the woman behind the new deal by kirstin downey

Social work, Perkins decided when she graduated in 1902, would be her life’s calling. At Mount Holyoke College, she was galvanized by a lecture by Florence Kelley of the National Consumers League, an organization dedicated to abolishing child labor and sweatshops. Born in Boston in 1880, the smart, articulate girl soon found herself questioning her family’s conservative values. Frances Perkins, FDR knew, was a woman who got things done.ĭowney’s cogent resume of Perkins’ early life and career shows her developing the skills she would put to triumphant use as one of the principal architects of the New Deal. The Depression had shaken Americans’ traditional faith in laissez-faire economic policy after 3 1/2 years of inaction by the Herbert Hoover administration, they were desperate for their government to do something, anything. Like Perkins, he believed that the time was ripe for dramatic federal initiatives. “She was proposing a fundamental and radical restructuring of American society,” Downey writes, adding: “To succeed, she would have to overcome opposition from courts, business, labor unions, conservatives.” Perkins needed to be sure FDR would back her she was well aware that “he often chose political expediency over idealism.” She had his full support, Roosevelt assured her.

It was not an idle question, as journalist Kirstin Downey makes clear in the prologue to her shrewd, appreciative biography of Perkins. “Are you sure you want this done?” she asked FDR. The goals she outlined on that chilly winter night constituted the most sweepingly ambitious to-do list any public official had ever presented: direct federal aid for unemployment relief, a massive public works program, minimum wage and maximum work-hours legislation, compensation for workers injured on the job, workplace safety regulations, a ban on child labor and, finally - and most radically - a national pension system as well as one for health insurance.

The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscienceįrances Perkins knew exactly what she wanted when President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered her the post of secretary of Labor in February 1933.

The woman behind the new deal by kirstin downey