about her book, the one behind a new deal, the life and legacy behind frances perkins. she was the first female cabinet secretary who served as fdr's labor secretary from 1933 to 1945. in that role, she helped to create a new deal legislation, and cue lubing social security, unemployment insurance and minimum wage. the other spoke about the 19-year-old book festival which the library of congress hosted on the national mall. >> this person was meaningful to me because was the basis on my entire book. this was the life of frances perkins -- around this building. and i'll explain to you how that happened and much of the research was denied library of congress, which is sponsoring today's events. it's a wonderful institution and the beautiful buildings, they're such important research materials there and it's all available free. these public access libraries are really one of the things that make our nation great. and i'm very grateful to the library of congress for being here and for continuing to give us such a wonderful material. now, this is a self selecting crowd, i know some of you already know who frances perkins is, but a lot of people don't. so, let's start by asking this question. how many of you know who frances perkins is? oh yes! this is great! good! how about this, how many of you know on someone on social security? please raise your hand. how many of you know someone who is receiving unemployment insurance or who has ever received unemployment compensation? okay. francis perkins work. how many of you know somebody who is working a 40 hour week, generally more or less? francis perkins work. how many of you know a 12-year-old who has quit going to school so that she can work full-time in a factory? francis perkins work. her ban on child labor, enacted in the fair labor standards act made it possible to keep kids in school longer instead of in mills and factories. let me start by telling you a little bit, it's awfully noisy here, but let me start by telling you a little bit. i want to read a little bit of the prologue from my book so that you know a little bit more about the breath that frances perkins accomplishments. on a chilly february night in 1933, and middle aged woman waited expectantly to meet with her employer at his reticence at a street in new york city. she clutched a scrap of paper with hastily written notes. finally our shirt into his study, the woman brushed aside her nervousness and spoke confidently. they ventured casually for a while, as was their style. then she turned serious. her dark, luminous eyes holding his gaze. he wanted her to take an assignment, but she had decided she wouldn't accept it unless he allowed her to do it her own way. she held up to piece of paper in her hand and emotion to her to continue. she tipped off the items. a 40 hour work week, a minimum wage, workers compensation, unemployment compensation. a federal law banning child labor. direct federal aid for unemployment relief, social security, i revitalized public employment service and health insurance. she watched his eyes to make sure that he was paying attention and understood the implications of each demand. she braced for his response, knowing that he often chose political expediency over idealism and was capable of callousness, even cruelty. the scope of her list was breathtaking. she was proposing a fundamental and radical restructuring of american society with enactment of historic social welfare and labor laws to succeed, she would have to overcome all position from courts, business, labor unions, conservatives. nothing like this has ever been done before in the united states, she said. you know that, don't you? the man sat across from her in his wheelchair amid the clutter of boxes and rumpled rugs. soon, he would head to washington d. c. to be sworn in as the 32nd president of the united states. he would inherit the worst economic crisis in the nation's history. an era of rampant speculation had come to an end. the stock market had collapsed, rendering investments valueless. thanks were shutting down, stripping people of their lifetime savings. about a third of workers were unemployed, wages were falling, hundreds of thousands were homeless. real estate prices had plummeted. and millions of homeowners faced foreclosure. his choice of labor secretary would be one of his most important early decisions. his nominee must understand economic employment issues but be equally effective as a coalition builder. he was a handsome man with key features and he studied the women -- no one was more qualified for the job. she knew i was much about labor law administration as anyone in the country. heat known her for more than 20 years. the last four in albany, where she had worked by his side. he trusted her and he knew she would never betray him. none of the items i just mentioned were part of the fdr campaign platform in 1932. nevertheless, he told frances perkins he would pack her. and she agreed to accept the job. that night in bed, she actually cried in deep whaling saws because she knew it was going to be such a difficult job. she would open herself to constant medias scrutiny, harsh judgment and public criticism, yet she knew she must accept the offer as her grandmother had told her, whatever a door opened to, you had no choice but to walk through it. francis perkins would become the nation's first female secretary of labor. now, we know what happened after that. the social security act, passed in 1935 gave us unemployment insurance, social security and our welfare system known as aid to dependent children, designed to help the children of parents, of mothers left to raise their children the fairly rare sanders act passed in 1938 said that 40 hour work week minimum wage. put the ban on child labor. other things she did, fha insurance, she was the primary booster of the civilian conservation corps. she was the largest single supporter of the wpa. truly, this was a really remarkable woman. now, it's a little interesting and unusual that i came to write this book. i came from a staunchly republican family. i actually came from a family of roosevelt haters. but when i came to washington d. c. in 1988, has a young business reporter, one of the first things i did as i set out to learn my way around the town was to sign up for a trolley bus tour of the city. and one of the first things i noticed was the frances perkins department of labor. as those of you who live in washington know, there is very few buildings in washington named after women. and so i noticed it and i filed it away and wondered, who was frances perkins? i never even heard of her. as we went around in the trolley bus on this day i took that tour, we got around over by the washington monument and the tour bus driver said in -- along with his regular pattern. white american women had the worst childhood experience -- childbirth experience? francis perkins, she spent 12 years in labor. that's the first time i ever remember hearing that name spoken aloud. now, i left. like the rest of you did. but it also as a feminist, kind of irritated me and ever after that, i kept frances perkins name in my mind and i kept listening for her. i spent 20 years at the washington post and over the years, i realized how often i heard her name. often like as sort of distant whisper. when we talked about social security, frances perkins. when we talked about age discrimination, frances perkins. when we talked about the fair labor standards act and making revisions to it, we talked about frances perkins. when you talked about the labor movement, we talk about frances perkins. this was hall her handiwork. quite an extraordinary record of achievement. i spent 20 years at the washington post. i went all over the country for the washington post. it was a wonderful life education going to visit places and learn new things. and as i traveled around the country writing business stories, i began to realize how little i knew about the history of the working people of america. it's something that really isn't taught. in the late 1990s, i wrote a series of articles on sexual harassment. and i heard a lot of chilling stories about places where there had been an imbalance of power, where people were able to use their power to force people to do things they didn't want to do. there were people who were sort of trapped in a cycle of abuse and a lot of time, those stories were really very bad stories. it's really much more akin to criminal activity than most of us have realized. and i've heard all the stories overall of the coldest route, as i get to suffer myself, when my call secondary stress. and i got afraid to fly. i started to feel like authority figures could not be counted on to do the right thing if there were a problem. i suppose part of the issue for me was that i had both a good look and the bad luck to sit by the post -- fabulous aviation reporter, don phillips and he was writing about every plane crash that happened in america. so every day, and i was afraid to fly, i was over hearing him talk about every era accident that happened and just how the people on board had died. so i started to travel places by train. whenever i could get away with it. i took a long trip out west to do a story on the national perks and on the way, i'd read tony lucas his book, big trouble. which is a really fabulous book about the great labor battles of 100 years ago. and i was shocked to realize that actually, these were pitched battles. this was almost like warfare out on the western frontier between employers and workers. and i realized how little i knew about that. so i began looking for a vehicle to write about the uptick struggle of the working man in america to get a better life. i came back to the post and i started to write a column called, on the job where people can write me letters about the problems that work. and one day, a man wrote me and said, at the end of the day, every day, we're locked into our offices while the count of money in the cash register. do you think that's unsafe? yes, it is. even a rat has an escape hole, he told me. so i decided to write a column on workplace fire safety. and in doing it, i did a little bit of research on the triangle fairways fire. and i heard that a young social worker, names francis were perkins had actually witnessed a fire. and what she had seen had so horrified her, 146 people died that day, many leaping to their deaths from a building in lower manhattan, it was a sweatshop. from that experience, frances perkins was so motivated to make changes that she drafted the laws that became our national fire safety act. you might say, eureka! at that point, i felt this is a woman that has a fabulous story. it has to be told. this aspect, labor history is something that is not told very much at all in america and by telling the story of frances perkins life, i saw an opportunity to do it. today, and the various plans, you'll hear a lot about political history, military history, civil rights history but except for me today, you'll hear very little about labor history and my book has tried to rectify that. i got a contract to write the book, i began doing the research when i got a fellowship at harvard university, i was a fellow at harvard and that harvard at that time, there was not a single professor of labor history. at this point now, there's only one major newspaper that employs a full-time labor reporter. that's the new york times. and it's stephen greenhouse. and he has a lonely job. now, many people advocate heartily for free trade today but there aren't a lot of people speaking up to the offense of working people in america and in fact, that's what frances perkins devoted her life to doing. a stud talking about the problems of working people and trying to find ways to solve those problems, ways that could also keep americas businesses strong and prosperous. now, if perkins were standing here today, i can almost assuredly tell you, what do we think that should be talking about? should be talking about jobs today. should be talking about how to generate jobs and how to bring good paying jobs back to america. she'd be talking about smart employers who are finding ways to grow their workforces, economic policies that bring good paying jobs back to america. and should be talking about ways to strengthen the labor movement today so that workers can protect their pensions, their right to a 40 hour work week. and their right to health insurance, that actually works when it's supposed to. now, the labor movement, the working people of america, there is the backbone of america and they're much of the source of their country's economic prosperity. but nobody talks about them very much at all, almost nobody at all. and that's alarming, especially when we face an economic crisis as we do today. this is a matter of particular interest to me because i spent a lifetime studying the american economy. and the unemployment rate is really becoming a very serious problem for the united states. we need to get people employed with jobs that are earn enough money to give them financial security. and allow them to buy the things they need, food, housing and health care. i think if frank is perkins was here today, and i think i have the right to say that i spent nine years studying her life. i think she'd say, we need to pay a lot more attention again to the working man. and i'm open for questions. [applause] [applause] [applause] >> i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how frances perkins, in an era when there were essentially no other women in high political positions, was able to navigate with the other political players in washington. >> could everyone hear the question? it's a really good question and i think that's part of what fascinated me. she and she never like that but she put herself in a position of inventing herself. she tried to be very careful how she spoke, she tried to speak as men do, she try to keep her sentences short and to the point and she tried to make sure that the men never felt like she was stealing the limelight from them. now this was very important that you always let fdr shine, and that was part of the secret of her success. but in fact, every single day of her life, she had to think about those gender issues and how exactly things were going to play out. it was very difficult, in fact, she did find washington to be just as frightening of a place as street feared >> could you expand a little more on the relationship between francis perkins and fdr? >> francis perkins, i believe, was fdr's closest friend. it's funny, because a lot of other men played poker with, him hung out with him, helped him a lot. these men were all devoted friends, but across the years, frances perkins first met fdr in 1910, when she became his secretary of labor. she had already known him 22 years. and he kept her by his side for the entire length of his presidency, the 12 years in labor that i mentioned earlier, the whole time of his presidency. in fact, she tried to resign repeatedly. she really disliked life in washington, but he could never let her go. in fact, when she tried to resign in 1944, she was exhausted and want to go home, he actually reached his arms up to her, put his arms around her and said please don't go, francis. how can you be so selfish? and she stayed. >> were there any progress ivan issued is that the fbi pushed back on or didn't fully implement? >> that's a really good question and in fact, the debate is raging right now in washington as we speak. francis perkins have presented fdr with a list of about ten items i mentioned at the beginning when i was reading the prologue. i know it's kind of difficult to hear me, but she had presented a list of about ten items. the only thing she didn't accomplish was national health insurance. the american medalist so chp in told roosevelt and frances perkins that they would kill social security to prevent what they called socialized medicine from taking root in america. what we ended up with was a health insurance system that grew accidentally. it was a reaction to the wage and price controls during world war ii. companies were not allowed to raise wages, but they really wanted to attract workers and began to offer health insurance. we ended up with a health insurance system that was targeted to the strong and healthy, not to the sikh and jobless. the program frances perkins wanted would have looked more like medicaid looks today, a program that would be targeted to people who don't have money to pay for health care. she was never able to get that accomplished. fdr abandoned national health insurance to get social security enacted. every two or three years, she would bring it up again saying isn't a time now to get national health insurance? each time, someone would tell her no. it's too much of a hot potato and we won't touch that one now. her very last communications with fdr were please don't forget national health insurance. [applause] [applause] >> thank you so much for your work on her. i am just deeply grateful to you for having done that. as a feminist, just a minor suggestion. i'm sensitive to the working man and would encourage you to say working men and women. i wonder if you could talk about that in her childhood might have foretold this deep sympathy to the working people and to those who were kind of left out? >> francis perkins was a very devout christian. she was on a pisko paleo and had enormously deep empathy for the human condition. she was interested in the plight of immigrants. she was interested in the plight of workers. she often said that she felt peoples pain. she became fascinated in the american economy. she studied business. she was very interested in businessman and how businessmen and women, primarily businessmen at that time, how they conducted their business. but she was fascinated to see the role that workers play in making businesses prosperous. she wanted to see a better balance of power between employers and workers and that became her lifetime crusade. she had an enormous number of interests over the years. she was a very big suffrage activist. she was very strong as an advocate for women's rights. she was a birth control supporter as well. but she chose the one particular issue which was worker rights. she made that her lifetime cause, and that seems to have all jailed for her after seeing the horror of the fire. >> relations with organized labor, the unions? >> it's a fascinating relationship between francis perkins and organized labor. they were mad when she was made secretary of labor. most unions didn't permit women and a lot of men who were the heads of the labor unions had hoped to be labor secretary themselves. they were personally resentful and also resentful that a social worker was the one who would be leading the department of labor. over time, they saw she was the most stalwart supporter and the things she did enabled the labor movement to grow dramatically in the next 20 years. we know fdr and frances perkins didn't pull the united states out of the great depression. the capitalist system eventually recovered after the big employment push of world war ii. but the labor movement was a huge beneficiary of this growth, with labor laws, protective labor laws in place, we had an enormous growth of the middle class in america. it became the prosperous plays it was in the fifties and sixties and that has been the base of our countries great global wealth. >> good morning. you mentioned she was a strong supporter of the wpa. i wonder if she had friendships with dorothy lang. >> francis perkins was less immediately involved in the wpa and the public works projects. hello. i just have a question about the programs he created.s- >> sorry? >> what was her top priority? >> it was an acting social security, and that was her biggest single source of pride in our entire life. she thought it was a program that would last forever, and there's 50 million people on social security today. >> could you comment on her relationship to eleanor roosevelt? >> they had a very interesting, complicated relationship. they both shared the affection of franklin roosevelt in different ways. eleanor was an enormously valuable -- frances perkins was the one who came up with the ideas and enacted the legislation. franklin roosevelt was the one who had the political savvy. eleanor was the one who could popularize these ideas. the two women were friends. they love each other as allies of a lifetime due. they were also fierce rivals and often jealous of each other. at the end of their lives, there is a wonderful picture of the two women at the 50th anniversary of the triangle and their heads are bent in close to each other and you can see what's sincere friendship and affection they had for each other, despite whatever little tiff they may have had over the years. >> yes, thank you very much for writing the book. it's an issue that needs to be brought forward now. do you think the book brings any new research to the historiography of that period? >> i would say the things that i learned in my research that are probably news to most people is really what a huge role frances perkins played and all aspects of the new deal. you will now see new deal history books including some taught in colleges that mentioned her three, four, five times. that's extraordinary. i also found out teddy roosevelt was the one who actually first picture to head the committee on safety after the fire. that meant that her first important contact was teddy roosevelt, not franklin roosevelt, and i thought that was a really cool find at the library of congress.
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