Throughline - Frances Perkins Goes To Washington

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

This week, we explore the life of the first woman Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, and how in the midst of the Great Depression she helped reshape the nation by fighting for minimum wage, Social Security, and unemployment insurance.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from NPR and ThruLine. I'm Rand Abd al-Fet-Tar. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. In 2011, a deadly fire broke out in a factory in Manhattan, where hundreds of workers, mostly young immigrant women, were employed. On the night, the fire broke out, the buildings, Exit doors were locked. The owners of the company had closed some of the other doors to prevent people from stealing. And the building became a trap for the workers inside. Bystanders started to gather in the streets.

And witnessed the first of the women jumping out of the windows to escape the flames. On that night, 146 workers died. 62 of them jumped to their death. It was the worst industrial accident in New York City up until that point, and hundreds of people witnessed it, including a young woman named Francis Perkins. What she saw disturbed her and led her on an epic journey that would ultimately transform the country.

The things that she created remain fundamental pieces of our social security and safety net today. Without her, what would we have? It's hard to even imagine. Frances Perkins did so much in her lifetime. She was the first woman to serve in the presidential cabinet, creating programs that have transformed the way we all live today. Social Security, unemployment insurance, the 40-hour work week. She's behind all of that.

Today on the show, how Francis Perkins reimagined the nature of work and helped build the country's social safety net. That's coming up right after a quick break. After the factory fire in 1911, Francis Perkins went to work. She and other activists in New York pushed for a commission to investigate what happened and proposed regulations to prevent it from happening again. And then she started making recommendations on how to change things permanently. Some of the things that they got done are smoking and factories banned.

They established a requirement that factories should have automatic water. sprinklers. They required safe fire escapes. They required adequate elevators. They required the thing that we all completely live with all the time now is requiring exit signs so we now know how to get out and make our way to safety in the event of a fire. This is Kirsten Downey, author of The Woman Behind the New Deal, the life and legacy of Francis Perkins. And she started really to become an expert on all aspects of labor law administration. Think of how many times in your life something has felt kind of overcrowded

or you feel a little nervous and you look around and you look for that exit sign, you know how to get out. That's Francis Perkins' work. And people took notice. At this point, she was in her 30s, living in New York, married with kids. And there was a new governor in town.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or as he's known today, FDR, Francis Perkins had first met him at a social event years before. And she thought he was a huge loser. He had lots of ambitions without a lot of talent to back it up, in her opinion. But even so, she acted as a political advisor to FDR during his campaign for governor of New York. During that time, she got to know a different version of the man.

In the years since she'd first met him, he contracted polio and now used a wheelchair. And that is when she said she felt a real change in him, that polio had knocked him between the eyes. He had suffered, and suddenly she felt that he had matured and that he had learned to care about people in a way that he had never done so before. This go-around, they became fast friends. They got along marvelously.

They had very similar, senses of humor, and they enjoyed a lot of the same sort of things. With her help, FDR won the governorship, and he rewarded Frances by making her New York's Industrial Commissioner, one of the most powerful officials in the state. Francis got to work, and she got results. And then... This is a day of national consecration. After four years as governor, FDR turns around and runs for president of the United States.

states, and he wins. About 10 days before he officially took office, FDR asked Francis Perkins for a meeting. The newly elected president called her to his townhouse in New York City. She arrives and is escorted to one of the many rooms in the house. This is a wood paneled room. The door opened. Roosevelt said to me, I guess you know what I want you for. He got pretty much directly to the point and said, I'd like you to be my secretary of labor.

He said, I really mean it, Francis. She responds by being coy. Of course I made the usual courteous remarks about how honored and surprised I was. He said, oh, come on now. Don't say surprised. You're no fool. She had a little list of programs and priorities in her pocket. She hands in the list and she says, you don't want me for your secretary of labor unless you want me to do these things. And what we know it was on that list was work hour limitations, ban on child labor, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, social security. He looked at the list and he agreed to basically everything except unemployment insurance.

in Social Security. At that point, of course, he begins to object by saying, You know, Francis, I don't believe in the dole, and I never will. She said, Francis, that's crazy. She didn't think so, but she dropped it for the moment and focused on the decision she had to make. If she accepted, she'd be the first woman cabinet secretary in American history. And she was so frightened that she would ruin

everything for other women. She felt that she would somehow mess up and that no other woman would be invited to this position again for many, many years. She went to her bishop to actually ask whether or not he thought she should take the job. He wrote to her. You know, if you were a soldier and you had a talent that could save the nation during war, wouldn't it be your moral responsibility to serve, we need it. And so she felt as if God had called her to it and that she did not really have a choice. She called FDR and accepted the job. When Francis Perkins arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1933, her very presence made an impact. When she becomes Secretary of Labor and joins the cabinet, it's also odd to people that they don't even know what to call her. You know,

what do you call a woman in that role? And so they came up with the idea of calling her Madam Secretary. Madam Secretary Perkins was taking over a department that people in Washington barely thought about. She found the Labor Department when she arrived to be almost defunct, very quiet, very few people working. But with FDR's blessing, she was going to change that. That meant that she could reshape it. So she worked the room. She knew how to work the politicians in Washington, D.C.

But this was D.C. in the 1930s. To say it was a boys club would be an understatement. Within the cabinet, she was worried that she would be viewed by her fellow cabinet members as an intrusive woman or a silly woman. And so she wanted to be taken very seriously. She was very calculating about how she was going to operate politically. with men. She had this folder full of papers that she called Notes on the Male Mind. One of the things that she came to conclude is that men would take women more seriously

if they reminded them of their mothers, that they respected their mothers. They would not sexually harass their mothers and that they might listen to the opinions of their mothers. So Francis started dressing like their mothers. And it's calculating, it's manipulative, and it's extremely effective. Almost right away, she became one of the most important members of the cabinet. FDR always listened to her. And this is something we know because one of her fellow cabinet members, Secretary Icky's, wrote in his own diary that the men in the room would get frustrated with Francis

Perkins' lecturing, and yet the president was always at rapt attention. to her. The people are what mattered to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life. When the Roosevelt administration began in 1933, the United States was in the middle of the worst economic calamity in its history,

what we today call the Great Depression. One of the horrors of the Great Depression is that it exposed a lot of the dark, realities of the workplace. Especially for older people. It had been bad for everybody, but had been even worse for the elderly. People would see elderly people

eating out of trash cans. They were starving to death. They needed to have a system that would provide some income support for people when they get to the phase of their lives where they're simply less employable. And Francis Perkins saw an opportunity. FDR had

rejected the idea of Social Security when she first proposed it, but not now. Just as the fire had been a crisis that was a buildable moment, so the Great Depression was. You've had a streak of bad luck. We're going to deal the cards over again. We'll have a new deal. In 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act into law. It was an appeal to Lady Luck. With the hope that springs in every man's heart when you say, I'll give you some new cards. Social Security was the crown jewel of Francis Perkins' ideas. Here's how it works.

You pay into Social Security when you're young and strong so that you can get it when you're old and frail. It wasn't charity. It's you worked for it. You earned it. You'll get it later. It's an insurance system. It's not an entitlement. It wasn't as FDR had won.

put it, the dull. But many people in America thought Social Security was a huge government overreach as creeping socialism into the United States. A point Francis Perkins disputed. What we intended to do was

not to turn over the pattern of American life. What we did was to correct certain obvious defects. It's just as though when you have a leaky pipe, you mend the pipe. You don't pull out the plumbing. Social Security helped pull millions of elderly people out of poverty.

Perkins considers this her single biggest victory of her life. But it wasn't the only victory. Over the next few years, nearly every idea Perkins had presented to FDR before taking the job became law. Unemployment insurance, restrictions on child labor, minimum wage, work hour limitations. Whether she intended to or not, Francis Perkins had imagined a new America and made it a reality. Most people generally have a really hard time imagining what could be.

They only know what is. But what Perkins had was a great imagination for what could be and what would be the steps involved in getting there. Frances Perkins would stay in FDR's cabinet until his death in 1945, just months before the end of the war. She still remains the longest serving Secretary of Labor in American history. Eventually, she became a lecturer at Cornell University and spent the rest of her career there until her death in 1965. That's it for this week's America in Pursuit.

If you want to hear the full story of Francis Perkins, check out the full-length episode, The Woman Behind the New Deal. And be sure to join us next week when we revisit a difficult time in U.S. history. Japanese internment during World War II, an internment that changed the law. lives of many people, including a woman named Yuri Kuchiyama. She talked to a lot of people inside the camps. She listened to discussions of more politicized Japanese Americans inside the camps. And I would say she started to grow a social consciousness, a sense that problems in the United States have had social and structural origins.

The story of civil rights activist Yuri Kocciama, That's next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Morgadam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the through-line production team. Music by Ramtin Adablui and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna. I'm Randabd al-Fattah. Thanks for listening.