Profiles in Character #9: Frances Perkins Drives the Campaign for Social Security

On February 22, 1933, Frances Perkins prepared to meet with incoming president Franklin D. Roosevelt.  She knew why he had summoned her.  At the height of the depression, FDR would ask her to do what no woman had ever done - serve as a Cabinet secretary. 

Before taking the job, she laid out an ambitious plan – including putting people back to work, dealing with child labor, ensuring a minimum wage, a national system of unemployment insurance and an old-age pension system.  FDR balked at the last two, saying he could not support the “dole,” people getting handouts for not working. “[Y]ou don’t want me for Secretary of Labor if you don’t want these things done,” she said.

Born a Boston society girl, with degrees from Mount Holyoke, Wharton and Columbia at a time when just 3 percent of women graduated from college, Perkins was nevertheless passionate about improving Americans’ lives.  She had worked in settlement houses and campaigned against sexual slavery in New York City.  She had witnessed the 1911 New York City Triangle Fire, which took the lives of 146 seamstresses because of shoddy workplace conditions and supervisors who had locked doors to keep women from taking unauthorized breaks.  

She was politically astute, knowing the challenges facing a woman in a male-dominated world.  She had changed her name (from Fannie to Frances, to sound more substantial and gender neutral). She had a quick mind and a flair for befriending people.  When she found out that, in New York City, the “dirty” Tammany Hall politicians were the ones who could get things done, she befriended them too.    

She bided her time, sitting with wives of Cabinet members at official functions rather than with the office-holders.  At Cabinet meetings, she let men speak first. Vice-President John Nance Garner recalled: “She kept still until the president asked her what she had to say.  Then she said it.  She said it loud enough so I could hear [Garner was hard of hearing].  She said it plain and distinct.

In Roosevelt’s first year, she focused on getting people back to work, through such programs as the Civilian Conservation Corps.  She gained a reputation for hard work and honesty.  But she had not forgotten her commitment to the unemployed and aged.  “I promise to use what brains I have to meet problems with intelligence and courage,” she said as early as 1929. “I promise that I will be candid . . . I promise … the whole truth so far as I can speak it.” 

“I took it upon myself to mention unemployment insurance at least every second meeting of the Cabinet – just to mention it so that it wouldn’t die; so it wouldn’t get out of people’s minds.”  Perkins told the president that because of the depression “It is probably our only chance in twenty-five years” to get a bill through Congress. 

Her plan was to combine unemployment, old-age, and health insurance in a bill for cradle to grave coverage, but would it fly politically?  Roosevelt approved her launching an unemployment compensation effort, despite opposition from business, but then publicly pulled back.  Perkins was furious and marched to the White House.  FDR backed off.

In June 1934, she proposed a group to prepare a bill for Congress.  Perkins liked committees as a tool for getting good programs and support. “It is our American habit to arrive at what we think by talking things out together,” she said.  To avoid an endless committee process, she recommended a Cabinet-only committee, supplemented with experts. 

The committee lacked funds to operate, so she raised money herself.  She borrowed staff from other departments.  The experts sniped at Frances in the press when they didn’t get their way.  She put up with it.  There were Constitutional questions too.  It was not clear the Supreme Court would uphold programs of social insurance mandated by the federal government.  At a party where her friend, Justice Harlan Stone, was present he told her he could not comment on pending legislation but did say: ‘The taxing power, my dear, the taxing power.”   So, rather than a “dole,” unemployment and old-age insurance would rest on taxes on individuals and businesses.  Near the end of December, she locked the committee in her Georgetown home, put a bottle of Scotch on the table, and kept them at in until 2 a.m.

On January 17, 1935, Roosevelt sent legislation to Congress. She accepted amendments, knowing that getting a law passed which could be modified was better than no law at all.  The amended bill, without national health insurance (it was viewed as “socialized medicine”), passed on August 9, 1935.   Maurine Mulliner, an assistant to Senator Robert Wagner (D-NY) who helped shepherd the bill to passage, said: “I don’t think that President Roosevelt had the remotest interest in a Social Security bill or program . . . He was simply pacifying Frances.”

Perkins accepted none of the credit.  Yet her vision, determination, integrity, political savvy, and ability to build coalitions and trust have enabled hundreds of millions of Americans to live better lives.

Photo Credit: Social Security Administration