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FRANCIS PERKINS MEMORIAL  
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Heather Cox Richardson
December 17, 2024
Letters from an American
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_ Frances Perkins’s work to build FDR’s New Deal sparked the
modern American state. She recognized that the central purpose of
government was not to protect property; it was to protect the
communities of people who lived in the nation. _

, Frances Perkins (provided by Frances Perkins Center).

 

Today, President Joe Biden designated a new national monument in honor
of Frances Perkins, secretary of labor under President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. The first female Cabinet secretary, Perkins served for
twelve years. She took the job only after getting FDR to sign on to
her goals: unemployment insurance, health insurance, old-age
insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and abolition of child
labor. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he
said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”

She promised to find out.

Once in office, Perkins was a driving force behind the
administration’s massive investment in public works projects to get
people back to work. She urged the government to spend $3.3 billion on
schools, roads, housing, and post offices. Those projects employed
more than a million people in 1934.

In 1935, FDR signed into law the Social Security Act that she designed
and negotiated, providing ordinary Americans with unemployment
insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds
to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services.

In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which
established a minimum wage and maximum hours. It banned child labor.

The one area where Perkins fell short of her goals was in establishing
public healthcare. It was not until 2010 that President Barack Obama
signed into law the Affordable Care Act.

Perkins’s work to build FDR’s New Deal sparked the modern American
state.

Before Perkins, the primary function of the federal government was to
manage the economic relationships between labor, capital, and
resources. Property rights, after all, had been the basis on which
North American colonists had found the justification to rebel against
the British crown, and that focus on the relationships inherent in
property ownership had continued to dominate the government American
lawmakers built.

But Perkins recognized that the central purpose of government was not
to protect property; it was to protect the communities of people who
lived in the nation. She recognized that children, the elderly, women,
and disabled Americans, all of whom contributed to society whether or
not that contribution was recognized with a paycheck, were as valuable
to the survival of a community as male workers and the wealthy men who
employed them.

“The people are what matter to government,” she said, “and a
government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction
the best possible life.”

A majority of Americans of both parties liked the new system, but the
reworking of the government shocked those who had previously dominated
the country. As soon as the Social Security Act passed, opponents set
out to destroy it along with the rest of the new system. A coalition
of Republican businessmen who hated both business regulation and the
taxes that paid for social programs, racists who opposed the idea of
equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, and religious
traditionalists—especially Southern Baptists—who opposed the
recognition of women’s equal rights, joined together to fight
against the New Deal.

Their undermining of Perkins’s vision got little traction when they
were attacking business regulation and taxes to support social
services. Voters liked those things. But it began to attract
supporters after 1954, when the Supreme Court handed down the _Brown
v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas_, decision requiring the
desegregation of public schools. That decision enabled those opposed
to the New Deal to harness racism to their cause, warning American
voters that a government that protected everyone would mean a
government that used tax dollars paid by white Americans to benefit
Black Americans.

Religious traditionalists’ role in undermining the New Deal grew in
the 1970s. The new system dramatically expanded women’s rights, and
when President Richard Nixon’s people worried he would lose
reelection in 1972, they quite deliberately used the issue of abortion
to claim that “women’s liberation” was destroying the family
structure that religious traditionalists believed mirrored God’s
relationship to his human flock.

By 1979, religious traditionalists had rejected the modern move toward
women’s rights and made common cause with Republicans eager to
derail the New Deal. In 1980 the support of those traditionalists put
Republican president Ronald Reagan into the White House. Their
influence grew in the 1990s as white evangelicals became the base of
the Republican Party. By 2016 they had brought into the Republican
Party a determination to reinstate a male-dominated, patriarchal world
that resurrected the government Frances Perkins’s vision had
replaced.

That impulse has grown until now, in 2024, attacks on women have
become central to the destruction of the kind of government Frances
Perkins helped to establish during the New Deal. Religious extremists
in the Republican Party have in some states reduced or prevented
women’s access to healthcare and are talking about taking away
women’s right to vote, and the party itself has downgraded the role
of women in society. When House Republicans released a list of their
committee leaders for the next Congress last Thursday, there were no
women on it. For the first time in 20 years, no House committees will
be chaired by women.

“Very fitting in the MAGA Era—No Women Need Apply,” former
Republican representative from Virginia Barbara Comstock posted on X.

In his term in office, President Biden has worked to reclaim Frances
Perkins’s vision of a government that works for all Americans. When
he took office, he promised to have a Cabinet that “looks like
America,” and he created the most diverse Cabinet in American
history. And he has emphasized women’s equality. In March 2024 he
signed an executive order noting that, since women’s roles in
American history have often been overlooked, it is imperative that we
recognize the women and girls who have shaped the nation.

The creation today of the Frances Perkins National Monument tied
together Perkins’s expansion of the government and the centrality of
women to the American story. The event took place in the Frances
Perkins Building, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor in
Washington, D.C., where acting secretary of labor Julie Su noted that
Biden has been “the most pro-worker, pro-union president in
history,” protecting pensions, defending unions, creating good jobs,
and unapologetically wielding the power of the presidency on behalf of
working people.

Su inducted the president into the Labor Department’s Hall of Honor,
and Biden responded with the observation that “the American people
are beginning to figure out all we’re doing is what’s basically
decent and fair—just basically decent and fair.”

Then Biden spoke about Perkins and her work. He described how his
administration has defended, protected, and expanded her vision. He
reiterated that women have always been vital to the United States and
insisted that they must be acknowledged both in our current society
and in the way we remember our history.

As part of the day’s events, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland
announced the establishment of five new National Historic Landmarks
recognizing women’s history: the Charleston Cigar Factory in
Charleston, South Carolina, where in 1945–1946, Black women led a
strike that prompted the organization of southern workers; the Furies
Collective, the Washington, D.C., home of a lesbian, feminist
publishing group in the early 1970s; the Washington, D.C.,
Slowe-Burrill House, home of Black lesbian educators Lucy Diggs Slowe
and Mary Burrill in the early twentieth century; Azurest South in
Petersburg, Virginia, the home and studio of early twentieth century
Black architect Amaza Lee Meredith; and the Peter Hurd and Henriette
Wyeth House and Studios in San Patricio, New Mexico, where the two
painted in the twentieth century.

In establishing the 57-acre family farm of Frances Perkins on the
Damariscotta River in Newcastle, Maine, as a National Monument today,
Biden acknowledged both the importance of Perkins’s New Deal vision
of a government that benefits everyone and the centrality of women’s
equality to that vision.

_HEATHER COX RICHARDSON is an American historian. She is a professor
of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the
American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the
Plains Indians. She previously taught history at MIT and the
University of Massachusetts Amherst._

_Subscribe to Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson
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* Francis Perkins
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* Biden Administration
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* New Deal
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* Department of Labor
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