The Woman Behind The New Deal
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This message comes from Capital One. Access comprehensive solutions from a top commercial bank that prioritizes your needs today and goals for tomorrow. Learn more at CapitalOne.com slash commercial. Member FDIC. Prologue. The Fire. March 25th, 1911. Washington Square in Manhattan. Pauline Pepp arrives at work on the eighth floor of a high-rise building. She sits at her station.

an industrial sewing machine. Well, it was a very big place. Oh, my God, I couldn't... Just a big place with machines and windows. A lot of windows with shades. That's what they had. This is her voice, recorded years later in an interview. A lot of young girls...

Pauline was one of hundreds of workers, mostly young women, employed by the Triangle Waist Company. It made the very popular Gibson Girl blouses, fluffy, high-neck, big sleeves, and they were all made of gold.

The work was constant. Maximizing the use of space was very important to boosting the profitability of the business. So the workers were actually working at their sewing machines shoulder to shoulder. Their forearms were practically brushing each other as they did their work.

Today, we'd call this kind of place a sweatshop. There were slots in the back of the machines, just holes, and the excess cloth and the strings and threads would be pushed down into sort of a trash slot at the back of the desk so that the debris could be brushed away quickly without having to be removed. It was hot. It was loud. It was not safe.

They would be frequently oiling the machines to make sure that the machines worked as quickly as possible. An overcrowded room filled with people and machines, all on top of piles of oily cloth. Meanwhile, they were supervised with, generally by men, who smoked cigars while they worked. Cigar ash fell onto the fabric, went onto the oily cloths.

So what you had is a circumstance where it wasn't if a fire would start, it was when a fire would start. At 4.40 p.m., right before Pauline was about to wrap up her shift, a fire started on the eighth floor and quickly spread. Pauline watched in horror. That lingerie was so, so white, it went in a blaze in a minute. The windows got caught, the shades, everything. Oh, my God.

And the workers began fleeing. The fire escape collapsed. There was only one exit door. The owners of the company had closed some of the other doors to prevent people from stealing. The factory became a trap. Inside of the building was basically a towering inferno. Bystanders started to gather in the streets.

and witnessed the first of the women jumping out of the windows to escape the flames. I guess the sky must have been black. Oh, the smoke. It was terrible. I'll never forget that time. Never. Never forget it. Pauline survived. Many others didn't. As many as 62 people jumped to their deaths. In total, 146 workers died. Most were women immigrants.

It was the worst industrial accident in New York City history up to that point, and hundreds of people witnessed it. It happened in front of New York. One of the people watching that day was a young woman named Frances Perkins. What she saw disturbed her and changed her. It led her on an epic journey that would ultimately transform the country.

In the years that followed the fire, Frances Perkins became the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet. She was a mastermind of programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance, the 40-hour work week, minimum wage, and many more. The things that she created remain fundamental pieces of our Social Security and safety net today. Without her, what would we have? It's hard to even imagine.

On this episode of ThruLine from NPR, the story of Frances Perkins, the woman behind the New Deal. Hi, my name's Alyssa. I'm in Madison, Wisconsin, and I actually work in public radio. And shows like this one just keep me really engaged and inspired. It's my favorite one. So you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

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This message comes from Progressive Insurance and the Name Your Price tool. It helps you find car insurance options in your budget. Try it today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Part 1. A Bold Front. May 6th, 1955.

Francis Perkins stepped off the train in South Hadley, Massachusetts, a small town on the banks of the Connecticut River.

The year was 1898, and she was 18 years old. She was just starting her freshman year of college at Mount Holyoke. She soon fell in love with the school's rolling green lawns, iconic bells, and gothic buildings. It's a wonder that I got any liberal education. Not many girls went to college in those days.

It was even thought to be somewhat dangerous for a woman's health to pursue higher education. She might have fits or fevers. It might overexert her. This is Kirsten Downey, author of The Woman Behind the New Deal, which is a biography of Francis Perkins. Perkins had grown up in a home where education was prized. I had a classical education before I went to college. My father taught me Greek when I was eight years old. He read it for pleasure.

at Mount Holyoke. She ends up studying science. She was popular at school. Her classmates nicknamed her Perk. She became the president of her senior class, where their motto, by the way, was Be Ye Steadfast. And her experience going to college at Mount Holyoke really opened her eyes to many things. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures...

Francis had grown up just 50 miles from Mount Holyoke in a middle-class religious family. As a kid, she spent every Sunday with her parents and sister at the Congregationalist church in town. Her family also valued their family legacy, which went back to the American Revolution.

This is Stephanie Dre. She writes historical fiction, including a book about Francis Perkins called... Becoming Madam Secretary. To write her book, she did extensive archival research into Perkins' life. Her family was steeped in the building of America, and she felt a strong patriotic urge...

That patriotism, alongside her faith, formed a strong sense of duty to others. Her parents were generous when it came to helping the poor. But Frances was also raised to believe that the people her family helped were in poverty because of their personal failings, like laziness, loose morals, or alcoholism. By going to Mount Holyoke, she found herself in an environment where she was beginning to raise questions.

She had some professors that took she and other classmates into factories to actually see what the working conditions were. I was astonished and fascinated by what I saw. It opened the door to the idea that there were some people much poorer than other people, and that the lack of comfort and security in some people was not solely due to the fact that they drank, which had been the prevailing view in my parental society.

When Perkins graduated in 1902, she headed straight for New York with her renewed sense of activism to a place she'd heard about in college called the Charity Organization Society.

She marched right into their office and demanded to see the man in charge. I had a round face, wide-eyed look. That makes you look younger than you really are. When the man in charge came down, they talked. She said she wanted to get a job. He asked her what she'd like to do. She told him she wanted to help the poor.

Wrong answer.

He explained to me in words of one and two syllables that in the first place, they wouldn't hire anybody so young as I was. And in the second place, I hadn't enough life experience to have any judgment at all about what to do with the poor, the needy, and those who were in trouble. He told her to try teaching instead. So she did. She took a job in Chicago at an all-girls academy. But the bug for activism never left her.

And she began volunteering at a pioneering institution called Hull House. Hull House was a place where activists lived together and organized together around social issues. Hull House was also a place that poor people could come and get help. Hull House was where the writer Upton Sinclair was based while he was researching the Chicago meatpacking industry for his famous book, The Jungle.

There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms, and thousands of rats would race about on it. This was the reality for many of the people Perkins helped at Hull House. Anguish would seize the workers, more dreadful than the agony of death. They were lost, and there was no deliverance for them, no hope for all the help it gave them. The vast city in which they lived might have been in ocean waves, a wilderness, a desert, a tomb.

Perkins would go out with older social workers, and they would go to the homes of some of these families that were living through terrible social breakdown. The mother was sick. The father was drunk. The children were crying. The dishes were piled up in the sink. The water didn't run and hadn't run for days. Hungry, cold, a lot of alcoholism, a lot of child abuse.

These families lived in crowded tenement housing, sometimes without windows or plumbing. And everyone was struggling for survival. We had had a very large influx of immigrants. From countries like Germany, Poland, Italy, and Ireland. Many of whom were financially desperate and would take work on whatever conditions that it was offered. Such things as holidays were not known. If the boss said you worked on a Sunday, you worked on a Sunday.

There was no overtime. No one ever heard of overtime. But all those hours of work didn't earn people enough money to get by. So families that couldn't make ends meet sent their children to work as well. For the children, it was very bad. Because of their small size, they were often tasked with dangerous jobs that nobody else could do. Industrial injury rate was very, very high.

And of course, what was happening is many, many children were being injured. The experience made Frances less naive and more determined. In 1907, she packed up and moved to Philly. Girls were coming to cities like Philadelphia on trains. Many of them were young Black women fleeing Jim Crow laws in the South.

And when they would arrive, there were often pimps and other human traffickers waiting on the platforms to trick them into going to boarding houses or false employment agencies that would in fact turn out to be brothels. Francis Perkins went undercover.

She pretended to be one of those migrant women searching for a job. She would go into the employment agencies and expose the people who were trying to kidnap these girls. It was dangerous work. She was actually chased by thugs that pimps sent after her on one rainy night. I was considerably alarmed because it was relatively late, 11 o'clock or so, and I was alone on a quiet street.

I remember thinking, what shall I do? What I did was what my father had always recommended that you do. She kept walking, but she could hear them gaining on her, their footsteps coming closer and closer. She spun on her heel and thrust her umbrella out at them. She made them run into the pointy end. And she screamed.

People poked their heads out of windows to see what was happening, and the attackers fled. It gave me the feeling that if you put up a bold front, people will turn and run. What else would you do? You can't run and let them stab you. Where does this come from, this spirit in her? I think it came from her deep faith. She believed that she was on a mission from God. She believed it was her Christian duty to help her fellow Americans lead a better life.

Coming up, Frances Perkins takes her mission back to New York City, where she would witness a tragedy that would change the course of her life. Hi, this is Omari from New York City. For a complete historical context and perspective, continue to listen to ThruLine from NPR.

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Part 2. Frozen Horror. Frozen Horror.

When Frances Perkins arrived in New York City in 1909, she immediately started making friends. She was an enormously gifted networker. She's engaging with people of all economic levels, artists, workers, government officials, heiresses. All while pursuing her master's degree in sociology and economics at Columbia University. She thought it would help her advocate for workers' rights.

And it happens that on March 25th, 1911, she's actually at the home of a very wealthy woman. In lower Manhattan, the Greenwich Village neighborhood. Facing Washington Square. They're having afternoon tea. Chatting, having a good time. And suddenly they hear all this noise from the street. They run out the front door to see what it is. It was just as the fire trucks were just arriving.

Hundreds of workers, mostly young women, were trapped inside the Triangle Shirtwaist factory as it burned. We rushed into the square just as they started to jump. This is how Frances Perkins later described what she saw. The firemen kept shouting to them not to jump, but they had no other choice. The flames were behind them. The frozen horror which came over us as we stood with our hands on our throats...

watching that horrible sight. This was a sight and a sound that she never forgot. The neighborhood around Washington Square was lined with beautiful, large townhomes and industrial buildings, like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which meant that not just poor people or working people saw this terrible tragedy. Rich, powerful people saw this.

And there was widespread horror and a desire to make change. Francis Perkins wasn't going to let it go. She wasn't just horrified. She was angry. Something was wrong in that building or it never could have happened. She and other activists in New York pushed for a commission to investigate what happened and proposed regulations to prevent it from happening again.

They held hearings all around the state of New York, and they brought in hundreds and hundreds of witnesses to talk about industrial conditions, focused very much on fire, but all kinds of other things. Child labor came up, working hours came up, sanitary conditions. Francis Perkins worked on the commission for several years, and she knew there was no substitute for seeing something firsthand. She also took...

the commissioners to workplaces themselves, for example, at a cannery or a factory, and see for themselves how many children were employed there, or under what conditions the women were working, or how long the men were being asked to work, and at what pay.

The commission's 1915 report was thousands of pages long. It included detailed policy recommendations, recommendations that Francis Perkins pushed to become law.

Some of the things that they got done are smoking in factories banned. They established a requirement that factories should have automatic water sprinklers. They required safe fire escapes. They required adequate elevators. They required the thing that we all completely live with all the time now is requiring exit signs so we know how to get out and make our way to safety in the event of a fire.

Today, it's really easy to take for granted how revolutionary these reforms were. New York State had enacted the most progressive regulations for worker safety in the country. And in the following years, other states began following their example. Think of how many times in your life something has felt kind of overcrowded or you feel a little nervous and you look around and you look for that exit sign. You know how to get out. That's Francis Perkins' work. And people change.

took notice. She became pretty famous in New York because of the successes that she was having. But the big thing that happened is that Al Smith, who she'd worked with so closely with the Factory Investigating Commission, he was a New York City politician with a ton of ambition, was elected governor of New York. And when he took office in 1919, he named her to the New York State Industrial Commission, which was a pretty big job.

And she became one of five commissioners overseeing working conditions throughout the whole state. And she started really to become an expert on all aspects of labor law administration. So at this point, Frances Perkins is in her 30s. She loves New York. She'd also gotten married and had a kid. She was settled.

But her life would be upended again when Al Smith, her mentor and the governor of New York, decided not to run for re-election in 1928. He was replaced by a wealthy man who had an estate on the Hudson River. His name? Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or as he's known today, FDR.

Frances Perkins had first met him at a social event years before. And she thought he was a huge loser. He had lots of ambitions without a lot of talent to back it up, in her opinion. He was not very compassionate, in her opinion. She must have thought he was...

quite a lightweight, that he was living up to the nickname that some gave him, which was Feather Duster Roosevelt. But even so, she acted as a political advisor to FDR during his campaign for governor of New York. During that time, she got to know a different version of the man. In the years since she'd first met him, he contracted polio and now used a wheelchair.

And that is when she said she felt a real change in him, that polio had knocked him between the eyes.

He had suffered, and suddenly she felt that he had matured and that he had learned to care about people in a way that he had never done so before. This go-around, they became fast friends. They got along marvelously. They had very similar senses of humor, and they enjoyed a lot of the same sort of things. With her help, FDR won the governorship.

And he rewarded Frances Perkins by making her New York's industrial commissioner, one of the most powerful officials in the state. And she felt like it was very important for her to live up to his hopes for her. So she got to work and she got results. The labor reforms that Perkins was implementing got him a lot of very good publicity all around the country. So she became a key figure.

He must have really believed in her. They must have really developed a close relationship at that point. Yes, he knew that she would never betray him. He knew he could trust her completely. She never surprised him. If something happened and there was a problem, she told him the truth. And they talked it through and she would tell him, here's what my solution is. This is a day of national consecration.

After four years as governor, FDR turns around and runs for president of the United States. And he wins. And I am certain that on this day, my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the presidency, I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impels. And he ran mostly on a platform of recovering from the Great Depression.

Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. About 10 days before he officially took office, FDR asked Frances Perkins for a meeting. The newly elected president called her to his townhouse in New York City. She arrives and is escorted to one of the many rooms in the house. This is a wood-paneled room. The door opened.

Roosevelt said to me, I guess you know what I want you for. He got pretty much directly to the point and said, I'd like you to be my secretary of labor. He said, I really mean it, Francis. She responds by being coy. Of course I made the usual courteous remarks about how honored and surprised I was. He said, oh, come on now. Don't say surprised. You're no fool.

She had a little list of programs and priorities in her pocket. I had about a day's notice before having to show up at Roosevelt's house. It was in that 24-hour gap that I wrote out the list of things that I thought I would like to try to do. Which she thought were probably so extreme that he would never commit to them.

I did not know then actually how deeply his heart was involved in some of these things. I did not know how deeply he gave a damn about whether the working girls back ached or not. She hands him the list and she says, you don't want me for your secretary of labor unless you want me to do these things. And what we know it was on that list was work hour limitations, ban on child labor, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, social security,

He looked at the list and he agreed to basically everything except... Unemployment insurance and Social Security. At that point, of course, he begins to object by saying, You know, Frances, I don't believe in the dole and I never will. He said, Frances, that's crazy. She didn't think so, but she dropped it for the moment because FDR had called her bluff, which meant she had a big decision to make.

The stress brought her to tears. Her husband suffered from what we now call bipolar disorder, and he had to be committed. And so suddenly, Frances found herself a single mother of a teenage daughter who needed her. And then there was the pressure.

If she accepted, she'd be the first woman cabinet secretary in American history. And she was so frightened that she would ruin everything for other women. She felt that she would somehow mess up and that no other woman would be invited to this position again for many, many years. She went to her bishop to actually ask questions.

whether or not he thought she should take the job. He wrote to her. You know, if you were a soldier and you had a talent that could save the nation during war, wouldn't it be your moral responsibility to serve? We need you. And so she felt as if God had called her to it and that she did not really have a choice. She called FDR and accepted the job. And then she became Secretary of Labor. She was sworn in.

Coming up, Francis Perkins goes to Washington in the middle of the greatest economic crisis ever to face the U.S.

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When Frances Perkins arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1933, her very presence made an impact. When she becomes secretary of labor and joins the cabinet, it's all so odd to people that they don't even know what to call her. You know, what do you call a woman in that role? And so they came up with the idea of calling her Madam Secretary. Madam Secretary Perkins was taking over a department that people in Washington barely thought about.

She found the Labor Department, when she arrived, to be almost defunct. Very quiet, very few people working. But with FDR's blessing, she was going to change that. That meant that she could reshape it. So she worked the room. She knew how to work the politicians' offices.

in Washington, D.C. But this was D.C. in the 1930s. To say it was a boys club would be an understatement. Within the cabinet, she was worried that she would be viewed by her fellow cabinet members as an intrusive woman or a silly woman. And so she wanted to be taken very seriously.

She was very calculating about how she was going to operate politically with men. She had this folder full of papers that she called Notes on the Male Mind. One of the things that she came to conclude is that men would take women more seriously if they reminded them of their mothers.

that they respected their mothers, they would not sexually harass their mothers, and that they might listen to the opinions of their mothers. So Frances started dressing like their mothers. And it's calculating, it's manipulative, and it's extremely effective. Almost right away, she became one of the most important members of the cabinet. FDR always listened to her. And this is something we know because one of her fellow cabinet members, Secretary Ickes, wrote in his own diary that...

The men in the room would get frustrated with Francis Perkins lecturing, and yet the president was always at rapt attention to her. The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life. When the Roosevelt administration began in 1933, the United States was in the middle of the worst economic calamity in its history.

what we today call the Great Depression. One of the horrors of the Great Depression is that it exposed a lot of the dark realities of the workplace. Especially for older people. It had been bad for everybody, but had been even worse for the elderly. People would see elderly people eating out of trash cans. They were starving to death.

They needed to have a system that would provide some income support for people when they get to the phase of their lives where they're simply less employable. And Frances Perkins saw an opportunity. FDR had rejected the idea of Social Security when she first proposed it, but not now. Just as the Triangle Fire had been a crisis that was a buildable moment...

So the Great Depression was? You've had a streak of bad luck. We're going to deal the cards over again. We'll have a new deal. In 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act into law. It was an appeal to Lady Luck, with the hope that springs in every man's heart when you say, I'll give you some new cards. Social Security was the crown jewel of Francis Perkins' ideas. Here's how it works.

You pay into Social Security when you're young and strong so that you can get it when you're old and frail. It wasn't charity. It's you worked for it, you earned it, you'll get it later. It's an insurance system. It's not an entitlement. It wasn't, as FDR had once put it, the dole.

But many people in America thought Social Security was a huge government overreach, as creeping socialism into the United States, a point Francis Perkins disputed. "What we intended to do was not to turn over the pattern of American life. What we did was to correct certain obvious defects. It's just as though when you have a leaky pipe, you mend the pipe. You don't pull out the plumbing."

Social Security helped pull millions of elderly people out of poverty. Perkins considers this her single biggest victory of her life. But it wasn't the only victory. Over the next few years, nearly every idea Perkins had presented to FDR before taking the job became law.

unemployment insurance, restrictions on child labor, minimum wage, work hour limitations. Whether she intended to or not, Frances Perkins had imagined a new America and made it a reality. Most people generally have a really hard time imagining what could be. They only know what is. But what Perkins had was a great imagination for what could be and what would be the steps involved in getting there.

But making major changes to the government came with a price. As Frances Perkins' national profile grew, she became a target. A labor leader named Harry Bridges, a longshoreman in San Francisco, was born in Australia but became a very effective labor organizer. And a lot of business people in Australia

California wanted him deported. At this time, the Labor Department was in charge of the U.S.'s immigration enforcement. So it was Frances Perkins' call to make. So she said that they needed to follow the process of the law. And she insisted on him getting full due process.

Bridges had been a member of the Communist Party in the past, and many argued that he was dangerous. Perkins testified before Congress that regardless of Bridges' ideology or past, he deserved his day in court. The due process mattered. This was obviously controversial. In some circles, articles of impeachment were brought against Perkins for her failure to enforce immigration law.

Did FDR support her through this? What happened? He said nothing. So what does that mean? She just twisted in the wind until the effort was dropped. Wow. So wait a minute. Was this a betrayal a bit of FDR of her? Like, did he not go out on a limb for her in that situation? Well, she kept a stiff upper lip.

about things. She said about FDR, well, we're both Yankees, so he knows I'm not supposed to start crying. So Frances Perkins kept her job, but her reputation had taken a hit, and FDR decided to act. Ultimately, he takes immigration naturalization away from the Labor Department, and they moved it into the Justice Department, and it became an issue of criminal enforcement.

At this point, Frances Perkins was one of the most famous women in America. And here she was, basically being demoted by FDR. He needed at that point to look like he was going to be tough on it. I submitted a resignation and pressed very hard for the acceptance of that resignation because I really didn't want to go on with it. The cruelty of it, very painful and lonely. Her life was often lonely. She was constantly being demoted.

challenged with terrible questions that she had to try to resolve. She found the job so exhausting and depressing. "I'm bored to death by power. I think it's terrible to have it. The more authority you have, the more impossible situations you're going to be up against. And the more your conscience is going to be boiling all the time and keeping you awake nights."

At one point, she even packed her stuff up and sent it back to New York. But FDR just said, I can't, I can't have you go. I absolutely need you. Perkins stayed on as Labor Secretary. But soon, all her policy ideas would take a backseat. World War II was coming to the United States.

She's going to be part of FDR's war cabinet. And this would be where she made her final major move as part of the Roosevelt administration, keeping women out of the draft. Women had been given the right to vote in 1920. There was a very large constituency of people that said it's only just to send women to war now. But Perkins took a different stand on that.

Perkins said, women play a much bigger role socially than as workers. They care for children. They care for relatives. They care for aging family. If we take young, able-bodied women and draft them and send them to war, who's going to take care of everybody they left behind who they've been taking care of?

She ended up being correct, at least economically, because it was women in the factories and across the country that fueled the effort here. And it changed how women in America viewed themselves. And it allowed, it was yet another thing that allowed for a huge expansion of prosperity in America. Francis Perkins would stay in FDR's cabinet until his death in 1945, just months before the end of the war.

When Harry Truman took over as president, she stepped down as labor secretary and was appointed to the Civil Service Commission. She still remains the longest-serving secretary of labor in American history. Eventually, she became a lecturer at Cornell University and spent the rest of her career there until her death in 1965.

Something Frances wrote at the end of her life is that she's a day laborer in the garden of the Lord. So you're always giving over the project to a new generation. You can only do your part and hope that it matters in the future, even if it isn't successful during your lifetime. We've been reading you Frances Perkins' words throughout this episode. Here's the woman herself. One thing I know...

that no politician, no political party, no political group could possibly destroy this act and still maintain our democratic system. It is safe. It is safe forever and for the benefit of the people of the United States. She gives us hope. She faced problems that seemed intractable and she found solutions.

She was very conscientious about realizing that it isn't just getting, it isn't just recognizing a problem. It isn't just passing legislation. The legislation has to work. The program needs to feel like it's fair. I think that was part of why so many of the things that she's done have really stood the test of time. We will go forward into the future a stronger nation because of the fact that we have this basic rock of security under all of our people.

That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablui. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And...

I'm Julia Morales and I played Frances Perkins. If you want to learn more about Julia's work as a filmmaker and actor, you can visit Julia Morales dot com. Thank you to Michael Parrish, Hannah Chin, Carolyn Crouch, Washington Walks and Amity Shlaes. Excerpts of the Frances Perkins oral history interview from 1955.

was given to us courtesy of the Oral History Archives at Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Thanks also to Johannes Dergi, Edith Chapin, Nadia Lansi, and Colin Campbell. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. The episode was mixed and mastered by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed and performed by Ramtin, with additional music from Hania Rani.

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