Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

The ‘woman behind the New Deal’ gets her due

FDR’s mistress, mother and wife have all gotten plenty of ink.

Now, the woman who was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s social conscience — Labor Secretary Frances Perkins — is getting some well-deserved attention.

Kirstin Downey’s excellent new biography — “The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience” (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 458 pgs.) — is timed perfectly as the U.S. faces the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression.

In the book’s opening, Downey describes the 1933 meeting when FDR asked Perkins to be his secretary of Labor — making her the first woman to serve in a presidential Cabinet. They were old friends: Perkins had worked for FDR since 1928, when he became governor of New York. Under the previous governor, Al Smith, Perkins had established herself as a leading reformer in protecting the health, safety and rights of workers.

Perkins accepted FDR’s offer; she would serve until his death in 1945. Many of the New Deal’s greatest achievements — Social Security, the 40-hour workweek, the elimination of child labor, unemployment insurance — bear her imprint.

Perkins found her life’s mission on March 25, 1911, when the then-31-year-old social worker watched young women (most of them immigrant girls) jump to their deaths during Manhattan’s Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

The tragedy also changed her politics. Born into a comfortable Massachusetts Republican family in 1880, Perkins became a Democrat.

Long before Hillary Clinton, Perkins wrestled with how the public, the press and male politicians perceived an ambitious woman.

Ferociously self-controlled and coolly insightful, Perkins realized early on that men found maternal figures unthreatening. Thus, at 33, Perkins began dressing like a dowdy middle-aged matron, earning her the sobriquet “Ma” Perkins.

FDR paid Perkins the ultimate compliment: He treated her as a peer. In turn, she gave him utter loyalty. Her goal: keeping the powerless on his crowded radar.

No one would ever accuse Perkins of sharing too much.

She had a difficult personal life, which she kept private. Soon after her marriage in 1913, her bipolar husband had a mental breakdown. (Their daughter also was bipolar.) Unable to work, he required expensive private care, which Perkins paid for with her government salary. (The country’s failure to institute national health insurance was Perkins’s great disappointment.)

Downey believes one reason Perkins has been overlooked is her refusal to cozy up to reporters and share personal tidbits. As this biography makes clear, Perkins wasn’t in government for fame or power; she was there to help others.

This highly intelligent, determined, deliberately dowdy public servant cuts a truly heroic figure.