Kirstin Downey - The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance

I came to Washington as a young business reporter to work for the Washington Post in 1988. I remember the first time I heard Frances Perkinss name. I was taking a bus tour of the city to familiarize myself with its political landmarks. Frances Perkins had a cameo role in the tour leaders comic shtick. Which woman in American history had the worst childbirth experience? he asked. Pause. No one answered. Frances Perkins, he said. She spent twelve years in Labor. It drew a big laugh from a crowd that seemed to know as little about her as I did.

Over the next two decades, as big stories developed and I probed the history of the governments responses to the situations, I was referred to Frances Perkins again and again, but only by much older people, almost in a kind of distant whisper. Age discrimination? Frances Perkins had talked of the problem. Long work hours? Frances Perkins. Workplace injuries, and what rights did employees have to be compensated for the loss of their health? It was a refrain in Frances Perkinss life.

I began to hear her name more often when I started writing a newspaper column called On the Job, which allowed workers to raise important workplace questions. One day I received a plaintive letter from a man who wrote that he was being locked in the office at the end of each workday as the boss counted the money in the till. He asked if I thought it was unsafe: Even a rat has an escape hole, he wrote. I began to investigate the fire safety code and its origins, and then I called Judson McLaury staff historian at the Labor Department, to ask him about famous workplace fires. He arranged to send me information on the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and then casually asked whether I knew that a young social worker, Frances Perkins, had actually witnessed that 1911 disaster. Eureka.

A decade-long detective project began. Digging this womans legacy out of the ruins has required an effort as archaeological as historical, of long years spent, nights and weekends, sifting through hundreds of thousands of documents and interviewing dozens of Francess friends and relatives, many of them very old. Francess papers had been deposited willy-nilly in more than a dozen archives across the northeastern United States, with revealing documents housed, often poorly organized and unrecognized, in obscure corners of other collections. The story of how former president Theodore Roosevelt selected her to head the Committee on Safety after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire was written up in pencil on a pad of yellow paper, jotted down by an obscure New Yorker, and stored almost forgotten in a warehouse in the Maryland suburbs. A fascinating correspondence about efforts to save leaders of the International Labor Organization from the Nazis was lost at Harvard University amid a large volume of papers on suffrage leaders. Of course, historians putting the records together closer to the era in which Frances Perkins lived would have known that Frances was both a suffrage leader and a labor advocate, but scholars born later did not easily make that connection.

Two extremely important sources of information were Francess 1946 biography of FDR, called The Roosevelt I Knew, which became a key source for New Deal scholars for many years, and an extensive oral history, running to five thousand pages, compiled by the Columbia University Oral History Research Office. They are invaluable, partially because of the wealth of details they offer, but also because Perkins recalled, almost verbatim, conversations she had had over a lifetime, and events at which she was a participant and eyewitness. The interviews were conducted in the 1950s, when Perkins was in her seventies.

Many items of potential importance have disappeared. Letters that might have shed light on the nature of Francess close relationships with several women friends are gone. Mary Harrimans papers were destroyed in a warehouse fire in New York. The children of Caroline ODay, one of the first U.S. congresswomen, allowed their mothers papers to be thrown into a rubbish heap.

A few dramatic turns of events allowed some documents to survive. For example, some condolence letters sent by close friends to Frances when Mary died suggest an intimate friendship between the two women. Historian Winifred Wandersee had planned to write a biography of Frances Perkins and was given access by Frances Perkinss only child, Susanna Wilson Coggeshall, to some personal correspondence. She asked Susanna questions about what the letters suggested about her mothers life, and Susanna cut off further access to the letters, something she did to other aspiring biographers as well. Winifred had taken notes on the letters, however. She died of cancer before she could complete her biography, but she arranged for her research to be archived at Cornell University. Some of the letters that she cited in those files are now mysteriously missing from Frances Perkinss papers at Columbia, but survive in handwritten form, in Winifreds hand, at Cornell, thanks to her brother Richards devotion to his sisters memory.

Professor Maurice Neufeld, a colleague of Francess at Cornell, found a cache of notes and letters in her desk after her death. Frances had left the papers there while she took a trip, but she fell ill and died in New York City. Fearing that Susanna might destroy the documents, Neufeld secretly copied these papers before handing the originals to Susanna. He stored the documents at the Library of Congress, with instructions not to release them publicly until his death. Neufeld died in 2004, and the documents were made available without restriction for the first time. It was within those notes that Frances poured out her sorrow at her inability to give wholehearted love to her difficult daughter. She wrote these kinds of thoughts down for herself to better prepare for discussing them in confession and in prayer, and they give us insight into her most private musings.