by Adam Cohen
When she got to the office, Perkins asked her chief statistician to look at New York’s employment numbers. He reported back that the numbers for employees on hand, days worked, orders on hand, and other key indicators were all headed straight down. Perkins had him check with the head of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. It turned out that Hoover’s top labor statistician agreed that the situation was grim, but he was unwilling to publicly contradict the president. Perkins called a press conference to announce what she had found out. New York’s labor data, she told reporters, showed that employment was lower than any December since 1914, the first year records were kept. She was speaking out, she said, so people would understand the gravity of the situation, and not be deluded into thinking that nothing had to be done. It occurred to her that she had not told Roosevelt her plans. She called him and gave a full report. Her response to Hoover was already “in the city rooms,” she said. “Are you going to kill me, or fire me?” Roosevelt said he thought her press conference was “bully,” though he was glad she had not asked him first, because he might have told her not to do it. The next day, the Times reported that Perkins had challenged Hoover’s numbers as “not statistical, and probably based on inadequate, improperly analyzed material.” It would soon become clear that Perkins was right. The dispute was a coup for Roosevelt, whose administration appeared to have a better handle on the Depression than the White House. “Frances, this is the best politics you can do,” Roosevelt told her. “Don’t say anything about politics. Just be an outraged scientist and social worker.”69
Perkins’s clash with Hoover also helped in her ongoing campaign to persuade Roosevelt to take strong steps to help the victims of the Depression. Roosevelt had great sympathy for people who had lost their jobs, but he also had a limited view of the government’s role. He was reluctant to take on responsibility for providing relief. At Perkins’s urging, Roosevelt established a committee to investigate the unemployment problem and recommend a course of action. He called it the Committee for the Stabilization of Industry because, Perkins noted, “he did not like to appoint a committee against anything.” In announcing the formation of the committee, the first of its kind in the nation, Roosevelt emphasized the role that New York’s businesses could play in lessening the impact of the economic crisis. He urged them to display “the same good-will” they had demonstrated in confronting “industrial accidents, industrial diseases, child labor,” and other “adverse conditions.” Roosevelt still believed the private sector, not government, would be the key to helping the unemployed.70
Perkins was the driving force behind the Committee for the Stabilization of Industry. She chose the governor’s appointees, including the chairman, Henry Bruere, her and Paul Wilson’s old friend, who had done a major study of unemployment during the Mitchel administration and was now a vice president of the Bowery Savings Bank. The committee met at the Labor Department, and Perkins’s staff provided investigative and clerical support. To determine how severe the unemployment crisis was, the committee held meetings around the state. It also sent out surveys to employers, asking what they were doing to prevent joblessness. Many companies responded that they were cutting workers’ hours to spread the work among as many employees as possible. In late April, just weeks after it was created, the Committee for the Stabilization of Industry issued its first recommendations. Calling for “steady work the year around,” the committee urged companies to adjust production schedules to keep as many people working as possible. It also called on government to do more. The committee encouraged local governments to plan purchases and construction projects so more of them were done in economic downturns. These government-funded jobs, the committee said, could put the unemployed to work right away. Perkins convened a conference of mayors in Rochester to encourage local governments to establish public works programs.71
In November, the committee issued a final report with more sweeping recommendations. If industry could not solve the problem, the committee said, “it seems inevitable that the state will.” It called on the state government to establish a planning board to help develop public works programs at the state and local levels. “The public conscience is not comfortable,” the report declared, “when good men anxious to work are unable to find employment to support themselves and their families.” It also recommended that the state consider a compulsory unemployment insurance system to help workers caught between a layoff and their next job. Perkins struck similar themes two days later in a speech to the National Consumers’ League convention in Philadelphia. The “new challenge” for industry, she said, was making workers secure in their jobs. Perkins emphasized the importance of making jobs available to anyone who needed one, and expressed regret that the stock market crash had caught the government off guard. “If we had any brains in this country we would have had a long-range plan of public works,” she told a luncheon audience, “making it possible for the government in December of 1929 to have released at once orders for construction without having to pass emergency legislation.”72
Armed with the committee report, Perkins tried to persuade Roosevelt that the state should take affirmative steps to help the unemployed. She was convinced that one reason he hesitated to act was that he knew little about how business worked. To fill in the gaps, she encouraged committee members to meet with him and educate him. As a result of these conversations, she said, Roosevelt came to “realize that unemployment was not just a closed book, and that something could be done about it.” Still, he continued to resist specific proposals. When Perkins raised unemployment insurance, Roosevelt was skeptical. “I’m against the dole, Frances,” he protested. “Don’t you get any dole in here!” Perkins found Roosevelt’s frequent references to the “dole” frustrating. He was afraid of a European-style welfare system in which it was so easy to get benefits that people would not work even when jobs were available. Perkins tried to explain that unemployment insurance was not a “dole.” It was an insurance system in which the benefits that were paid out were financed by contributions from the same people who were eligible to receive them. Roosevelt “never could get it through his head,” Perkins complained. She kept hammering away, trying to persuade him that she was proposing a form of insurance. “I finally decided that we had to have a completely different set of words,” she said.73
As times got worse, Roosevelt’s thinking evolved. In a speech to the Governors’ Conference in Salt Lake City in June 1930, he became the nation’s first major political leader to endorse unemployment insurance. He cut the “three or four pages” that Perkins had written for the speech, and toned down the substance. Rather than support a particular plan, Roosevelt said the subject required “proper study,” and he emphasized that any program should be self-supporting so it did not become a “mere dole” or a “handout.” When Perkins heard the speech, she was initially disappointed in Roosevelt’s changes, but she later decided that, as a political matter, his cautious approach had been exactly right. On issues other than unemployment insurance, Roosevelt’s speech to the governors reflected his still-conservative approach to many aspects of the economic crisis. He criticized the Hoover administration for abandoning laissez-faire, and expressed skepticism about the modest efforts the administration was making to stimulate state and local public works programs. New York State had spent $20 million more on public works projects than it had a year earlier, he said, and local governments had also increased their spending. The cost was too great, he said, to continue spending at that level.74
Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1930. Although he had not come up with a solution to the problem of mass unemployment, he had nevertheless compiled an impressive record. He had made strides toward developing low-cost public power, increased hospital construction, and improved conditions in state prisons. He had also, with Perkins’s encouragement, fought for workers in a wide array of areas, including expanding the scope of workmen’s compensation. In the campaign, Roosevelt made clear he wanted to do more about the hard
times, in part because Hoover was doing so little. The president’s failure “either to estimate the situation correctly or to tell the truth about it,” he said, “has thrown an enormous burden on the Governors of all the States.” Perkins hit the campaign trail, appearing before business and labor audiences. She also spoke to women’s groups, though she said they were “not my dish of tea, really.” On election night, Roosevelt won a resounding 725,000-vote victory, including a 167,000-vote edge in Republican upstate New York. Will Rogers declared the next day, “The Democrats nominated their President yesterday, Franklin D. Roosevelt.”75
In his second term, Roosevelt’s response to the economic crisis became bolder. In January 1931, in his annual message to the legislature, he indicated that he was becoming more supportive of the sort of public works programs Perkins and the Committee for the Stabilization of Industry had been recommending. “Public works are being speeded to the utmost,” he told the lawmakers, “all available funds are being used to provide employment; wherever the State can find a place for a man to work it has provided a job.” He also promoted labor reforms that Republican legislators had been balking at, including setting up an advisory minimum wage board. The same month, Roosevelt hosted a conference of governors of eastern states to work together on the unemployment problem. The conference, another recommendation of the Committee for the Stabilization of Industry, had been Perkins’s idea. Delegations from Ohio, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island descended on Albany. Perkins invited Professor Paul Douglas of the University of Chicago, the future senator from Illinois, and other progressive thinkers. The conference helped spread ideas that were percolating in New York, including public works and unemployment insurance, to states that had not given them much thought. It also strengthened Roosevelt’s reputation as a national leader in responding to the Depression.76
In the late summer, with economic conditions continuing to worsen, Roosevelt called the legislature into special session. On August 28, he delivered a historic address to the legislature in which he set out a new philosophy of government. “What is the State?” he asked. It was, he declared, an “organized society of human beings, created by them for their mutual protection and well-being.” One of the state’s primary duties, he said, was “caring for those of its citizens who find themselves the victims of such adverse circumstances as makes them unable to obtain even the necessities for mere existence without the aid of others.” To fulfill the obligations that he had just described, Roosevelt asked the legislature to allocate $20 million for relief for the unemployed, to be administered by the newly created Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. In the interest of avoiding “the dole,” Roosevelt wanted as much of the money as possible to be used for public works, so the recipients would have to work for their benefits. If it had to be dispensed as relief, he wanted it to be given, as much as possible, in the form of food, clothing, fuel, and shelter. The legislature was reluctant to sign off on the plan, but Roosevelt won them over. Samuel Rosenman, his counsel, would later say that the special session “had more to do with making Roosevelt the national figure that he became than anything else.”77
With the TERA, New York became the first state to establish a relief agency to help victims of the Depression. Roosevelt appointed a three-member board to run the new agency, chaired by Jesse Isador Straus, the president of R. H. Macy & Co. Harry Hopkins, a transplanted Iowan who headed the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association, was chosen to administer the new program. Hopkins energetically took on the job of setting up the new agency and dispensing the $20 million to the unemployed. The Temporary Emergency Relief Administration would be a model for other states—New Jersey established a similar body a month later, and Rhode Island and Illinois followed—and for New Deal agencies to come. In the next six years, the TERA would provide aid to about five million people, 40 percent of all New Yorkers.78
Roosevelt’s focus in 1932 was his much-anticipated campaign for president. Perkins was not part of the campaign’s inner circle. “I was regarded as an administrator, as a reformer, as a do-gooder,” she said, “while they were doing their plotting.” She was, however, seen as a political asset. She was dispatched to speak to audiences that were looking for a more activist government. Perkins, who was invariably introduced as the woman who had challenged Hoover’s employment numbers, attested to Roosevelt’s progressive values and recounted his good works as governor, much as she had told the nation about Al Smith’s character. New York boasted “the most advanced labor laws in the country,” she said in a radio address in St. Louis. “If Franklin Roosevelt is elected President, the same policies of putting social justice first will prevail in the Federal Government.” Perkins also expanded on her own ideas about government. At an appearance at the Tremont Temple in Boston she declared that people were looking for “security of opportunity to earn a living; security to plan their lives.” It was the first time she had used the word, three years before she helped usher the Social Security Act into law, and it got, she recalled later, “wild, thrilled applause.”79
The progressive influence of Perkins, and of the Brain Trust, could be seen in the kind of campaign Roosevelt ran. He made frequent reference in his speeches to government’s responsibility to care for its citizens. In an October 13, 1932, radio address from Albany, Roosevelt mentioned the $20 million he was spending on local relief programs, which had been supplemented with another $5 million, and quoted from his “What is the State?” message. “That principle which I laid down in 1931, I reaffirm,” he declared. “I not only reaffirm it, I go a step further and say that where the State itself is unable successfully to fulfill this obligation which lies upon it, it then becomes the positive duty of the Federal Government to step in to help.”80
On election night, November 8, Perkins went to the campaign headquarters to watch the votes come in. She was out of her element among the political foot soldiers and revelers. “The most ungodly looking women were kissing each other, kissing me, and others,” she recalled. “I remember saying, ‘You have to stand a lot for your country.’ ” When Roosevelt won his landslide victory, the speculation about what role Perkins would play in the new administration began right away. Even before any votes were cast, The Washington Post had declared that it “seems to be a foregone conclusion” that if Roosevelt won she would be his secretary of labor.81
Perkins was an obvious choice, and not only because of her close working relationship with the president-elect. In the twenty-three years since she had arrived in New York, she had acquired a national reputation. Ida Tarbell, the muckraking journalist, had included her on a list of the fifty foremost women in the United States, alongside Amelia Earhart and Helen Keller. William Allen White, the Kansas newspaper editor, said choosing Perkins would be a “master stroke,” and praised her as “not the professional political woman, not the chronic female person but the broad-minded, competent person who happens to be a woman as an incident of life on the planet.” All the same, women were not indifferent to the fact that Perkins could be the first female Cabinet member. “Many, many women of influence in both Republican and Democratic ranks” were “concentrating on Miss Perkins,” The Chicago Tribune reported. Molly Dewson, a leader in the Roosevelt campaign’s outreach to women, told Roosevelt, “half jokingly, and at proper intervals,” that Perkins’s selection was the price of the work she had done. One person who was not actively promoting Perkins was Eleanor Roosevelt. The women were cordial, but not close. Perkins, the unflappable rationalist, regarded her boss’s wife as too emotional. “Eleanor was always saying, ‘I feel this and I feel that,’ ” she complained, “and I wanted to say: ‘Eleanor, if you only feel it, don’t say it.’ ” Perkins also suspected that Eleanor, who had not yet found her footing as a public figure, envied her career. In her memoir, Eleanor denied that she had lobbied her husband for Perkins, though she said she was “delighted when he named her.”82
Perkins told anyone who asked that Roos
evelt would not choose her. It was, she insisted, just as well. In the fourteen years Paul Wilson had been ill, there had never been “anything but very short periods of reasonably comfortable accommodations to life,” she would later say. It would be difficult to manage his care if she moved to Washington. The main thing holding Perkins back was her desire for privacy. Joining the Cabinet, particularly as the first woman to do so, would make her a national figure, something she did not want to be. Perkins, who had been shy her whole life, once said that having her picture in the newspaper “nearly kills me.” In later years, she would be outraged when a census form asked how many toilets her home had. “She was just furious,” her grandson, Tomlin Coggeshall, recalled. “I remember her saying, ‘We’re not going to answer that.’ ” Perkins’s reticence was partly due to her background. Her friend Agnes Leach thought of her as “a very reserved, very sensitive New Englander.” The biggest consideration, though, was her fear that her husband’s condition would become public, something Wilson was also afraid of. Perkins later confided to a friend that one reason she hesitated was her fear that Wilson would escape his caretakers, and it would be a national news story.83