Chainsaw History - Part One: Frances Perkins Kicked Ass For Workers, Immigrants, and the Poor

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

What does Dirty Dancing have to do with the first woman to sit on an American presidential cabinet? Frances Perkins is the answer! Jamie & Bambi take a break from awful historical figures to celebrate the early life of someone who worked hard and long hours so that others could have an easier life. Learn more and support our podcast over on Patreon!

like we've both been sick off and on now i've been sick twice you've been sick once just in the very recent mm-hmm you know it's fall here in georgia yeah between the tree sex and the children that's everything's trying to kill us oh and then the plague don't forget the plan well speaking of everybody trying to kill us we're gonna hear a lot about some shitty people in the background but this is we're gonna try something different today so welcome whoever's listening to chainsaw history we are the podcast where we look at the important figures of history and show them the respect a baby gives a diaper i'm jamie chambers and this is my sister bambi hello and you can learn all about what we are

about and support the show by visiting us at chainsawhistory.com which will funnel you directly into our patreon where we have all the episodes show notes and bonus stuff so go check that out more at the end of the show on that we are a comedy history podcast i am not a historian but i did take history in college and i'm a guy with a lot of really strange priorities i'm a girl with a lot of odd hobbies does that count and well baby we've uh you know recently had labor day here and it was also your birthday not that long ago yes it was and i felt bad for you yay the entire month of your birthday um i inflicted the story of george wallace on you who you hated hated more than i ever imagined so much i have never hated anything more so after everything we've been

through recently my original plan was for us to do a what i called the roosevelt round table where we just talk a little bit of shit um about teddy roosevelt yeah teddy roosevelt is definitely not my favorite roosevelt and actually i still want to do that but i think that's going to be our bonus episode that will tie into this topic but like most things that would have made my life easier i just couldn't make myself do it um i really wanted to give our listeners a research and scripted episode but i do think we need a palette cleanser after more than three hours of talking about george wallace oh my god so so we're gonna do something a little bit different today instead of you know what we normally do is take this sort of like well-known figure

and chop them down to size and and talk shit about them but instead i'm we're gonna go a different route and take someone who's actually kind of awesome who not as many people know about and lift that person up okay i i do like awesome people we're gonna get a whole lot of them we're gonna get a little bit more positive at least in terms of our main character today um and not only that we we're gonna talk about one roosevelt and now we actually get two roosevelt in this story dos rooseveltes as they say in spanish probably well elinor roosevelt is my personal favorite and hero i know quite a bit about her although i'm still like having to do a bunch of research it's been between the children and yeah i haven't been able to force

myself to do anything now the bambi led elinor roosevelt episodes are are coming in they'll come and again i even have fun children stories that go with it so bambi are you familiar at all with a woman named francis perkins francis perkins this name sounds it's ringing a bell but i'm not coming up with anything so so based on your you know at least some roosevelt familiarity it's not surprising you at least sort of have heard the name before so let me ask you a different question are you you familiar with a with a movie called dirty dancing i'm very familiar with a movie i asked that uh i've seen it a couple of times considering that movie was constantly like we you wore out the vhs tape and the vinyl album i had both vinyl albums thank you very much because

there was dirty dancing and then there was also more dirty dancing thanks to you i can hear patrick swazy singing she's like the wind like in my ears at any moment i feel like it it was so great well you know what rest in peace pat yeah you know who wasn't a bastard patrick swazy i loved that man patrick swazy however the main character in dirty dancing uh had something that's actually a little bit in common with you because she went by a nickname that starts with the letter b given to her yeah she had a stupid nickname and then an even worse first name right i relate so there you go so at the end of the movie after delivering the legendary nobody puts baby in the corner line patrick swazy introduced jennifer gray's character to the

audience by her the much more mature name on her birth certificate francis yep in a throwaway line earlier in the film jennifer gray explains that her character was named francis in honor of the very first woman to sit on a united states presidential cabinet as our country's secretary of labor under franklin delano roosevelt and without this extraordinary person we probably wouldn't have things like the federal minimum wage a 40 hour work week an eight hour work day child labor restrictions and you know social security yeah i really like all those things this woman is the primary architect of the new deal and so today so today is kind of a treat for you maybe i want you we're gonna get to know feminist icon and total badass francis perkins

cool i'm in and i have very little energy so it's really good that i i can yeah here's somebody you can actually get behind and root for friends so let's get into it about francis perkins so so here's a twist francis was not actually her original name um on april 10th 1880 fanny coraline perkins so yes her name was fanny i can't imagine why she'd want to change her name okay because usually they give you a name like francis and then call you fanny nope it was fanny on her birth certificate her parents did oh that's just rude and it's also funny too is like you know especially if you become familiar with overseas people like in the uk and australia fanny is is slang for vagina so it's not even butt butt like it is here it's your front butt

oh so she she didn't hold on she didn't hold on to that one for her for life it was like you know what i don't want to be named after parts of my anatomy front or back so she chose francis as the as the better option as the alternative you know what if these were my options i would totally go with francis because there's nothing wrong with the name francis yeah it's it's fine it's patrick patrick swayze said it was a great name in front of a large crowd of people and i tend to believe him um so she was born on in uh beacon hill on beacon hill in boston massachusetts and in some ways she's like the very epitome of her stuffy new england protest and upbringing like like if you listen to her speak she's almost a cliche uh the the Yankee

values were drummed into the young girl's bones like work hard live modestly and help others she also lived an intensely private life while also staying out of the personal business of other she was like my shit's not any of your business and vice versa but her parents yeah that's that's usually uh that that's that's the good person to know yeah exactly she she wanted you to stay out of her business and but also wasn't interested in years her parents were both well-read and encouraged their daughter in the development of her mind which was unusual considering you know fanny here turned 20 in the year 1900 yeah no usually women's educations were not a priority they didn't have any sons they had two daughters so maybe that was some part of it so they just

poured all of their their hopes and dreams of the future into their girls um so uh and even though because of the education that they pushed her towards it kind of expanded her into politics and thinking way outside of anything that they would be comfortable with uh just to give you an idea about her upbringing and what kind of a parent she had i'm going to read you what francis recorded her mother saying when purchasing hats in the year 1890 so so francis or fanny rather is 10 years old right now and mrs susan perkins purchased her daughter a rather plain like tricorner hat and dropped some truth on her them idea is your hat her mother said you should always wear a hat something like this you have a very broad face it's broader between the two

cheekbones than is up at the top your head is narrow above the temples and then it is at the cheekbones and it lops off very suddenly at your chin the result is that you need to have as much width in your hat as you have in your cheekbones never get yourself a hat that is narrower than your cheekbones because it makes you look ridiculous oh you know that's some good advice i personally would like to talk to some women about bangs just because you don't need miles and miles of forehead no her mom was like her her like brutally honest best friend here it's like don't wear one of these other kind of hats you will look like don't wear these shitty hats they're not flattering and it makes you look stupid i mean i totally get that that's

that's good parenting sorry fanny you do not have the face for a high hat it's just you don't want a high hat you know not everyone's made for it so it's right there the Yankee attitude to a brutal honesty practicality and make your children intensely aware of their shortcomings so frances once wrote that her father never once told his daughters they looked pretty ever his entire life because that would be considered sinful he might say you look ladylike that would be like the most of a compliment dad would ever give well you know what i'm um but i guess it's better than getting a little too interesting you know it's better than i mean what it's like how were they complimented otherwise they were you know they were told to be smart this isn't me talking

shit about her parents we're just saying this is the the kind of like you know new england protestant you know oh the new england protestant where they actually wanted their women to be intelligent and didn't really focus too much on their looks and beauty yeah i mean yeah these are terrible people let's throw them overboard now so far they're they seem all right even if they said francis is gonna kind of drift past anything they're in their experience so even later when francis was negotiating labor disputes with dirty men in hard hats she spoke with a stuffy new england affect that must have been off-putting so i'll admit because there's a lot of recordings of her um and i when i was listening to a lot of them reading direct quotes i i kind of

made a face the way she uses the word one uh instead of personal pronouns she's like one should do this and one shouldn't do that you know very like this and it versus well that's that's how ladies were supposed to talk though yeah especially if you were brought up uh like with a governance yeah i mean and they were they were kind of they would they were kind of like middle class family but and it sounds to me but it's like and honestly like once i've read a lot more and listened to her speak a lot more over the last week um it's really seems to be more part of her humility and sense of privacy uh like you know instead of saying you know i should you know i did this and i did that she's like one does this it's it's a way of making it not about her and just being about what's sensible

and practical for everyone yeah what what's people should do not just what she is doing because she's one thing one thing she does not have is a lot of personal pride she does not put her own ego into the the things that she tries to accomplish which is something i really admire which is why she was really effective instead of just a douchebag like um most other politicians and yeah she got stuff done the fact that you know the fact that you didn't immediately know a lot about her when i'm sure he's actually kind of by her design she actually went to a lot of trouble so we wouldn't have much to talk about like she apparently destroyed a number of notes and letters and stuff she didn't want journalists who she didn't trust or historians to ever get a

hold of it because once again she felt like her private life was that and she didn't really give a shit it was hers she wouldn't be couldn't be interested uh in us talking about her and her legacy right now she couldn't care less if she if there's some you know version of her in the afterlife it's off working hard and not giving a shit about her to us talking about her yeah well i mean if she gave us all the cool shit that you uh claimed she did yeah and again it's like well she didn't i guess she didn't want us to focus on hers she wanted us to focus on her work so let's do it plus you'll see some reasons why she got intensely private even going forward even when she had a public position uh so yeah before for her was always about the work to be done the best

that could be done and she was willing to compromise she's willing to work with questionable people as long as it made progress towards the long-term goals and damn if this woman didn't get a lot done so let's jump into it we'll go so we'll go back to francis's early life uh one thing that was definitely a huge influence was her parents combination of social conservatism and political liberalism as author david brookes put it so meaning they were very strict and modest in their private lives but they devoted part of their time to like charitable works helping people and they voted in government uh that you know they believe that government should preserve good order by helping people so they believed in an active you know a government so so very unusually

for the end of the 19th century they also placed a large value of education for their daughter and supported education you know for women in general and the early stories of of francis in like high school were that she was very very smart but very much a slacker so i related to her instantly she's like i don't want to do all the work yeah she made mediocre grades and didn't really stand out and at least in high school um but then her parents helped her and she moved into mount holy oak college where she could be introduced to issues and causes that hadn't really reached her in her much more sheltered family life so the culture of this all-girls school was much more about like correcting moral weakness and teaching self-discipline so

obviously there was education going on but instead of this idea of college is here to freely like explore ideas this is more like you need to understand that you're this flawed sinner and you need to work on yourself so teachers were so so she had some experiences uh several that she recounted that i didn't weren't worth making this even longer to get into here but she had several like of her college professors that kind of like really beat her down gave her a hard time but then later on she was super grateful because she felt like they really instilled that you just pushed even when you even when it sucks even when you hate it you just get shit done it's not about whether you like it or not or whether you know how you're feeling at the moment and that really

kind of been about you yeah not about her so uh her teacher successfully broke her out of old bad habits and instilled a tireless worker mentality she'd maintain for life even and especially when doing stuff she hated so one of the best examples here is her college major and this is where she and i who started a little bit of like we immediately diverge off forever so so just like me she was drawn to history and literature and was completely baffled by chemistry but unlike me she decided to major in her weakest subject so the idea being if she mastered the thing she was worse at she could handle anything and she did so she was bad at chemistry so she majored in it and didn't even make great grades like she just pushed her way

through the hardest thing she could think of um at at the same time she made herself as busy and useful as possible so she acted as the executive for like half the activities on campus she was constantly volunteering and organizing all kinds of stuff that was going on all over the college so later oh yeah no she she was one of those people who had to be busy um as reported in the evening star which was a washington dc newspaper quote in college she was right for work and the mark she made on her classmates at mount holyoke caused them to make her their permanent class president it was the class of 1902 so she got voted in in charge of everything because she was so busy volunteering they figured you know why not just put her in charge of everything she wants

to be in charge of everything she'll do it oh she's like that pta mom i don't like except she was the p you know she was the 20 year old girl now the idea of social service as part of her religion got a serious boost while francis was in college as this was the big moment for a religious movement called the social gospel i don't even ever heard of this one because it's faded long away by now but when you find out what these people are all about you'll be a little sad to hear how far modern mainstream like evangelical christianity has gone away from from these guys at the social gospel so like they're the opposite of prosperity gospel douchebags like joel ostin okay at its most basic the social gospel decided to take the idea of the lord's prayer from the gospel of matthew

and put it into real-world practice so that kingdom come that will be done on earth as it is in heaven so in other words instead of just accepting that things suck around here but what a better life awaits in heaven they say the job of a true christian is to work and sacrifice to build a world closer to the kingdom of god here on earth that means helping people feeding people serving you know the so that's why this religion died off oh yes yeah it was about service yeah i didn't it's not about making people rich and powerful it's about hum humbling yourself and helping others so it had stood no chance in the united states long term oh so these folks became the the religious segment of the progressive movement in the united states so they were fighting

public policy wars over injustice poverty and human suffering in the name of jesus christ it was also an important part of the labor movement in the early 20th century and its ideas were incredibly influential to young perkins i don't know but this actually sounds like a church i could get behind no these people were very cool for one for once no i remember you know i i minored in religion at a private christian college and i read some of these uh these social gospel people and it's like yeah they're their ideas are in the but now they'll be like socialists how dare you want jesus communism jesus wasn't about to scream about communism jesus wasn't about feeding the hundry or anything yeah jesus was a socialist y'all as class president francis chose be ye steadfast as their

class motto she took the verse from first carinthians quote therefore my beloved brethren be ye steadfast unmovable always abounding in the work of the lord for so much as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the lord unquote it's all about just holding true to the cause and and know that your work is going to pay off in the end regardless of whether you're around to see it or enjoy the results of it it's about holding on so it's like you know that's her motto she made for her class and very appropriate for herself and she remained a woman of faith for her whole life except she her version of faith involved actual like work not just yeah not just on the small personal level but trying to make change in the world yeah normally they just you know they're shitty all week and

then go to church on sunday and now they're good christians but college and a new perspective on her faith changed the young woman so when her mother visited uh she found the the changes in francis troubling and this quote is saying i don't recognize my daughter fanny anymore i can't understand it she's a stranger to me and susan perkins daughter would officially change her name to francis in 1905 when she joined the episcopal church because she was just like for for christ sake please stop calling me fanny no i do not want to be fanny anymore i'm francis i do not want to be fanny so after leaving college she took a position teaching at a girl's school in lake forest illinois but then she got involved with another element that grew out of the social gospel movement

something called the settlement movement and its most prominent location hull house in chicago and having lived near chicago for a decade i can tell you hull house is a very famous spot and it was part of this uh the settlement movement what i was telling you about so it's this was a movement that was around in the late 19th and 20th century it was a program designed to link the rich and middle class with poor and working class people by literally putting them up close to one another and creating social connections um the main focus was establishing these settlement houses which hull house was the like primo example of so volunteers from better circumstances would live and work directly with these poor people but in a condition of service

so a middle class woman might volunteer as a counselor or assistant or advisor on some project so according to david brooks hull house offered job training child care a savings bank english lessons even art classes so the idea being that the settlement houses would not only materially improve the lives of the poor people there but also give them exposure to things like art and music and culture that would not be available to them so it's like it's like saying okay all you local people who've got it good you need to volunteer some of your time and help out the people who don't have it so good but you're not going you're not there to condescend to them you're here to literally work for them and help them you're gonna humble yourself and help the poor

yeah like jesus but all but all but only that but by creating these social connections you're building these like you're building these little social bridges in between the poorer and wealthier communities and it all that always opens up doors and provides opportunities for everybody and just opens everybody's eyes when you suddenly see how things are on the other side of the tracks it's like it had multiple things it was trying to do so at hull house francis worked directly with its legendary co-founder jane adams and threw herself into a life of service to the cause while being trained to to distance her own emotions so so like adams did not trust people who committed acts of compassion uh based on mood and emotion like she was like if you're looking for the

person to thank you or be grateful or turn their lives around you're doing it for the wrong reasons you you shouldn't be focused on this short-term stuff or or any kind of emotional high you get from feeling like you've helped somebody instead you're there to serve them uh you in fact if somebody doesn't even give a shit or is ungrateful you still do the work and be just as glad as you did it because it's the work that is where the value comes yeah that's where that's where it's satisfying that's where the that's where grace lies right she also reminded those working in her house that they were there to like serve the needs of their charges they were not there to condescend or to take away people's decisions or agency so like you know they you know they might have advice

they might have helped to offer but was never about taking people's choices away or making them feel like it was their fault that they were poor or you know desperate and that was not allowed whatsoever only quiet pride and committing to the work long term was permitted so it was during her time at hall house that francis got a real idea of the institutional problem stacked that stacked the deck against immigrants and the working poor and she devoted decades of her life to making changes on scales both small and impossibly large so in 1907 francis moved from chicago to philadelphia to take a job with an organization doing work she cared about the philadelphia research and protective association so she showed up in town with almost no belongings nowhere to

live arriving with a wave of poor immigrants looking for work and she was direct witness to seeing young women being lured into boarding houses or being given you know information by fake employment agencies or women who are just straight up drugged in order all of these designed to force women into prostitution so awful so she literally gets off the train seizes with her own eyes and that was also her first big job for the prpa was to conduct an investigation yeah stop yeah because you should definitely not do that yeah so here she was in a new town and she immediately poses as a potential victim to get inside these shady places and learn about their practices first hand so this tiny little woman like goes into these places and would get in the faces and confront

pimps and tell them off to their face with her like unflappable stuffy new england temperament so according to the does not do this one does not drug women and force them into prostitution one does not agree according to the documentary summoned francis perkins in the general welfare quote after investigating 165 employment agencies and 100 boarding houses perkins published a public report that pressured city officials to run regular police patrols at docks and train stations and to write a new ordinance requiring stricter licensing of lodging houses and employment offices unquote so she went in person into over 265 of these places putting herself in personal danger like they're gonna literally try to you know and somehow by the grace of god she's was just fine well and

through the grace of her own attitude because like yeah she had a pair on her hype you know metaphorically speaking so having kicked ass in philly francis moved to new york city in 1909 when she was awarded a research scholarship by columbia university so she's going to pursue her master's degree and do some direct research uh in there so her research project was to the awful conditions in the poor immigrant neighborhood known as hell's kitchen so she's gonna go to send hell's kitchen just like she's gonna she's researching hell's kitchen and writing about how uh how bad things are so and while she was neck deep in the problems of poverty and exploitation by day she lived and socialized in greenwich village by night where she attended lectures and

concerts dining with philosophers radicals reformers writers and artists um that sounds fun that sounds awesome she's like i mean just a side note if you're going to name something hell's kitchen i mean don't you assume that it's going to be shitty so some of francis's friends include jack reed who is a journalist and communist activist who later covered and supported the russian revolution and sin claire lewis who's a famous author who wrote among other things a novel about the potential rise of american fascism so like after hitler rose to power uh sin claire lewis wrote a novel about you know how that thing that happened over there it could totally happen over here and then everyone ignored him and still ignores him and still ignores him and but the good news is nothing like that

ever happened and we've been fine ever since we haven't been slowly tiptoeing closer to fascism every day for a while now um it's also at this time francis met a young franklin roosevelt who did not much impress her at the time uh well she thought he was kind of an arrogant prick he actually was um that's a fucking fair assessment so she she did didn't really associate much with uh with fdr when she first met him because she didn't really think much much dr was again a really super awesomely complicated dude i mean but for here he just kind of like walks on the stage waves and walks off again yeah so while finishing her master's degree in economics and sociology she became active in the women's suffrage movement so she was holding

signs on street corners attending protest meetings and you know fighting for women's rights to vote as she should have been absolutely she then made waves by accepting a position heading up the new york office of the national consumers league working to end child labor and improving working conditions and factories and mills and this is what child labor laws are important yeah and we didn't have them back then and we didn't have them yet here's go shove yourself up this chimney child hope you don't die this is where you'd see the eight-year-old smoking his cigarette on his three minute break in the middle of his 16 hour work day um yeah not cool yeah it was great uh and this is when francis became a direct witness to a national tragedy it would make her even more

determined to help the working people of her country so uh do you ever remember hearing about an event in new york called the triangle shirt waste factory fire yes yeah i mean actually uh yes that's it's horrific i've seen documentaries on it yeah i remember way back um yeah i was one of most uh famous well infamous workplace disasters in american history i remember watching a tv movie about this back in high school where like the teacher had something to do so she is wheeled in a tv and vcr on the cart and we watched uh we watched it i mean there's plenty of information for anybody like to learn more about the fire um i highly recommend the semi recent episode of behind the bastards on the triangle shirt waste factory fire he goes in in detail um but for those

who don't know it was a garment factory located in the top three floors of a ten story building grinch village it caught fire on march 25th 1911 when some anonymous asshole almost certainly tossed a lit cigarette into a bin filled with months worth of dry cotton scraps and even though there was no smoking allowed uh in the place a lot of these uh there's like mostly women who work the actual machines uh you know we're sewing everything together and doing the sewing and cutting but there were men who would attend to the machines and supervise stuff and even though they weren't supposed to smoke a lot of them would um like smoke and they would blow it inside their the lapel of their jacket or whatever so that'll help and they just kind of looked the

other way because nothing bad happened until one day this guy somebody almost certainly just tossed out a cigarette right into just where all these little trimmings have been going in this big bin for months just dry cotton just all piled up with plenty of air in between yeah that that won't start a fire it's fine so the triangle shirt waste factory was filled with about 500 workers on an average day usually very young italian and jewish immigrant women yeah i mean didn't they have girls as young as five and six in there um i don't know if they girls that young they did have a lot of teenage girls yeah i think the youngest victim was 14 but but well we're about to get into it a little bit so these ladies averaged a 52 hour work week and earned what would be in modern dollars

three dollars and 67 cents to six dollars and 29 cents per hour so like the top earner was making less than what would be considered our shitty minimum wage even now and had to work 52 hours a week when you're like a 14 year old girl the the focus of factory management was keeping people working at all times and preventing theft so you know like an amazon warehouse so so the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked and employees were forced through these choke points so they could be searched so you weren't stealing you know weren't stealing cloths you could make under your home yeah it's like in a factory where there's really not much that they would even be able to steal or want cool but again that's that's what's important i'm obsessed with you know employee

slacking off and theft there was no sprinkler system there was only one fire escape which was rickety and also blocked off so completely useless uh when the fire first broke out the first response was to try to prevent property damage rather than evacuating employees the decision that no loud no doubt cost dozens of lives like some experts say that if they immediately went into evacuation not a single person needed to have died but because of some about about three to five minutes worth of really bad decisions is this thing happened it cost a lot of of people their lives so according to frances perkins herself quote i happened to have been visiting a friend in washington square and we rushed over to see this building which we could see was a blaze

and the people began to jump the men were trying to put up a net to catch people but the weight of the body was so great and the speed at which they were traveling that they broke through the net they hit the sidewalk oh so she like she was having like this afternoon tea or whatever with some friends and they heard people shouting and so she goes and literally sees this building on fire and watches desperate people literally jumping out of the eight to tenth story because they had no other choice there's like one story of one one man who was staying at the window and he literally was holding these girls and women out at arm's length and dropping them and finally the last woman next to him he kissed her passionately and then he shoved her out and immediately

dived out right after her as the flames were literally like licking his shoulders like and frances perkins stood in the streets and watched the whole thing unable to do shit which is horrific just as people just splattering on the sidewalk and screaming out the windows and again to prevent fast and i don't know if it was uh was it the textile fire or was it the supermarket fire where they were actually like oh it was a supermarket fire where they actually like blocked oh yeah that was that horrific story yes so uh as far as this factory fire goes every single person who jumped died every single person trapped inside died ultimately 123 women many of them teenage girls and 23 men died from burns smoke inhalation or their bodies breaking on the

pavement so oh my god yeah it was a bad one and and so it was like and it was one of the few events that really kind of broke through the public consciousness because normally striking workers nobody give a shit about them especially immigrants you know these people yeah but once you once you're actually seeing like the dead bodies of little girls on the sidewalk when you're watching them a little bit more oh my god watching them leap out of smoking windows screaming to their deaths horrific deaths yeah so so the horror sunk in a new york city and they sort of collectively seem to remember that like a year before though two years before a russian immigrant woman led a strike for safety concerns for these local garment factories and the city

pretty much ignored all while the the company guards violently fucked with the picket line as usual and nothing really had gotten changed and nothing happened yeah it's but this time there were too many dead teenage girls to ignore the problem and the tragedy seemed to make people ready for some real change francis herself was forever scarred by the incident so while like you like you'd already seen that her she was already dedicated to helping people and stuff but this like before this she was still kind of this typical idealistic liberal where it was like it's all about saying the right things and hanging around the right people as long as you're sort of performing and saying you're doing it she this is kind of the breaking point where she's like

it doesn't matter if i had to get my hands dirty if i have to work with people that i don't like if i have to compromise if it means preventing people from having to choose between burning alive or leaping to their deaths i'm willing to to do some you know some uncomfortable work yeah well you know erin and i have been watching this the documentary on netflix turning point about 9 11 and um you know and i've i've seen all the footage before but i mean they have some really horrific footage and one part of the footage is you watch watching the people jump yeah from the high ends of the building just people leaping and it was i mean and i'm scarred from witnessing it on television you know yeah watching on television yeah i've listened to some

of the 9 11 calls that came from within the building yeah i mean the entire documentary is a little upsetting and it's a little jarring and scarring so i can only imagine standing there yeah and and in this case it was the other part even with a building that high from the ground it's still surreal could you imagine it being so much closer oh no yeah because this is only a 10 story building like you could see people's faces as they were jumping i mean it was i can only imagine what they would do to you i can't and again i've seen that documentary and i've just seen uh still pictures right of this particular incident i i can't imagine i can imagine her being fucking scarred for life yeah that was uh i think i'm a little scarred from life talking about it

it's not okay so after the fire francis left her position with the national consumers league and took a recommendation from a goofy looking bespectacled man named theodore roosevelt becoming the executive secretary for the committee on safety of the city of new york there she investigated other workplace fires and pushed against the circumstances to lead to these disasters so so she got this so like i said before this is the point where getting shit done becomes her top priority so doesn't matter who she needed to work with what compromises she needed to be forced to accept or what anyone thought of her it was always about forward progress sometimes slow often slow but sometimes blindingly fast and she didn't connect her own identity to

the work so it didn't matter just how tarnished some of that work had to be so working in albany francis left political idealists behind and started working with the tamany hall political machine which is like one of the most famously corrupt organizations in the history of the country uh they pretty much control politics for the city and state of new york and while it's true that they engaged in a lot of shady practices that both were or at least should have been illegal depending on what which thing we're talking about it's also true that the tamany machine got some really forward-thinking policies in place where they failed their parts of the country so over over time the tamany political engine ended up getting a lot of irish immigrants involved and so a lot of pro-immigrant

government started happening just because of that through this really corrupt engine and because these were these you know a lot of these people involved were more from the poor working class side francis like these are the people i need to work with they're the ones in with the unions these are the ones in with the labor organizers and she also picked up on something that inspired her to change her personal style and approach as a woman working in a man's world according to david brooks quote one day she was standing by the elevators of the state capital when a crude little senator named hu frauli came out and started describing the confidential details of the backroom negotiations and moaning about the shameful work he was compelled to perform swept up in

self pity he cried every man's got a mother you know perkins kept a folder titled notes on the male mind and recorded this episode in it it played a major role in her political education quote i learned from this that the way men take women in political life is to associate them with motherhood they know and respect their mothers 99 of them do it's a primitive and primary attitude i said to myself that's the way to get things done so behave dress and comport yourself that you remind them subconsciously of their mothers unquote hi well well at that point they couldn't you know usually it's wives and daughters also but you know but this is also in a time period where they didn't respect their wives their daughters or even pay attention to them much so they had to go to the

moms a woman being anywhere to dress like my mom a woman being adjacent to government was so incredibly unusual at this time so she had she was the the one had to figure out how to even function in this world so at the age of 33 francis began dressing like a much older woman and began comporting herself more in the style of a middle-aged grandmother and you've actually go and look at the pictures of her you'll see that like up through her 20s into her very early 30s she dresses basically whatever the contemporary fashion is nothing you know just for a respectable you know woman and then at 33 suddenly she just looks like a grainy she's wearing these like thick dark dresses these tricorner hats and little bows tied at her neck and and then and she just

and she already kind of has this new england you know governess thing going on and she just kind of leans into it and so people tend to listen to her more that way so all of a sudden she starts looking like mary poppins but they take her damn seriously it seems to work for her because she sticks with it so a huge project was pushing through a statewide law to limit the workweek to 54 hours so that's nine hours six days a week for people like me who are bad at math and that's just just desperately trying to get to that because people were averaging 60 or more hours a week back then yeah children children children as well even though like a lot of times like well children only had to work a slightly less than that uh she worked tirelessly to convince

the right people to get it to the floor of the new york legislature but when it came up the lawmakers had added a huge exemption it would not apply to the canning industry so like and then remember this is pre refrigeration so like you know canning the canning industry is a really big deal and so suddenly oh everybody else has to abide by the 54 hour workweek in the state of new york except one of the largest industries in the state of new york so frances had a choice she could use her influence to kill the bill entirely or support it even though one of the most important industries wouldn't be included this is the way she makes that first choice she decides to support the bill as is rather than let nothing be the actual result of all her hard work

and so a lot of other progressives screamed at her like oh you shouldn't compromise what are you doing but she just bit her lip and she was like grimly satisfied that like half half of the job was better than none none and yeah that's pretty much how politics go they never pass anything that would make it good so so she never apologized for compromising and she ruthlessly compromises for the rest of her working life because yeah yeah because it's better get enough or be an idealist who gets nothing done yeah exactly she didn't want it that was a thing she had spent that early time with those idealists she was hanging out in greenish village with all drinking martinis with all the authors and you know and socialists and all this stuff you talk a big game and they'll

stand on the street corners and organize but in terms of what what are the actual results in the real world you know are very little whereas like she actually changed working hours for ridiculous number of people so for the record elinor rose about hung out with those same people and came to the same conclusion of yeah you just got to do the work it was during this time in her life she was courted by a close aide to the mayor of new york city a guy named paul wilson to very handsome very senior aide to the mayor and and love letters between them would make one think there was real feeling and romance on both sides however frances never showed much enthusiasm when she was talking to her friends and her associates about the the whole thing and years later she claimed she never

really had strong feelings for him at all but that could be hindsight talking yeah the two were married in september 1913 in a church with no friends and family and attendance and no special celebration afterwards later in life she had this to say as reported by brooks quote there was a new england pride in me i wasn't anxious to get married to tell the truth i was reluctant i was no longer a child but a grown woman i hadn't wanted to marry i liked life better in a single harness but people were constantly asking her when she would find a husband so she decided to get out of the way thinking i know paul wilson well i like him and i enjoy his friends and company and i might as well marry and get it off my mind unquote it's like check that off the block of stuff yeah i you'll do

her i settled for you baby and like anyway he was good-looking seemed like you know had a good job and he would politically you know was in line with her they agreed on he was a very progressive dude uh it is worth noting that she never changed her last name for her husband and this was a hundred years ago so wow so she was real progressive super progressive she had to change her first name to the one she wanted and she wasn't about to change her last name for some damn man now her excuse was that because he was you know politically associated with the new york city mayor he was considered upwardly mobile in politics and she didn't want all of the stuff she was doing to to bleed over onto him was the excuse but i get the feeling that

she wasn't interested in having me and mrs wilson yeah no um i don't blame her well the early years of their ball you'll you'll see that she has to be the early years of their marriage seemed to have been happy but they didn't stay that way for too long at first paul carried out an affair that went public so there's like intense embarrassment socially then it was never brought up again which is the new england way then so she asked for a separation but then she got pregnant with a boy who died shortly after childbirth and she was grief-stricken but again like once she got through her short-term grief she never discussed that publicly ever however she did become the executive secretary of the maternity center association which is an organization dedicated to lowering infant

and maternal mortality so very much in character for her it's like this is this terrible thing that happened i need to join i need to to work on this and make this less of a problem for other people so she takes her pain and tries to help others which is like her go-to a france excuse which is really nice it's admirable uh you know even though i do think she seems a little buttoned up and maybe could have used a therapist or something i don't know frances gave birth again this time to a little girl named susanna who survived infancy and she lived to adulthood but she she had a tragic life in her own way which more on that in a minute now paul wilson suffered from mental illness most likely manic depression his wife later said of him quote he was always up

and down he was sometimes depressed sometimes excited unquote and so things got worse until wilson's compulsions caused him to blow his entire life savings on a gold scheme that turned out to be a scam so all his money's gone because he was like on a manic you know i can i'm get rich quick scheme he could go into rages sometimes even get violent um but as his issues got increasingly worse he spent more of his remaining years in asylums so he actually literally had to be institutionalized and even during these periods and he was a dude so yeah you know he was crazy yeah he was crazy like if it would have been her i mean she could have just been you know having a bad day yeah when he was stable enough to be home he had a nurse that everyone just

sort of politely called his secretary you know for the sake of his pride francis spoke of her husband's breakdown as the accident and moved forward with her life knowing it was up to her to support her family on her own and as an emotionally private person she wasn't about to share her feelings in a venue where we'd learn about it today so we don't really know much about how she felt about all this she just rolled up her sleeves and did what she had to do over the years her daughter susanna proved to have inherited her father's mental illness was never able to properly fend for herself so francis was still working when she was 77 years old to provide a roof over her daughter's head so like her own her daughter is so like manic depressive or bipolar

whatever her issues are so extreme even she's not able to take care of herself mom has to do it um her whole life oh that's terrible so yeah so it came to her family situation francis did not have a great thing going on she picked the wrong dude yeah she that's what you get when you just pick a husband to check off a yeah you'll do check off a box you might want to vet them a little bit more for for mental health oh well it was in albany where francis got a huge opportunity with new york governor al smith who francis adored and admired he appointed her to the industrial commission the state workplace regulatory agency so suddenly she was making a respectable salary i think it was like $8,000 a year at the time which is like over it'd be a six big over a

hundred thousand dollars a year in today's money uh she's making good money and um diving in the middle of labor disputes between union organizers and corporate bosses she threw herself into the work and used her motherly persona to scold the men into listening and talking james m lynch another new york commissioner said her work was invaluable and that quote from the work which miss perkins has accomplished i'm convinced that more women ought to be placed in high positions throughout the state departments unquote so he's like hey we got a woman in here and and she's doing a good job maybe we should get more chicks maybe they would maybe there's too many dudes around here yeah well you know alternate perspectives do help it's like you bring a woman in and show

that she not only can do a good job because she can do a great job and they're like oh okay some people are open-minded enough to think hey this is a thing we should do more of it was during this time that francis got re-inquanted with franklin roosevelt who she found she liked much better after polio had gotten ahold of him yeah you know what a lot of people did i mean he was kind of an arrogant shit yeah and polio kind of humbled him a bit i mean not completely i mean fdr still had plenty of ego but you know when you can't stand up and need people to help you with basic things it kind of gives you a perspective shift yeah well and his marriage got a lot more on the level side at that point too yeah and fdr this is the moment where fdr is officially on the

rise so he succeeded smith as the governor of new york uh and the election of this is 1928 he immediately and this is you know as the great depression is starting to get you know is really getting going he immediately offered francis the job of industrial commissioner for the state so literally or instead of just being one of the commissioners she's now in charge of the whole department and in what will become a familiar dance between the two of them she tried to get out of the appointment without directly saying no but fdr insisted and then she did the job in this case she was managing a state agency with 1800 employees and how did she do according to biographer george martin who i'm almost certain did not write game of thrones as an administrator she was

good perhaps even more than good as a judge or legislator she was quite extraordinary she had a judicial temperament and a strong sense in all situations of what was fair she was always open to new ideas and yet the moral purpose of the law the welfare of mankind was never overlooked unquote so she did her job and did it with compassion open and fairness yeah she she was really good hi marx a plus she was awesome she was a good judge by using logic reason and fairness so as the labor commissioner of new york state she did great francis used her connections and increasing influence to make extremely progressive reforms in the wake of the great depression every day while waiting for her morning train she could witness old ladies dragging

like digging through garbage cans to find edible food and she saw people desperate for jobs that could actually support families and so working with fdr she reduced the maximum weekly work week for women to 48 hours and pushed for their safety she pushed for them for a minimum wage and the creation of unemployment insurance she called for the end of child labor in the state and all these programs proved intensely popular and so as fdr is pushing through these things that francis is coming up with he's getting more popular because of it and to bring her even more closer realizing this lady you know her ideas are really a big part of of what i'm doing right here in new york yeah so he became fdr did surround himself by intelligent women he he was all about that yeah

for sure he did not disclaim yeah and he valued their opinions which was different than most men at the time very forward thinking so so he became a dominant political force in both new york and all across the country and roosevelt was ready to roll his way to washington dc so mother perkins as the press sometimes called her described fdr's national launch in these terms quote i'm going to give the people in this country a new deal it's a card playing term and everyone understands it we're going to deal out some new cards i don't think that even then he had the remoteness idea of what his program was going to be but the newspaper men noticed it and tore their newspapers to pieces and emblazoned them with a great headline roosevelt promises new deal

and this is where the new deal really began so fdr comes up with this amazingly great slogan for for what his program will be the new deal so everybody plays cards gets his idea it's like we're gonna hit the reset button and give you a new chance but he didn't actually have a program laid out he just had this slogan and he just had a slogan and kind of his track record of bringing these more progressive labor friendly policies you know forward so he had a like a kind of like a template but he didn't actually have the new deal didn't exist when he started talking about it so franklin roosevelt shows about right yeah so fdr showed the country was ready to give this new deal a chance even if he had only like half an idea of what it really was

but one thing was certain just as francis perkins was key to his success in new york she would be equally crucial to the success of his presidential administration so he asked francis to join his cabinet as the secretary of labor she tried to turn him down she wrote to him mentioning her family's unusual situation husband institutionalized and such it could be a source of potential embarrassment and she wrote to him in this very long letter i think that someone straight from the ranks of some group of organized workers should be appointed to establish firmly the principle that labor is in the president's councils unquote fdr wrote her back on a piece of scrap paper have considered your advice and don't agree and what's she gonna do and what she

gonna do when the president asks you to join his cabinet you join this cabinet and that's where we're gonna end part one this is actually gonna be a two-parter because again this she she does way too much shit to talk about in one episode so now we're gonna start with her right at the beginning of fdr's fdr's uh plus terms in office and and her being the the primary architect of the new deal all right so here we go some feminist icon and total badass francis perkins hooray yeah i don't feel shitty about this yeah an actual person i don't have to go go away like feeling i i need to cleanse myself since we just had labor day i felt like this is like a labor day hero we should talk about she deserves a little bit more yeah because you know without our labor day hero we

probably wouldn't even have labor day because we'd all be working everybody would be working there there's 70 hour weeks um thank thank you listeners uh for checking us out hope you'll check out our past episodes on george washington on george wallace the conclusion to this episode is coming soon and there's also bonus stuff if you uh follow and support us on patreon which you can now reach directly by going to chainsawhistory.com you also follow us on all the socials so you can actually just look up chainsaw history on twitter instagram facebook we are all over these places you can follow me on twitter and instagram at jamie1km and if you want to see me play a computerized dungeon and dragons game live uh you can kind of my twitch page on jamiechambers.tv and watch

the dead characters society fun stuff you can't see me i'm nowhere hiding from the internet i have been hiding from the internet since the internet's inception but if you do go to chainsawhistory.com and start interacting on our community i'm going to make bambi participate uh we're also gonna be building yeah i'm i keep not doing it yeah we're also going to be uh you know building a discord community that's going to be part of what we're doing moving forward we'll be doing uh extra stuff to interact with our audience as we slowly catch up and figure this whole thing out yeah we started out that we had a little bit of a fluffer and now we're we're down to we've have no fluff we're fluffless that's okay i'm gonna i'm gonna try to catch us up a little bit yeah and i do i

have a few things that i i've wanted to implement and do but i just haven't had the time or the energy so we'll get there we'll get there i i keep i promise that one day i'll have energy again we're gonna try it's been a rough month so uh as far as charity stuff in honor of francis perkins and her efforts to support workplace safety this week i am recommending everybody check out the national safety council which was founded in 1913 to reduce workplace accidents and increase safety standards across the board so anybody wants to check that out and help them go to nsc.org to learn more and contribute good times um yeah i actually i'm gonna have a charity pet project here very very soon for halloween coming up so it'll yeah stay tuned for that

and also the progress of the uh spooktacular haunted house looking forward to that and yes bami makes a spooktacular haunted house every year and this year we're gonna open it up for charity super cool so really excited again thanks for everybody listening uh yeah if you you know if i i guess i would lead this out we're all going through a lot right now the world sucks and i say take a page from francis perkins who took her personal pain and issues and and channeled her frustrations and dissatisfactions into work that helped other people and it's something we could all learn a little something from yeah yeah some some selflessness and and some hard work and some dedication to change the world that sounds really fantastic so go support a picket line

go do a thing give some money to a strike fund or quit your job don't quit your job do not i'm quitting this job i mean if your job really sucks i say go look for a new job there's plenty of them right now well i'm quitting this job but i'll i'll resume it again tomorrow see you guys next week bye i quit