EPISODE 319

Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was the first female cabinet member in U.S. history. Appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Perkins is known as the “Mother of Social Security” for her pivotal role in the creation of The New Deal’s greatest legacy. In this episode, Amanda Hatch, Executive Director of the Frances Perkins Center in Newscastle, ME, shares stories about this early feminist icon — and her lifelong commitment to social insurance for the American people. As Frances Perkins herself said, she came to Washington in 1933 for “God, FDR, and the common workingmen.”

TRANSCRIPT:

ANNOUNCER: It’s You Earned This, the Social Security and Medicare podcast, brought to you by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. And now, your host, Walter Gottlieb. 

WALTER: When you look at the famous photo of Franklin Delano Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act into law in 1935, there is a sea of men in the room, but there’s one woman over his shoulder wearing a black tricorn hat, looking directly into the camera. That woman was Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor.

She was the first woman ever to join a presidential cabinet, and she made it a condition of taking the job that Franklin D. Roosevelt would let her “ride herd” on the creation of Social Security. That’s why she is called the “Mother of Social Security.”

Frances Perkins was a social worker by training. She was a reformer during the Progressive Era in the early 20th century. In fact, she embodied the entire progressive era through her work. Today, we’re going to find out more about this fascinating lady who changed the course of American history.

We are talking to Amanda Hatch, Executive Director of the Frances Perkins Center at the Frances Perkins National Monument, up in Newcastle, Maine.

We did some shooting there for our documentary, Social Security: 90 Years Strong, and Frances Perkins is definitely a major character in that film — and in life, too. So let’s get right to it with our interview with Amanda Hatch.

And joining me in the studio today for this interview is our very own podcast producer, Mel Reilly. Hey, Mel.

MELANIE: Hey, how are you?

WALTER: I’m doing okay. I’m really happy to have you here. We’re going to co-host, co-pilot this episode together?

MELANIE: Yes, we are.

WALTER: I’m looking forward to it. And there’s a reason you’re here. It’s because you also helped produce the documentary Social Security: 90 Years Strong, which has a big section about Frances Perkins. You also kind of know Amanda already from our two organizations collaborating.

MELANIE: That’s right. Very excited to hear from her.

WALTER: Well, let’s bring Amanda in. Joining us from Newcastle, Maine, is that right, Amanda Hatch?

AMANDA: Correct.

WALTER: And Amanda, remind us again what the formal name of the organization is.

AMANDA: We are the Frances Perkins Center, and we are the official philanthropic partner of the brand new Frances Perkins National Monument.

WALTER: Congratulations on that!

AMANDA: Thank you.

WALTER: Anybody who visits the Frances Perkins Center in Newcastle, Maine, or watches the documentary will see that you have a remarkably preserved home of Frances Perkins’ family up there. And she did spend some time there in the summers or something like that?

AMANDA: Yeah. Most summers throughout her life, she would return to the home, and later in her life, she owned it, but she never lived there year-round.

WALTER: And I’d say to anyone who’s listening, if you’re ever up in Maine and you can get over to Newcastle, it’s well worth a visit.

AMANDA: Yes. And we strongly encourage it, especially during the summer when we’re open. We, as a nonprofit, help welcome visitors to the National Monument in partnership with the National Park Service. So, check out our summer tourism season and come visit us.

WALTER: And I definitely second that emotion.

So let’s get on with it. If you had to quickly explain who Frances Perkins was and what her legacy was, what would you say?

AMANDA: It depends on how quickly. I think I would need some time. I think I have a 30-second, a 90-second, and a five-minute version. There’s just so much to say about her.

WALTER: Could we get the elevator pitch?

AMANDA: The elevator pitch. So, Frances Perkins is best known as the first woman to serve in the U.S. presidential cabinet. So she was the Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

She was the longest-serving Secretary of Labor. She actually served in that role for 12 years, from 1933 to 1945. I would also add that I consider her a feminist icon because she was a lot of “the first” in male-dominated spaces, like in a presidential cabinet.

But in that role, she also crafted many of the well-known New Deal policies that remain in place in some form today, such as Social Security, minimum wages, and worker safety protections. She was really the architect and driving force behind many of those policies.

WALTER: And speaking of feminist icons, Melanie.

MELANIE: Oh, thank you.

WALTER: Take it away.

MELANIE: Amanda, how well-known is Frances Perkins? When you tell people where you work, do they know who she was?

AMANDA: Unfortunately, not, which is a big part of what we do at the Frances Perkins Center is just making sure that people know the name Frances Perkins, and that they recognize her role in American history.

I will say now that, since we are a national monument, some of the folks who come in are really coming because of Frances Perkins. So, I am meeting more and more people who know who she is, but usually they are in a public service role, a union, or a labor-adjacent field.

The common person who’s coming to the National Monument right now — because it is a national monument — wants their stamp in their National Park Passport book. They don’t know who Frances Perkins is, so that’s our opportunity to then grab them and say, “Have we got some stories to tell you.”

WALTER: Stories indeed. And I was a history nerd, so I knew who she was, and we hope more people do in the future. Amanda, when did Frances Perkins first come onto your radar as an important historical figure?

AMANDA: I would say, honestly, not until I moved to Newcastle, Maine in 2015. The Frances Perkins Center used to have a storefront in downtown Damariscotta, which is the twin city of Newcastle. So, if you were walking through downtown, you would actually pass a big sign that said “Frances Perkins Center.”

So, at that point, I had looked into see, well, who is this person? I don’t think that she came up in any of my history classes. I’m also a self-proclaimed history nerd, did a lot of women’s studies work in college, but I had never heard of Frances Perkins.

MELANIE: And how does it feel to work in her house? What makes it so special? It must be really cool to be there.

AMANDA: It is. And at the risk of sounding very cliché, it’s inspiring. It’s nice to be able to go into that space. When we have people visit us, especially last summer, someone who sticks out in my mind is someone who came and was very emotional, saying, “It felt like coming home,” because she felt such a strong connection to Frances Perkins. And we as staff get to have that feeling every day.

We’re very lucky to be able to go inside the house and literally sit in some of the same places where Frances sat, and walk the trails she would walk when she came to visit. So it’s really inspiring when we’re feeling really worn down by our work and stressed out.

Much like Frances, she would go to the homestead, that’s where she would find her rest and restoration during the summer, take herself out of politics and really disconnect.

We don’t have that luxury every day at work, but we do try to find those spaces where we can learn something from Frances and take those moments of peace at her homestead.

WALTER: That is actually inspiring. Frances Perkins seemed to be dedicated to helping women and the poor from the very beginning of her career. How was that perspective shaped? She actually witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911?

AMANDA: She did. And we have quotes where she actually said that witnessing the tragic event in 1911 was the day the New Deal was born. In her mind, that was the catalyst that really pushed her to move forward with so much of the legislation that she eventually passed. But before that, I think I would actually start as far back as her childhood, her earliest years, spending time at that family homestead with her grandmother in particular.

She credits her grandmother with helping to shape her values, and helping her figure out what was important to her, how community functions, and works. That’s a really New England idea, and something that she really learned from her grandmother, as far back as her childhood. And then, in college, she attended Mount Holyoke College, and one of her classes required her to visit a factory and observe the conditions there. That was another formative moment.

I think seeing firsthand how people were treated in the factories, how dangerous it was to work there, talking to some of the people who had been severely injured and lost their income while working in the factory, that really started to put her on that path which eventually took her to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, to witnessing that event, and then launching her career forward.

WALTER: She was really somebody who embodied the progressive movement of the early 20th century.

AMANDA: Yes, absolutely.

MELANIE: So as we know, Frances Perkins was the first female cabinet member in U.S. history. The next female cabinet member wouldn’t be appointed until 1953, and the third in 1975. Tell us a little bit about how Frances became the first female cabinet member in history.

AMANDA: That’s a good question, because I think a lot of times we talk about Frances as if her life began in 1933. But she worked with FDR in the New York State government before that, when he was governor. Even before that, she was actually more closely aligned with Governor Al Smith. As the story goes, Frances didn’t really like FDR when he was a senator, but she interacted with him at the State House in New York, and obviously, that changed over time.

They ended up working very closely at the state level and built a mutual respect that carried over, and he clearly trusted and respected her enough to ask her to become his Secretary of Labor. She came to that position with a list of policy priorities and accepted the position only after FDR agreed to support her on those non-negotiable policy priorities, which she called her “practical possibilities.”

AMANDA: Again, I think that shows a great level of trust and respect that was there before they even got to the White House… that he would say “Yes, Frances, if you’re saying this is non-negotiable, and because I trust that you have a plan, I will support you on these.

WALTER: She apparently wouldn’t accept the job of Secretary of Labor unless FDR promised her that she could guide the creation of a Social Security program. She said, “I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten plain common workingmen.”

MELANIE: Frances Perkins figures prominently in our documentary. One of the interviewees said that we wouldn’t have Social Security without Frances Perkins, and she is often called the “mother of Social Security.” And FDR said, “You love this thing… I know you’ll put your back into it.”  Hearing about her, that seems fitting, doesn’t it?

AMANDA: It sure does. I think that anything that she cared a lot about was well known to put her back into it, that it was going to happen if Frances Perkins cared that much about it. So I think that all of that is a very fitting description of her.

WALTER: And as you know, Amanda, enacting Social Security was not easy because there were a lot of forces aligned against it, and Frances Perkins found herself having to bridge those forces and try to bring enough of the stakeholders together to get it through Congress.

In the documentary, your former executive director, Giovanna Gray Lockhart, tells a story about Frances leading a stakeholders meeting, trying to get Social Security over the finish line. We’re gonna listen to that now, and I want to hear your response to it.

LOCKHART RECORDING: When Social Security was being debated in 1935, conservatives made very colorful attacks on It. They, of course, called it “socialism,” but they also said that it was gonna bring down the pillars of our democracy. It was gonna crush us.

BILL ARNONE RECORDING: From the start, there were ideologues, who were on the right of the spectrum, who just didn’t want the government involved in anything. Let Americans rely on rugged individualism. That’s the essence of America.

CONSERVATIVE POLITICIAN RECORDING: The largest tax bill in history, and to call it Social Security is a fraud on the working man.

DOCUMENTARY RECORDING: Frances Perkins was able to talk across different stakeholders, such as employers and workers, and understand what was at risk if they continued to be in conflict.

LOCKHART RECORDING: Legend has it that Frances Perkins got all the parties necessary to pass this bill around the table, put a bottle of scotch in the middle, and said, “We’re not leaving here until this gets done.”

WALTER: So again, Amanda, not surprising given what we know about Frances Perkins?

AMANDA: Yeah, not surprising at all, and I love to hear Giovanna tell that story because it also reminds me of Giovanna’s personality and her work to get the National Monument designation. She was also very much like, “We are not leaving here until we get this across the finish line.” So that’s how the story goes. I think that that was Frances’s personality: she was no-nonsense, she was direct.

Again, going back to her childhood, she knew what her values were and what needed to happen, so she would lead with that and say, “This is going to be the outcome, how are we going to get there?” And that was something that I think a lot of people respected, and why she was able to work with a lot of different people from different spaces throughout her life.

MELANIE: Yes, she had an amazing work ethic, didn’t she?

In her biography, Perkins, The Woman Behind the New Deal, author Kristen Downey, recounts that Perkins would lie in bed late at night working on the administration of the Social Security plan, intermittently dripping cold water onto her eyelids to stay awake.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

AMANDA: Someone would argue that’s a form of torture.

MELANIE: Yes

AMANDA: I think that’s amazing, and I think it goes back to that idea of her knowing what needed to happen, and she was just this workhorse that needed to get it across the finish line. But that has its toll as well. We can’t be awake 24-7 for 85 years of our life. She lived a very long life.

She had to sleep sometimes, and I think that’s part of the story that we tell at the Frances Perkins Center, and especially at the National Monument, because that was the place where she would go to find rest.

Another story we hear about that house, in particular, her family’s homestead, comes from her grandson, Tomlin, who was a founding member of our nonprofit and served on our board until he passed away last year.  He said that when Frances returned to the homestead, she would actually take to her bed for a week.

AMANDA: She would just go straight to bed, lie in bed, and sleep for a week, probably because she had been pouring water on her eyelids up until that point, and she really needed a week’s worth of rest.

She could be a powerhouse and get everything done when she was in D.C., but she still had to find those ways to compartmentalize — so that she could sustain that work over time and make all of these good things happen.

WALTER: I love the way that you bring Frances Perkins to life, Amanda. We really appreciate that.

Let’s talk about the iconic photo of FDR signing the Social Security Act into law. There’s Frances Perkins, over his left shoulder, wearing a tricorn hat and looking directly into the camera, surrounded by a sea of men, with a very serious expression on her face. Tell us what you know about that day in that photo.

AMANDA: Yeah, absolutely.

That photo is so importantone —it’s iconic because it was the day the Social Security Act was passed. So for that reason alone…

I think looking at it, you might just think: “Well, that was Frances Perkins.” She does look very serious, and in many of her photos she is the only woman.

But what makes that photo particularly interesting, if you know the background of what was going on, is that Frances was married to a man named Paul Wilson. And he (Paul), somewhat early in their marriage, soon after the birth of her daughter, started exhibiting signs of mental illness, which at the time was diagnosed as manic depression. So he was in and out of institutions throughout his life, mostly in New York.

So, when she was in DC, she would regularly go back and visit him on the weekends, but he had a caregiver or was in an institution for much of that time.

So, shortly before that photo was taken, Frances received a phone call that Paul was missing, so she wanted to leave. So, in addition to everything else she did, she was a caregiver, a wife, and a mother, and those were important roles to her as well. She wanted to go and help find her husband in New York.

FDR apparently said, “No, Frances, you are the mother of Social Security, this is your baby — getting this act passed. You need to be here for the signing, you need to be in this photo.”

But that’s likely why she looks particularly stern in that picture; she was distant, thinking about other things. Shortly after that photo was taken, she traveled directly to New York and helped walk the streets looking for her husband that night.

WALTER: Did they find him?

AMANDA: Yes, they did.

MELANIE: What an amazing story. You don’t hear a lot about her marriage or her kids, and that just makes it even more incredible that she did all this. She was a mom and a wife, too. It’s just incredible.

Frances Perkins outlived FDR and the New Deal by 20 years. What did she do after the Roosevelt administration?

AMANDA: Well, she was actually quite active until pretty much the end of her life. I think that partly had to do with the fact that she was the family’s sole breadwinner. Her husband was institutionalized, it was on her to actually care for the family. She wasn’t born into wealth so, unlike some of the other men in the cabinet, she had to continue working until the end of her life. So shortly after (leaving the White House) she had a book deal to write a biography of FDR, which was a bestseller, so she had some money from that.

Then, she was appointed to the United States Civil Service Commission, and later she lectured at Cornell University’s School of Industrial Relations.

She actually lived at the Telluride house while she was lecturing at Cornell, so she was the only woman living with these college-aged young scholars, young men.

She made it very clear that she was not a house mother; she was not taking care of them. She was there as a colleague, as another intellectual, while she was actually in her 80s and lecturing at Cornell.

But again, if she had free room and board, that was helpful for her at the time.

WALTER: I love that story, especially since my mom graduated from Cornell in the 50s.

Another quote I love about Frances is when Christopher Bryceth, who was the former CEO of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, asked Frances Perkins to identify her proudest achievement toward the end of her life. Without hesitation, in her clipped and carefully cultivated Boston Brahmin accent, she said, “Two words, Social Security.” Does that track with your understanding of Frances’s view of her own legacy?

AMANDA: Absolutely, it does. I think that was a flawless impersonation. I wondered if you were going to give it a go.

WALTER: Oh, yeah, residency in Vegas, just doing Frances Perkins. That’s what’s ahead for me.

AMANDA: Yeah, well, it will get her on more people’s radar, and that’s our bottom line.

So yes, I think it does track, and I would add here that Christopher Bryceth is also a member of our board and the former chair of our board of directors.

He actually lived in the Telluride house at Cornell with Frances Perkins. So he is very, very closely aligned with Frances Perkins and knew her personally.

But I think not only is Social Security what I believe she thought of as her own legacy, but another quote we have that points to that is, “A government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best life possible.”

And I think Social Security was one of the ways that she saw that this could happen. If she were to help the most common working men in America give the most people the best possible lives, Social Security was one of the ways she could do that.

WALTER: As I hear you say that, Amanda, and listening to her whole ethos, I think it’s sorely missed right now in this country. We wish there were more empathy and concern for the everyday person and their struggles, rather than for billionaires. But anyway, Mel.

MELANIE: Amanda, thank you so much for bringing her to life for us today. We’re big Frances Perkins fans over here. We really appreciate it. If people want to visit the Frances Perkins Center or learn more about it, what will they discover there, and how can they access it?

AMANDA: So right now, if you want to come visit us, we are open during the summer. The best time to visit Maine, some would say.

As I said, we help co-manage the Frances Perkins National Monument in partnership with the National Park Service.

You can actually visit her family’s homestead, which is now a National Monument. We have an exhibit on the life and legacy of Frances Perkins that is open during the summer. And I would recommend that folks visit our website for the most up-to-date information. The exact dates and times are not set yet, but our website and our newsletter is always going to have the right information that you need.

But you can also visit the monument grounds and the trails any time of year. We still see people, even in the winter, the shoes change… they’re wearing snow shoes right now. But people still like to come year-round to walk those trails and, much like Frances Perkins, take some time to disconnect and think about the world around them and how they can make it better. So, we encourage you to do that as well, even if it’s not during the summer tourism season.

WALTER: Can you snowmobile right up to the front door?

AMANDA: I wouldn’t recommend it. But it’s a pretty easy trail to walk. So, as long as you have the proper footwear, you should be good to go.

WALTER: Okay. Well, it goes without saying at this point, Amanda, we so much appreciate you, and you are a great guest. So thank you for coming on and telling us all about Frances Perkins and the Frances Perkins Center.

AMANDA: Thank you for having me.

WALTER: And thank you, Mel.

MELANIE: Thank you.

WALTER: We hope you enjoyed our chat with Amanda Hatch of the Frances Perkins Center. If you want to visit the Frances Perkins Center and Frances Perkins National Monument, check out francesperkinscenter.org.

Remember, that’s Frances with an E, not an IS. Francesperkinscenter.org. And you can check out our website, ncpssm.org, to do all sorts of cool things. You can subscribe to our free blog; you can sign up for our free newsletter; And you can find out more about what we do here at the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare — and even become a member.

Looking forward to seeing you next week. In the meantime, our engineer is Shahab Shokouhi. Our story editor is Donna Lack. Our editor is Steve Lack. And I’m Walter Gottlieb, saying: “You Earned This!”