Labor's First Lady

...Moreover, she had a ritual of leaving Washington regularly to immerse herself in the enforced celibacy and quiet of a nearby Episcopalian convent, and her devout religiosity deserves further commentary...

...Perkins, an alumna of Mt...

...The New Deal chapters may be utterly confusing to readers uninitiated in the lab-rynths of the alphabet agencies...

...Unlike many of her female contemporaries, however, Perkins married in 1913, at the age of 33, bore a child and made the transition from social to political activity...

...Whenever Roosevelt concluded a speech, people would appear on the platform not so much to congratulate him as to mask his movements...

...Doak showed no intention of going anywhere...

...This she did through her husband, Paul Wilson, an economist who was to take a job with the reform administration of New York Mayor John Purroy Mitchel...

...In the end, though, a single vignette Martin draws from the oral memoirs may explain more about the Perkins-Roosevelt relationship than any common ideological predilection...

...Madame Secretary reflects a prodigious research effort, but it often lacks the kind of historical sensibility that places raw data in an adequate context...

...We are today considerably more sober in recognizing the limitations of state-regulated welfare capitalism, a sobriety this book doesn't always accommodate...

...Nonetheless, Martin is reluctant to suggest any connection, for example, between her personal circumstances and her conviction that for a woman to get ahead in public life she had to "behave, dress and comport herself" in a manner that conveyed an image of "motherhood," not womanhood...

...once in office she always appeared a rather queer little lady in black who wore a tricorn hat her enemies claimed she commandeered from the Bureau of Standards...

...She grabbed the woman next to her and hurriedly stood in front of Roosevelt as he turned to leave the platform...

...Nevertheless, the issue was ever-present...

...She opened a drawer...

...Wilson spent the rest of his life in and out of New York hospitals, with Perkins carrying the burden of the family finances...

...This would explain why, despite her serving as Secretary of Labor until FDR died in his fourth term and witnessing the greatest period of organization in American trade union history, she could claim little credit for the achievement...

...The Right, meanwhile, kept up a steady attack against Perkins, accusing her of "coddling" aliens and radicals in labor's ranks because of her "soft woman's heart...

...The first woman Cabinet member in the history of the United States spent her inaugural day cleaning house...

...Martin need not have resorted to the technique of psychohistory to have shed greater light on the material he presents...

...Martin notes that on the day of the signing of the Social Security Act, Perkins received a call from her husband's nurse saying he had disappeared...

...Madame Secretary is especially welcome, therefore, as a long overdue contribution to a historiography that has slighted the female role in Roosevelt's Administration...

...The maneauver thereafter became routine...

...Reviewed by Ellen Chesler The day after Francis Perkins took office as Franklin D. Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor in 1933 the New York Times reported that she had arrived at the ramshackle headquarters of the Department to find her desk strewn with flowers, the staff ready to assist her, and the outgoing Secretary, William Doak, eager to offer aid and cooperation...

...George Martin's admiring and admirable biography is the first to be based on the mammoth collection of documents and oral memoirs that Perkins did not allow to be opened before her death in 1965...

...Perkins dressed fashionably when she was young...

...She rarely spoke of the illness, even to close friends, but it was a constant concern...

...Perkins was seated near the platform at the Democratic National Convention in 1924 when Roosevelt made his first public appearance after his near-fatal bout with polio...

...One hopes more keenly analytical biographies will follow...

...The author's detachment is as much a problem when he deals with the public woman as with the private...

...This time the inaccuracy was all on Perkins' part...

...Later that year a journalist asked Perkins if being a woman was a handicap in government...

...At the conclusion of the famous "happy warrior" speech nominating AI Smith for President, Perkins realized that Roosevelt's awkward snuffing movements should be shielded from public view as he left the podium...

...Both the President and his Secretary, it may be argued, did not clearly understand the significance of self-determination for labor in an industrialized society...

...Thus, although she un-equivocably supported labor's right to organize and bargain collectively, and used her considerable personal influence with Roosevelt to prevent the government from restraining the longshoremen's strike in 1934 and the sit-down strikes at General Motors in 1937, Perkins never had perfect confidence in the trade union movement as an instrument of social morality, nor in the enlightenment and accountability of its leadership...

...Her refusal to deport the Australian-born Harry Bridges, leader of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, and an avowed Communist sympathizer, resulted in a vicious, slanderous campaign against her and a 1939 resolution by the bloodthirsty Dies Committee calling for impeachment...

...It would also explain why Perkins devoted most of her efforts to social welfare legislation—particularly the old age, unemployment insurance and relief provisions of the Social Security Act, and the maximum hours and minimum wage regulations embodied initially in the National Recovery Act and subsequently in the Fair Labor Standards Act...

...An instance of this is Martin's account of her early life and marriage...

...Most important, perhaps, is the simple fact that Martin never figures out exactly what he thinks of Perkins' and FDR's labor record, a failing that in these days of New Deal revisionism seems serious...

...It reminds us that her sex determined not merely elements of her personality, but of her policies and programs as a public servant as well...

...So does the strained relationship between Perkins and her daughter, Susanna...

...She drove to the White House, posed with the President and the smiling architects of the bill (the photograph appears on the book jacket), and then took the next train to New York, where Wilson was found unharmed...

...I saw around him all those fat slob politicians—men—and I knew they wouldn't think of it," she remembered...

...She possessed a religious fervor and moral faith in "the promise of American life" that was characteristic of Progressive-era reformers...

...The proceedings against her were dropped, but her reputation never recovered and the blight on her character combined with a military fever during World War II to push women into the governmental background and practically eradicate Perkins' power...

...Sometime in the winter of 1918, Wilson was overcome by a psychological depression Martin can tell us little about—merely that neither husband nor wife ever fully understood it...

...For the sheer human drama of one woman's battles through the public corridors of American life, the book should not be missed...

...Throughout a long career in public life—first as a good-government lobbyist in Albany, then with a New York City committee on factory safety formed after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911, later in the gubernatorial administrations of Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt, and finally in Washington—Perkins always tried to play down the difficulty of being a woman in a man's world...

...Only in climbing trees," she replied curtly...

...Such incidents—demonstrating Perkins' remarkable personality and how her feminity contributed to it —make Madame Secretary a fascinating and worthwhile reading experience...

...One cannot help assuming—and Martin does not deny?that the tragedy of her marriage and her inability to help her husband had a great deal to do with Perkins' peculiar demeanor and dread of publicity...

...A two-fisted man,' as the saying went, would have stood up to those subversives...

...The truth is that Perkins, having heard not a word from her predecessor, took a cab over to Labor where she found no signs that anyone had given a thought to her arrival...

...Her reticence derived in part, the author believes, from her unique awareness of the large groups of workers, notably women, who were excluded from the union rolls...

...The astonished Perkins summarily packed him off to lunch and sat down at his desk to begin disposing of his belongings...

...Holyoke, followed many women college graduates of her day into teaching and then, via the settlement house movement, into social work...

...The story was not exactly accurate...

...Roosevelt, after all, was a patrician farmer who came to the White House knowing very little about industrial America and had never met a payroll, as Perkins was fond of reminding him...

...It is a pity, though, that in committing to public record the unrecognized accomplishments and jealously guarded secrets of Perkins' life, Martin rarely interprets them sufficiently, either from the perspective of her time or the present...

...In fact, as he bluntly told her in his heavy Virginia drawl, he assumed that since she was a woman, she naturally would return to her family in New York rather than remain in Washington...

...He sets out to reveal the woman behind what was a carefully cultivated public persona, but when all is done the real Francis Perkins remains elusive...

...It is possible that her problems in this area are a clue to why, during World War II, she said that a mother's primary duty is in the home and opposed government programs to provide day care for women working in war industries...

...The odd couple shared what many in their day and since have identified as a naive Progressive faith in the ability of government, under the leadership of "statesmen," to balance the interests of labor and capital and to arbitrate impartially between private interests and the public good...

...She never "cavorted" for the press and allowed others of the Brain Trust to stand in the limelight, Martin tells us, yet she was responsible for many New Deal milestones...

...peering out at her, from amid the filth and debris of four years of neglect, was the largest cockroach she had ever seen...