Frances Perkins was standing on a Washington Square sidewalk on 25 March 1911 when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory caught fire. She watched, along with a crowd of several hundred, as young women who could not get out of a building whose exit doors had been locked from the outside jumped from the ninth floor. One hundred and forty-six people died in eighteen minutes. Perkins was thirty-one years old, and she later said that the New Deal began that afternoon.
She had been born Fannie Coralie Perkins in Boston in 1880, educated at Mount Holyoke in chemistry and physics, and had drifted into social work by way of Hull House in Chicago. The fire converted a reformist sympathy into something closer to a vocation. She joined the Committee on Safety of the City of New York, learned to write legislation, learned to count votes in Albany, and spent the next twenty years becoming the most technically competent labour administrator in the United States.
The Condition of Acceptance
When Franklin Roosevelt asked her to serve as Secretary of Labor in February 1933, Perkins did not immediately accept. She went to see him with a list written out in advance, and told him that she would take the job only if he was prepared to back the entire programme on it.
The list was: direct federal relief for the unemployed, a massive public works programme, minimum wage and maximum hours legislation, abolition of child labour, unemployment insurance, and old-age insurance. Roosevelt, by her account, looked at the list and asked whether she thought it could be done. She said she did not know. He told her to go ahead and try.
“I had more sense of accomplishment, I think, in the field of labour legislation than in anything else. But the thing I am proudest of is that I told him what I wanted before I took the job, and he never once went back on it.”— Frances Perkins, oral history, Columbia University
Almost every item on that list became law within six years. It is difficult to name another cabinet appointment in American history with a comparable ratio of stated intention to delivered outcome.
Social Security
Perkins chaired the Committee on Economic Security, the body that drafted what became the Social Security Act of 1935. The work was done under severe time pressure and against constitutional uncertainty — the Supreme Court had been striking down New Deal legislation with some regularity, and there was no settled view on whether the federal government could levy a payroll tax for social insurance at all.
The solution she and her committee arrived at was to structure the programme as a contributory insurance scheme rather than a welfare payment: workers and employers would both pay in, and benefits would be drawn as an earned right rather than granted as relief. This was partly a legal strategy and partly a political one. Perkins understood that a benefit people had paid for would be far harder to repeal than a benefit they had been given.
Insurance, Not Charity
Perkins insisted that Social Security be funded by dedicated payroll contributions rather than general revenue. Economists then and since have argued this was inefficient. She was making a political calculation rather than an economic one: a programme framed as an earned entitlement acquires a constituency that will defend it. Nearly a century later, the design has outlasted every attempt to dismantle it.
The Act as passed was significantly narrower than what she had wanted. Agricultural and domestic workers were excluded — categories that in 1935 covered roughly two-thirds of Black workers in the United States. The exclusion was the price of Southern Democratic votes, and Perkins accepted it in order to get the bill through. It is the largest compromise of her career and she never fully defended it.
The Rest of the List
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 established the federal minimum wage, the forty-hour week, time-and-a-half for overtime, and the abolition of most child labour. It was the last major piece of New Deal legislation and the one Perkins had wanted longest. She had been trying to get maximum-hours law onto the books since her Albany days a quarter of a century earlier.
She also administered the Labor Department through the most turbulent period of union organising in American history, and did so with a conspicuous refusal to take sides in a way that made her enemies in both directions. Business regarded her as a radical. The CIO regarded her as insufficiently supportive. A congressional faction attempted to impeach her in 1939 over her refusal to deport the longshoremen’s leader Harry Bridges without due process. The attempt failed, and she did not change her position.
“The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”— Frances Perkins
Why She Is Not Better Known
Perkins served twelve years, longer than any Labor Secretary before or since, and left office with a legislative record that shaped the daily conditions of American working life more than any other cabinet officer of the twentieth century. She is nonetheless close to invisible in popular memory of the era.
Part of it is that she was deliberately unglamorous. She wore a plain black dress and a tricorn hat as a kind of armour, having concluded early that the men she negotiated with responded better to a figure who reminded them of their mothers. She gave no memorable speeches. She refused to cultivate the press, which returned the favour.
And part of it is simply that the machinery she built works. Social Security is not experienced as an achievement; it is experienced as weather. The absence of children in factories is not experienced as a policy outcome. The people who construct the floor beneath a society are rarely the ones the society remembers.
Perkins in the Film
In The Great Depression, Perkins is the counterweight to the theorists. Eccles and Keynes argue about aggregate demand; Perkins is the one who has to write the statute, find the votes, and decide which exclusions she is willing to swallow to get it passed.
Her central scene is the February 1933 meeting with Roosevelt — two people at a desk, a handwritten list, and a question about whether it can be done. The film plays it without music. It is the quietest scene in the picture and arguably the most consequential.