America,” one study of public works noted. New Deal public works programs would go on to build thousands of schools, tens of thousands of miles of roads, highways, and sidewalks, major housing developments for the poor, post offices, and key parts of the nation’s infrastructure. In significant part because of NIRA public works, as many as one and a half to two million more Americans had jobs in 1934 as in 1933. 42
Perkins also played a role in drawing up the NIRA codes of fair competition, which gave workers rights that had never been recognized before in America. There were no federal minimum wage and maximum hours laws, and the few state laws that existed applied only to women, and offered relatively little protection. The industry-by-industry codes adopted under the NIRA dramatically altered the landscape of American labor. Most included forty-hour maximum workweeks, and about one quarter imposed limits of eight hours of work a day. In the Department of Labor’s Annual Report for 1934, Perkins declared that one of her lifelong goals had been achieved: “We have come practically to a 5-day, 40-hour week as the standard of working time in the United States of America.” The codes also banned child labor, imposing a sixteen-year-old minimum age requirement that was higher than the laws of all but three states. The child labor provisions were a major reform—especially the one that took children out of the cotton mills—though, as Perkins noted in the 1934 report, child labor still existed in agriculture, domestic service, and factory homework, so the struggle was not yet over. The codes included provisions guaranteeing unions the right to organize and to bargain collectively, as Section 7(a) required. Under the new rules, and the even stronger ones that would be instituted in 1935, union membership would increase sharply—from 2,689,000, or 6.9 percent of the workforce in 1933, to 8,763,000, or 19.2 percent of the workforce, in 1939.43
In 1934, Perkins began drafting an unemployment insurance bill. Rather than make it a federal program, she envisioned the states running unemployment insurance according to federal guidelines. Perkins made it a state-managed program partly because, as a committed Brandeisian, she was skeptical of putting too much power in the federal government, and partly because she believed a state program would have a better chance of being upheld by the Supreme Court. While Perkins was working on unemployment insurance, public support was building for old-age insurance, which was being promoted by Dr. Francis Townsend and his popular Townsend Clubs. Roosevelt announced that he was appointing a committee to consider a broader social insurance program that would include old-age benefits. He named Perkins to chair the Committee on Economic Security, which also included Wallace; Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau; Attorney General Cummings; and Hopkins. Perkins asked Roosevelt if it wouldn’t make sense for someone other than her to serve as chair, since she was known to be such a strong supporter of social insurance. “No, no,” Roosevelt responded. “You care about this thing. You believe in it. Therefore I know you will put your back to it more than anyone else, and you will drive it through.”44
The committee’s final recommendations went beyond unemployment and old-age insurance. Along with those insurance programs, which would be paid for by employer and employee contributions, it called for relief programs to cover categories of needy individuals who could not pay premiums: dependent children, the disabled, and the unemployed elderly. The committee nearly included national health insurance, but it backed down. “Its inclusion would have aroused such vehement opposition, sparked by the American Medical Association, that the whole bill, even the simple grants to the states, would have gone down the drain,” said Thomas Eliot, a Labor Department lawyer who worked on the bill. Perkins drew up much of the Social Security Act in the Department of Labor, using department staff.45
Perkins testified for the bill in Congress and spoke out publicly at every opportunity. It was passed much as the committee recommended, with one significant exception. The committee had called for the Department of Labor to administer social security and unemployment insurance, and for the FERA to manage the programs for dependent children, the disabled, and the unemployed elderly. Congress instead created an independent Social Security Board to run them all. Perkins thought Congress considered the Labor Department “too soft on workers” and wanted the programs in more skeptical hands. At least some members of Congress, however, were trying to prevent Perkins from taking control of large new bureaucracies, because they resented her reform-minded management style. Perkins was “an articulate, intelligent woman,” said Arthur Altmeyer, an assistant secretary of labor, but she was “not sufficiently amenable to patronage needs.” Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935. On her way to the White House for the signing ceremony, Perkins got a call from Paul Wilson’s nurse saying he had disappeared. She went to the ceremony to avoid calling press attention to the situation, and when it ended took a train to New York, where she helped locate her husband. 46
The National Recovery Administration, which Tugwell and Moley had hoped would steer the economy toward prosperity, was the least successful part of the NIRA. The public initially rallied to the NRA, but it soon came to regard the program mainly as a vehicle for big business to raise prices and stifle competition. There was little protest when the Supreme Court held the NIRA unconstitutional in May 1935. The right to organize contained in Section 7(a) had, however, proven valuable, and organized labor rushed to rescue it. Senator Wagner introduced the National Labor Relations Act, which guaranteed workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively, outlawed company unions, and declared firing workers for union membership to be an unfair labor practice. Roosevelt and Perkins worried that the bill contained so many protections for organized labor that it had crossed the line to being antibusiness, and that it would energize labor’s opponents. Perkins’s old social worker instincts also made her skeptical of a bill that saw unions as the full answer to workers’ problems. The Wagner Act, which became law on July 5, 1935, put the power of the federal government behind organizing drives. The National Labor Relations Board was given authority to go after employers who engaged in what the act defined as unfair labor practices. Union membership soared, but as Perkins feared, it produced a backlash, culminating in 1947 with the passage of the antiunion Taft-Hartley Act.47
When the NIRA was struck down, Perkins’s greatest concern was ensuring that its workers’ rights provisions lived on. In anticipation of the ruling, she had asked the Labor Department’s lawyers to draw up a pair of bills to reauthorize the codes’ protections. The more constitutionally cautious bill applied only to government contracts. The Wal
sh-Healey Act, which passed in June 1936, required that the government buy all goods and services that cost more than $10,000 from manufacturers who observed an eight-hour day and a forty-hour week, with overtime pay for anything over; paid a minimum wage set by the secretary of labor; and banned child labor. Perkins later put forward a more sweeping bill, the Fair Labor Standards Act, which became law in 1938. It called for the secretary of labor to set minimum wages and maximum hours, based on the recommendations of an appointed board. The version that passed authorized Congress, rather than the labor secretary, to set the minimum wage, which began at twenty-five cents an hour, rising to forty cents in two years, and maximum hours, which were set at forty-four hours a week, declining over time to forty hours. It also barred goods made by children under sixteen from interstate commerce. The act gave raises right away to hundreds of thousands of workers, and promised eventual relief to millions of workers who earned less than forty cents an hour.48
The Fair Labor Standards Act was the New Deal’s last great accomplishment. It also marked, for Perkins, the start of a dark period. There was labor unrest, and Perkins found herself in the middle of it. She came under pressure to deport the leader of the longshoreman’s union, Harry Bridges, who was being attacked as a Communist, but she refused. Perkins was right on the law, but was attacked by conservatives in Congress. In early 1938, the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by Martin Dies of Texas, introduced an impeachment resolution. Perkins was not fond of Bridges, but since she did not believe he was deportable she would not deport him. “Nothing but her concept of what was right affected her,” her counsel, Charles Wyzanski, said. In the 1940 election, Willkie made Perkins an issue. He would appoint a secretary of labor from the labor movement, he promised a union crowd in Pittsburgh, adding, “and it won’t be a woman, either.” After the election, Perkins submitted her resignation, but Roosevelt would not accept it.49
Perkins’s influence declined in Roosevelt’s final years in office, when labor issues took a backseat to the all-consuming focus on winning World War II. She made it her mission to keep the labor peace, so wartime production would not be interfered with. At the same time, she tried to ensure that defense contractors did not erode the labor standards she had fought for simply by pleading national defense. When contractors tried to get state and federal maximum hour, minimum wage, and child labor laws repealed, Perkins enlisted Roosevelt’s help in resisting. Particular laws were suspended temporarily when absolutely necessary but, as Perkins recalled, “we came through the war with basic labor legislation intact.”50
Perkins again offered her resignation after Roosevelt was reelected to his fourth term, but he refused again. “I can’t think of anybody else, and I can’t get used to anybody else,” he said. She remained in office until Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945. Perkins was one of only two Cabinet members—Ickes was the other—to serve for Roosevelt’s entire presidency. Counting her four years as his industrial commissioner, no one had worked for him longer. When Truman became president she submitted her resignation, and he accepted it. Perkins received a warm send-off from 1,800 Labor Department employees. She dispensed with her trademark tricorn for the occasion, wearing a sailor hat instead. “This is in honor of my new life,” she said. “It’s my private hat.” To ensure that her successor did not go through what she had thirteen years earlier, she met him at the train station and brought along a department car for his use.51
At the end of her career, Perkins’s standing with the public was not high. She received little credit for her two decades of accomplishments, many of which were simply attributed to Roosevelt, or to the New Dealers as a group. At the same time, the Bridges affair, and the impeachment charges, had taken a toll. Perkins’s antagonism toward the press had made matters worse, resulting in years of unflattering, and often antagonistic, coverage. Collier’s ran a profile in 1944 that began, “A major Washington mystery is how Frances Perkins has managed to hang onto her job as Secretary of Labor for twelve long years.” It went through a litany of her failings, and reported that “correspondents have voted her ‘the most useless’ of Washington officials.” Collier’s acknowledged, however, that before she agreed to be labor secretary, Perkins had asked Roosevelt to support her on a wide-ranging social agenda, and that twelve years later she had checked off every item on it. She had wanted immediate federal aid to states and local governments for unemployment relief, which became the FERA and the CWA. The large-scale public works program she sought became the WPA. Federal minimum wage and maximum hours laws and a ban on child labor were guaranteed in the Walsh-Healey and Fair Labor Standards acts. Old-age and unemployment insurance were established by the Social Security Act. Despite her current unpopularity, Collier’s predicted that “when the definitive history of this Administration is written, it is quite likely that Miss Perkins will be hailed as the most successful of the New Dealers, for the Roosevelt pattern of government contains more of her ideas than those of any other of the President’s followers.” It could be said, Collier’s concluded, that “what this country has been operating under for the past twelve years is not so much the Roosevelt New Deal as it is the Perkins New Deal.”52
For all of her career success, Perkins led a life filled with challenges and unhappiness. Mary Rumsey, her good friend and Washington housemate, died in December 1934 after a horseback riding accident. Paul Wilson never recovered his health. In his final years, after Perkins was out of the Cabinet, he moved in with her in Washington, but he remained troubled and depressed and avoided interacting with people. Hardest of all for Perkins was her relationship with her daughter. Susanna, who lived apart from her mother for much of her youth, was a difficult child and a troubled adult. Perkins and Susanna clashed frequently, and in her old age Susanna would call her mother a “dragon lady” and make wild charges against her. The intensely private Perkins spoke as little about Susanna’s problems as she did about her husband’s. At the end of her life, Perkins expressed doubts about the choices she had made, and said frequently that a woman should put family ahead of career. “There is no question that this was a summing up time of her life,” said Allan Bloom, a Cornell University English professor who befriended her in the early 1960s, “and she wasn’t the least bit sure that she had handled it right.”53
When she left the Department of Labor, Perkins wrote a book about the late president, at the urging of a friend who was a literary agent. The Roosevelt I Knew, which her publisher rushed out in 1946, was an instant best seller. Perkins hoped Truman would name her to the Social Security Board so she could work with the program of which she was most proud. Instead, in the fall of 1946, he appointed her to the Civil Service Commission. When Dwight Eisenhower was elected, she gave up her position on the commission and returned to New York. Perkins was happy to make the move. “I felt much more at home in New York,” she said. “I could never crack Washington. In New York I could see a fire escape someplace and say: I did that.”54
In her final years, Perkins accepted an invitation to teach at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She was by now a bit more conservative than she had once been. She still strongly supported relief for those who needed it, but she worried about it sapping the work ethic of those who could find gainful employment. At the same time, Perkins remained the guardian of the New Deal flame, and she talked about ways the New Deal legacy could be expanded and improved upon. In the years before Medicare was created, she advocated a federal health insurance program for the elderly, which she regarded as “the next step in expanding Social Security.” While she was at Cornell, the thirty young men who lived in Telluride House, a residence for high-achieving students, invited her to move in. “I feel like a bride on her wedding night,” she told a colleague before accepting. Perkins helped out in the garden, attended house meetings, and showed up at parties. To the students, she was a wise counselor, and a living piece of history—the “last leaf,” she used to say, of the New Deal. Sh
e remained at Cornell until her death on May 14, 1965, at the age of eighty-five.55
In late 1962, at the urging of her students, Perkins invited Henry Wallace, another “last leaf,” to Cornell for the weekend. She was not sure that her old Cabinet colleague, who was not venturing out much, would accept the invitation, but he did. Wallace’s hair had turned white, but he otherwise looked much as he had in his younger days. Perkins’s students, who expected to meet the fiery left-wing presidential candidate of 1948, were surprised to see an earlier version of Wallace, one who talked about his love of plants and his hope of developing a strain of corn that could be grown in the Caribbean and withstand tropical storms.56
The two New Deal veterans led a pair of undergraduate seminars. In the first, Wallace talked about the agricultural policies he had helped establish. The Roosevelt administration had been able to do a lot for struggling farmers, he said, but it had not managed to slow the flight of farmers from the land. Wallace cited projections that in two decades less than 5 percent of Americans would be living on farms. If he were a younger man, he said, he would consider leaving this fast-urbanizing United States. When Perkins’s expression indicated that she did not share his sense of loss, one student who was there recalled, Wallace joked that the two of them had never agreed on the advantages and disadvantages of growing up in a city like New York.” 57
