Time March 16–23, 20201933 | ARCHITECT OF THE NEW DEAL
FRANCES PERKINS
BY ALANA SEMUELS
There was a Time iN The U.s. wheN employers coUld
pay workers as little as they wanted, kids toiled in sweat-
shops, and bosses could lock in employees to prevent them
from taking breaks. Frances Perkins halted these practices,
defending workers whose lives had become dangerous dur-
ing the nation’s rapid industrialization.
Perkins was having tea one afternoon in New York in
1911 when she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
fire, where 146 workers died after being trapped in the burn-
ing building. Horrified, she pushed New York to pass early
worker health and safety laws, first as an advocate and later
as the state’s industrial commissioner.
Her work made Perkins such a prominent voice for the
working class that Franklin D. Roosevelt asked her in 1933
to serve as his Secretary of Labor. She accepted on the con-
dition that he’d support her in establishing a safety net for
workers. “Nothing like this has ever been done in the United
States before,” she told him, according to Kirstin Downey,
author of a Perkins biography. “You know that, don’t you?”
Perkins was the driving force behind the New Deal, the
package of laws that protected average Americans during
the Great Depression, and she implemented relief programs
that paid unemployed men to work on public projects. She
secured unemployment insurance and pensions for the el-
derly and financial assistance for the infirm in the Social
Security Act of 1935; and established a minimum wage,
maximum work hours and the eradication of child labor
in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
Perkins served as Labor Secretary until Roosevelt’s death
in 1945. “I came to Washington,” she once said, “to work
for God; FDR; and the millions of forgotten, plain common
workingmen.”
1930s1934
Mary McLeod Bethune
Equalizing education
Mary McLeod Bethune’s résumé was
already peppered with superlatives
and onlys, but in 1934 the civil rights
activist was a woman on the brink of
the most political power wielded by
an African-American woman to date.
By continually lobbying the federal
government to tend to the needs of
African Americans, she had already
gained the ear of Presidents Coolidge
and Hoover. As the nation reeled during
the Great Depression, she pushed
Roosevelt to pay attention to black
Americans too.
Soon, the former teacher and wom-
en’s group organizer would step into
an official New Deal role as head of
the National Youth Administration’s
Division of Negro Affairs and head of
what would be known as FDR’s “Black
Cabinet,” becoming the highest-ranking
African-American woman in govern-
ment and the first ever to head a federal
department. During her government
tenure, she fought for integration and
against segregation, discrimination and
lynching. As a colleague once said, “No
one can do what Mrs. Bethune could do.”
—Erin BlakemorePERKINS, BEHIND
PRESIDENT
ROOSEVELT AS HE
SIGNS PART OF
THE NEW DEAL
INTO LAW ON
JUNE 6, 193336 PERKINS: AP; BETHUNE: SCURLOCK STUDIO RECORDS, ARCHIVES CENTER, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION