Review of The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR'S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover)

In this age when Presidential cabinet members come and go almost with the frequency of auto salesmen, several generations of politics watchers have grown up pretty much ignorant of the name Frances Perkins.

Her time in the national spotlight was brief --- the 12 years of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. As FDR's Secretary of Labor she was especially prominent during the years 1933-1940, when domestic concerns were on the front burner and she played a leading role in pushing for such causes as the Social Security Act, wage and hour laws, immigration reform, workplace safety, the right of workers to organize, pensions, welfare and old-age insurance. When World War II erupted, she was less often in the news but still active in matters like pushing for admission of Jewish refugees into the U.S. As the first woman ever to serve in a President's cabinet, she was subject to blatant sexist attitudes and scurrilous rumors not only from know-nothing outsiders but also from her own colleagues in government.

Author Kirstin Downey was perhaps too young to have known anything about Perkins at first-hand, but she has done a thorough job of bringing this determined yet personally complex woman to life for a new audience. She shows how Perkins's complex character was molded by early revolt against her family background and by a conscious strategy of working with "imperfect people" to attain ends she thought important. Downey is sympathetic toward her subject's sly tactic of first studying closely the people she wanted to use, then playing up to them in ways that helped her get things done.

She had a gift for ingratiating herself with people who could help her. She was an early associate of Jane Addams and Al Smith. Sinclair Lewis wanted to marry her, and when Franklin Roosevelt came into her orbit, she played him as a great pianist plays a Steinway, feeding him ideas and plans and usually letting him take credit for carrying them out. Downey calls her FDR's "moral conscience," which seems in hindsight only a very slight exaggeration. Downey's portrait of FDR meshes closely with those drawn by other writers: a cagey operator who gave you the impression of agreeing to your ideas, then went his own often different way.

Frances was not Perkins's real name. She was born Fanny Coralie Perkins in Boston in 1880, but during her college years she changed her first name as a calculated stratagem for getting on in the world. She also shaved two years off her age, a move that came back to haunt her later when critics came howling after her, hatchets in hand. Her zeal for improving the lot of working people was awakened in 1911 when she was an eyewitness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York, in which 146 people died mainly because the company had locked the exit doors they might have used. When governor-elect Roosevelt of New York offered her a post on the State Industrial Commission, it set her course for life and began her long association with the future President.

Downey does not downplay Perkins's shortcomings --- her intense dislike of the press, burning ambition and personal secretiveness. The book also lays bare the scars Perkins earned from her difficult personal life with a husband immobilized for many years by severe mental illness, and a wrenchingly dysfunctional relationship with her only child, Susanna, herself a victim of mental illness. Downey also gives in occasionally to the urge to smother her story in too much detail --- and perhaps in a bow to modern sensibilities, she suggests subliminally that there may have been lesbian tendencies at work in Perkins's close relationships with several women.

Downey may not be a totally unbiased biographer, but her book does give a fully rounded portrait of this complex woman and makes a good case for her relevance in today's world, 44 years after Perkins's death. Women have come a long way over those 44 years in politics and in life in general; THE WOMAN BEHIND THE NEW DEAL gives a vivid idea of what they had to go through to get to where they now are.

--- Reviewed by Robert Finn



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