Kirstin Downey's The Woman Behind the New Deal

...Perkins’s emphasis on the state as a protector of workers is certainly defensible...

...the immigrant-based urban machines allied with liberal reformers and labor voters...

...Perkins came out of the left of the Progressive movement...

...In sum, Perkins saw the labor movement as narrow at the very moment it was broadening in its meaning for the nation’s whole working class...

...Franklin Roosevelt’s agenda and legislative achievements, which Downey attributes to Perkins’s moral and technical influence, are practically unthinkable without the turbulence from below and the rising power of labor...

...One might ask what non-specialist Americans know about any but the most celebrated figures from history...

...Among the grave errors of the conservative wing of the labor movement in Perkins’s time was its inability to imagine a government that could implement a pro-worker policy...

...Consider the health insurance debate in the context of Perkins’s provocative quote, “I’d rather pass a law than organize a union...

...In 1912, it was the Wobblies who rallied to the Lawrence strikers in Massachusetts, not the textile union of its time...

...Nevertheless, having revived Perkins’s name, Downey has also participated in the revival of interest, at least among the chattering classes, in the legislative infrastructure of the New Deal...

...In both cases, the focus has been upon extending a benefit or protection to the vulnerable...

...But what we need now is not another good technical idea—there is an overabundance of Beltway Savants...

...In 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt offered Perkins the job of secretary of labor, she proposed an agenda that was to become the backbone of the New Deal: unemployment insurance, hours and wages legislation, abolition of child labor, social security, and national health insurance...

...Facing nonunion competition, largely Wal-Mart, the large unionized chains demanded health insurance givebacks...

...At that point, the proportion of the labor force unionized (“labor density”) was about 35 percent—roughly three times the size it is now...

...Al Smith read a book...

...And she changed her name from Fanny to Frances for similar reasons...

...But it will take a labor movement to do so...

...The Magna Carta of labor—the Wagner Act of 1935 that Perkins did not particularly support— has run its course, and the unions want a successor law to clear the field for them...

...BOOKS Shaper of the New Deal ROBERT J. S. ROSS The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience by Kirstin Downey Random House, 2009, 480 pp...

...What began as a strike proceeded to a lockout, but health care benefits were preserved at the cost of wage givebacks...

...Downey’s biography is microscopic...

...On the other hand, contemporary white, liberal, middle-class, reform-oriented people—the Obamians—are very much like their Progressive movement counterparts in that they are very much for protecting the vulnerable, but have little concept of the strategic importance of the labor movement...

...Middle-class reformers, whose support is essential in legislative politics, believe in compassion but not in the labor movement as a vehicle of justice...

...After Harry Truman appointed her to the Civil Service Commission in 1946, Perkins took part in the implementation of the Loyalty Security program, forcing communists out of their public sector jobs...

...The ambivalence that Perkins evinced in her attitude toward labor has grown into a great cultural divide...

...These policies, most of which are included in what Europeans call the “social wage,” protect working people from the vicissitudes of the market...

...Burdened by a mentally ill husband, Perkins lived at the edges of and at the sufferance of upper-class patrons...

...In the current instance, those without health insurance coverage were, until the beginning of this past fall, the focus of the reformers’ concern...

...To begin with, those most likely to have adequate health insurance among the workers are unionized workers...

...And Downey’s assertion of Perkins’s influence is only overstated, not without some warrant...

...This is not your grandmother’s labor movement...

...She told him all these things and he believed her...

...Downey’s biography is sympathetic to Perkins’s social feminism and also to Perkins’s distance from the labor movement...

...Early on, she changed churches, from Congregationalist to Episcopalian...

...Its origins, which were in the famous troika—immigrants, labor, and reformers—that helped elect Al Smith governor of New York, are best captured in Robert Caro’s one hundred or so pages on Smith that are embedded in his biography of Robert Moses...

...Downey suggests part of Perkins’s motivation was to be among the more refined...

...He is the author of Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and lectures widely on labor rights issues...

...But it is here that Perkins’s background left her with a blind spot...

...Her perception was that a law would (a) protect or benefit more people and (b) unions narrowly defend only their members...

...For her principled stand, Downey reminds us, Perkins was forced in 1939 to undergo an attempted impeachment initiated by the congressional faction (of Republicans and right-wing Democrats) that would soon become the backbone of the Red Scare...

...Without a major source of political, material, and activist support, reforms like the minimum wage or even the Wagner Act can erode or have unintended consequences...

...With national health insurance for all, the unionized employers would not have been at a competitive disadvantage to nonunion stores...

...Perkins spent much of her life struggling upward from the middle of the middle class (her father was a shopkeeper, and the family was downwardly mobile from earlynineteenthcentury wealth...

...What we need now, and what is in short supply, for health care reform and the restoration of labor rights, is the muscle to make things happen, the confidence and willingness to mobilize masses for reform...

...She distrusted poor and working-class people,” Linda Gordon has written, “and believed that ‘All social improvements in this country . . . have sprung from the middle classes—the intellectual, comfortable middle classes.’ “ If the politics of progressive change is civil war without guns—the right-wing Tea Parties of this August suggest it surely is—then a strong labor movement is a strategic asset without peer...

...By contrast to the milieu to which she aspired, the AFL leaders she dealt with in New York and then Washington were crude...

...Robert J. S. Ross is Professor of Sociology and Director of the International Studies Stream at Clark University...

...Subsequent to the book’s publication Downey has reminded readers of the importance of unemployment insurance in today’s recession, but even when she addressed these topics in front of an AFL-CIO audience, Downey did not take up the issue of labor movement revival...

...This estrangement from the labor leaders of her era is central to Downey’s story...

...nor will a super-dedicated cabinet secretary be enough (though it would be nice to have a few on the side of workers...

...history was very much part of her consciousness—the assertion of the importance of technical expertise in making social policy and the importance of the educated middle classes in providing both the reform impulse and the expertise to implement it...

...quite as the Perkins/social feminist/Progressive movement saw it then...

...Famously, all but the latter were to be won and even more...

...Only as legislative advocates for health reform realized that the bulk of the country, already insured, was more concerned with rising outofpocket cost and security of insurance tenure, did the debate of 2009 shift...

...The discussion of health insurance reform in many liberal circles now resembles a certain tendency among the Progressive movement from which Perkins sprang...

...Perkins once said, reflecting on her experience, “I’d rather pass a law than organize a union...

...That its leader William Green later claimed credit for the bill reminds one of a phrase John Kennedy quoted about the crackpot Bay of Pigs invasion: victory has a hundred fathers, defeat is an orphan...

...The AFL opposed the original versions of the Fair Labor Standards Act, setting minimum wages and maximum hours, for which Perkins worked so hard...

...But, in contrast to Perkins’s day, it is also those workers and their unions who are most supportive of universal coverage...

...However distant she was personally from the union movement, and however critical of it, she acknowledged and supported the importance of collective organization...

...It reveals the personal troubles and deep commitments of a woman obstructed by sexism, by misfortune in her personal life, yet successful beyond conventional measures of achievement...

...35 As the nation debates once again proposals to guarantee health insurance for everyone, a new biography of Frances Perkins reminds us of just how long the argument has been going on...

...Downey’s book, sometimes without her full awareness, shows Perkins’s role in the evolution of what would become the New Deal coalition and later the liberal-left coalition...

...Now, even as the American labor movement leads the uphill battle for some form of public health insurance, it is fighting for its own life...

...Of concern to Perkins and her mentor Florence Kelley—the founder of the National Consumers League—were the vulnerable workers who were not yet central to a more socially conscious labor movement that was to emerge later...

...Broader social consciousness was of course characteristic of communist and socialist unionists— but Perkins was neither attracted to nor on close terms with the Left...

...Downey rescues from the mists of time Perkins’s valiant refusal to stand by in the attempted deportation of leftist longshore union leader Harry Bridges...

...Social movement unionism—to use today’s preferred buzzword—was not a prominent feature of the mainstream unions of Perkins’s acquaintance, at least not during her formative years as a professional reformer...

...That labor movement, which we now comprehend mainly as industrial unionism, was to surge out of the Great Depression during the very years of Perkins’s incumbency at the Department of Labor...

...In fact, they are the one bloc most likely to support a public option and single-payer alternatives— in other words, they are the largest bloc of supporters who want to extend benefits they now have to others...

...In Perkins’s day, it was child laborers and women workers who were in need of protection...

...That book was a person, and her name was Frances Perkins...

...Its particular stamp on U.S...

...Her apartments were often provided by wealthy friends who shared quarters with her, as did the heiress and socialite Mary Harriman Rumsey and, after her death, the wealthy widow and congresswoman, Caroline Love O’Day...

...In downturns, unemployment insurance, social security, family support payments, and maximum hours legislation all maintain a floor under aggregate consumer demand...

...Partly as a consequence, labor and its allies do not—apparently—think they can use mass demonstrations to leverage their way into a legislative victory...

...Anything that protects workers in these ways also has the effect of emboldening and thus empowering them to defend themselves further...

...Perkins, born in 1880, came to political and intellectual maturity in the bosom of the Progressive movement...

...This was not enough to elect Smith president or to remake national policy...

...The Southern California supermarket strike of 1993-1994 is a case in point...

...There was another dimension to Perkins’s distance from the labor movement—one that Downey shows in detail, though she does not much comment...

...One of them summed the matter up this way: ”I’ll tell you...

...Downey’s perception of this matter is apparently built upon the proposition that ordinary tourists in Washington, D.C., don’t know who Perkins was...

...What Perkins implanted with Smith and eventually in the policies of the Democratic Party was the foundation upon which white, working-class social enfranchisement would be partially erected...

...It is probable, though not certain, that Perkins would understand this, given the chance to observe today’s landscape...

...So the nature of the labor movement and its relation to vulnerable workers is not now (was it ever...

...When the labor movement does organize local actions—and there are many of them—for health reform, the bedraggled metropolitan dailies and their dumbed-down television cousins do not cover the events...

...So here is the paradox: Perkins, not the strongest union supporter among the big players of the New Deal, presided over the enactment of a legal and political framework now fondly recalled by labor movement supporters...

...However, by 1933, a tide of new immigrant voters carried Roosevelt to victory...

...Although today’s labor movement is a lot more socially conscious than Samuel Gompers’s, its self-interest in the health insurance issue is not trivial...

...If the labor movement’s material and political resources were tripled as well as the number of union households, wouldn’t singlepayer national health insurance be on the table if not the dominant solution...

...Steeped in the details of Perkins’s life and loves—one learns, for example, of a not-quite romance with Sinclair Lewis—Downey writes almost nothing of the strategic issues Perkins’s story raises for our times...

...The health insurance discourse would be different if the labor movement were as relatively large now as it was in 1948-1950, when Truman tried (but failed) to get national health insurance...

...The present impasse—nominal Democratic majorities but actual conservative congressional hegemony—can be overcome...

...In 1911, when Perkins and her whole cohort of upper-middleclass reformers were horrified by the deaths of women and young workers at the Triangle Fire, the old-line unions were still resistant to women, and many were racially or ethnically exclusive and estranged from the new immigrants...

...For Downey, the biographical task at hand is to rescue Perkins from what the author apparently perceives as obscurity...

...When the young Frances Perkins first became the “book” that educated Al Smith, the broad outline of a new coalition emerged...

...Perkins was anti-populist...

...Compared to the political forces of 1935, those of 2010 appear less propitious...

...But one can also find it in this passage from the Social Security Administration sketch of her: At Smith’s funeral in 1944 two of his former Tammany Hall political cronies were overheard to speculate on why Smith had become a social crusader...

...It would be good to have Perkins back to talk about labor rights to the earnest feminists and supporters of Barack Obama’s progressive reform agenda— her contemporary doppelgangers...