Madame Perkins has been in labor for eight years, but...

Two big national holidays here in the US this past week: Labor Day Weekend and Women’s Equality Day. 

Labor Day is much more familiar to Americans, I am sure.  Women’s Equality Day, always celebrated August 26, marks that August day in 1920 when the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution finally (after a 75 year struggle) granted women the right to vote.

Banks are still open August 26, no special bargains at stores.  Parades?  Not that I heard of, although long ago I did go to a Women’s Equality Day parade.  August 26, 1970, New York City. We were valiantly trying again to amend the Constitution.  This time seeking more than the just the vote.  We marched in support of a new amendment, the Equal Rights Amendment.  Full text: “Equal rights shall not be denied because of sex.”  That one failed; the necessary 2/3 of states wouldn’t ratify it.  I remember lots of scare tactics (required unisex bathrooms!) terrifying the southerners.

But Labor Day – now that’s a holiday we can get behind.  Always the first Monday in Sept.  A guaranteed three day weekend.  Back yard barbeques, all kinds of sales, and maybe a parade here or there. 

This holiday is only a little older than Women’s Equality Day.  1894, after the bitter Pullman Strike, railroad workers, President Grover Cleveland sought to appease union leaders with a holiday.  The date was picked to be as far as possible from May 1, International Workers Day, wanted no association with the Communists. 

We’re still pretty ambivalent about the rights of workers, even with the holiday.  Not quite as much as we fear women’s rights, but we can all support a day off from work and more encouragement to shop.  Sadly, many of our federal holidays honoring “good causes,” like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, 3^rd Monday in January, have become just  a long weekend for skiing and shopping.  But at least in my kids’ school they had some kind of lesson about Rev. Dr. King that week in January. Even though school now starts mid-August, (it used to begin after Labor Day) I doubt there is an August 26 unit on Women’s Rights.

Frances PerkinsSo to combine these two great American causes, rights of workers and women, I write today in honor and celebration of a remarkable American woman labor activist, Frances Perkins.  She should be the star of both Labor Day and Women’s Equality Day.  Perkins served as Secretary of Labor for 12 years in the Franklin Roosevelt administration, 1932-44, only one of two cabinet members to serve in all four of his terms.  She was the first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet.  That made her the first woman to be in the possible line of succession for president. 

But we don’t honor Frances Perkins because she was the first woman anything; indeed she would scorn that.

We honor her because she created and helped enact so many rights and policies and programs for workers that we take for granted in the US. 

She created Social Security Insurance, which provides guaranteed income and services for the elderly (over 65), unemployed, disabled and survivors.  Only since the New Deal and Perkins does every retired worker, disabled worker, surviving spouse or child of a retired or injured or dead worker (i.e. all of us at some time) receive a Social Security check every month.  Frances Perkins open that account.

During her service as Secretary of Labor our government also enacted for the first time national child labor laws, unemployment insurance, minimum wage requirements, and many health and safety regulations..

Born in 1880, a New England child of some privilege, Perkins studied labor history and social work and began her career advocating for the rights of women workers.   She was an eyewitness to the horrendous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the worst industrial accident in New York history, whose 154 victims were mostly young women Jewish and Italian immigrants.  She came to state attention lobbying successfully for a law in NY State limiting the work week for women and children to no more than 54 hours.  New York Governor Al Smith convinced her to move from advocacy to policy in 1918, two years before she and other women could even vote, by joining the fledgling occupational safety part of his government.  Subsequent NY governor Franklin D. Roosevelt made her his Secretary of Labor, and then invited her to join his presidential cabinet.  She agreed, she said, only if they would work for social security insurance for retired and disabled workers and their dependents, and other worker rights.  She had to convince FDR over and over again to take courageous stands.  The New Deal legacy would be shallow without her hard won policies.

For a country enamored by the myth of rugged individualism and terrified of so-called socialism, this was a hard sell.  When she and FDR came into office half of all elderly people were in poverty, in large part because of the Great Depression.   Even then they had to fight for each bill.  Their same battle is being fought again today; Republicans for the past few decades, Romney and Ryan today, want to reduce or eliminate Social Security. Republicans in the 1990s decimated New Deal programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children under the so-called “Personal Responsibility Act,” and the Ryan-Romney budget plan would strip them further.

Both Perkins, a devout Episcopalian, and now the Christian Obama frame much of their advocacy for government aid in religious terms, the responsibility of a society to care for its needy and elderly, the least of these.  Ryan and Romney, so-called men of faith, follow a different gospel.  Their ignorant mantra is every man (sic) for himself.  They assert that we need little if any government at all and we have no responsibility for social services for the poor. 

Obama tries to remind people that no one succeeds completely alone; we’ve all been helped by education, roads, internet, safety regulations, all of which come from government. If you have a business, he said recently, you didn’t do that alone, you had a teacher, roads, etc. “You didn’t build that,” he said, referring to the roads and infrastructure.  Republicans took the quote out of context, sulked behind their government supported loans and bailed out cars, bragged that they are completely self made and blindly cheered at their convention this week, “We Built It!” in a convention hall built with federal funds for a millionaire candidate taking federal money to help pay for his campaign. 

Frances PerkinsReminds me of a story I read about Frances Perkins confronting the people of so-called faith of her own church who likewise claimed, “We built it!” An author describes it this way: 

“Don’t you think it’s wrong for people to get things they don’t pay for?”

The question came from a man seated in the honeyed glow of the Guild Room of one of Manhattan's most famous Episcopal churches. This gentleman had not paid to heat the magnificent edifice popularly known as St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue, nor had he donated its handsome furnishings.  Even the 1948 lecture he had just heard had been funded by a legacy. 

He was not thinking of those things, of course.  His question was about the morality of the income redistribution mechanisms created by the New Deal, and it was addressed to the woman who was their chief architect and advocate.

“Why no,” Frances Perkins responded. “I find I get so much more than I pay for.  Don't you?”  The woman who had conceived, birthed, nursed and nurtured the New Deal’s crowning achievement – the Social Security Act – was revealing the theological perspective that informed her long career advocating, shaping and ultimately implementing social policy.  She knew she had not paid for the earth she walked on or the parents who had raised her.  She had not “earned” the air in her lungs.  All life was an unearned gift from God, as she saw it.  What we “got” in her view, was a function of grace, not merit or its inverse correlate, sin.

“I came to Washington to serve God, FDR and the poor working man,” Perkins said.

The only reason I even know about Frances Perkins (and I should have read about her as a Women’s Studies major in college) is because of a bad imitation my father does of FDR every Labor Day.  FDR had a notorious NY Brahmin accent that is fun to mimic, and many heard his voice because he was the first President to speak weekly on the radio.  “I hate waaah (war).  Eleanor hates waaah.  Sisty and Buzzy (his two dogs) hate waaah.” 

My father comes from a NY business family that probably didn’t vote for FDR – too many of those rights for workers.  Today they would probably vote for Romney.  (He became a Democrat after Nixon and Watergate.)  So he enjoyed making fun of FDR and we would goad him to do it.  

Every Labor Day the FDR quote was, “Madame Perkins has been in laaybawh for 8 yeaaahs, and has yet to produce anything!” 

Writing this column I tried to find that quote, and all I could find was how much FDR admired and supported Perkins’ labor reforms.  Why would he say this mean thing about her and make a bad pun about her being in “labor?”

So I asked my 90 year father, “Where did you hear FDR say that?”   Oh, he said, FDR didn’t say that.  That was one of his many opponents, making fun of FDR (and of women in government, in labor), telling lies and misquoting what FDR had actually said. 

Politicians telling lies about their opponents?  Partisans making up quotes by their opponents?  Government trying to deny the rights of workers, and abandoning them in their old age or disability or orphaned state?  

Boy, I’m sure glad those New Deal laws passed so we don’t have those kinds of shenanigans and bad government anymore….. 

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter