Columbia’s Butler Library showcases Perkins exhibit

This is a condensed version of notes written by Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall regarding his trip to New York last week.

Thursday was a full day, with two big events and some smaller ones interspersed. First was a talk by Kirstin at the Cosmopolitan Club, a private women’s club in New York, to which my grandmother belonged for many years.

When we arrived at the Cos Club, we were greeted by Beth Goehring and Susan Ciaccio, the two women on the Library Committee who had organized the event, who were very nice and pleased that we all came in spite of the fact that their event had a waiting list of over 40 people!

Kirstin’s talk at the Cos Club was in the library on the sixth floor, which was new territory for me. As a child, I had never been allowed out of the lobby because this was strictly a women’s club. So I felt as if I was eating forbidden fruit much of the time. Kirstin gave an inspiring talk, including some of FP’s own rules of the road for being effective in life in general, and as a lobbyist in particular, which got my attention.

We gave out a good number of brochures and invited people to sign our web site’s guest book if they’d like to be on our mailing list. I only missed the first group that got onto the small elevator before Chris Breiseth gently nudged me toward the brochures (thank you, Chris!), which I was forgetting in the chitchat after Kirstin’s talk was over.

The Cos Club had thoughtfully hired a serious SUV to whisk her to Columbia and it happened to be plenty big enough to comfortably seat all of us (my partner Christopher, Chris Breiseth, Kirstin Downey, Barb Burt, and me). We settled in and Kirstin and Chris wasted no time in diving into rapid fire conversation about various people who could speak at various events and who so and so was and what they had done and why they were significant and so on. It was obviously over my head but Barb did her best to keep up by taking notes on her iPod and the rest is still in Chris and Kirstin’s heads, so all’s well. We soon arrived at the gates of the Columbia campus at 116th street and headed for the Butler Library.

Jenny Lee, who couldn’t have been a nicer, kinder, more intelligent, and thoughtful person greeted us on the ground floor and helped us get past the guard. There was a little time to set up in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Jenny’s domain, on the sixth floor (yes, another sixth floor happening) where the exhibit was so nicely installed (by Jenny) and where the reception would be held. There was small room off to one side where Jenny had provided a computer projector and we hooked up my little Apple laptop to show images of The Brick House and FP’s Perkins family lands.

Kirstin’s talk, in a room on the ground floor, was very good. This one focused a bit more on FP’s efforts to ease immigration rules so that more refugees from Nazi Germany could be brought into this country. Very well presented and received, bravo Kirstin!

Afterwards, we went back up to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (sixth floor) for the reception. Penny Colman (another FP biographer) was there and very enthusiastic, full of good ideas.

The Mount Holyoke College NYC network had put the word out and so a number of MHC grads were there, which was good to see. I got pigeon-holed by a nice man who had been the son of the superintendent of the building that Margaret Poole lived in in NYC where FP spent a lot of time as a sort of permanent guest when I was a small boy. I remember visiting that apartment often and have clear memories of times there.

We went our separate ways after the reception (some of us had a long way to go; Kirstin arrived home in Virginia at 3:00am!) with a warm feeling of togetherness, common purpose, and FP’s amazing significance housed so securely with Jenny on the sixth floor.

Here are some photos from the Butler Library exhibit:

Billionaires for Wealthcare — Guerilla Theater

[Side note: Frances Perkins appears as a character in the original musical "Annie," on which this piece is based. I think she would have appreciated this effort to humorously expose the opponents of reform.]

The Center looks ahead to 2010 and beyond

On September 15th, the Frances Perkins Center held a planning session attended by all board members and several friends of the Center. The meeting was facilitated by Carol Wishcamper and was divided into two sections: Programs & Activities; and Finances.

The agreed-upon priorities for programs and activities in the next 18 to 24 months are:

1. 75th anniversary of the Social Security Act as a theme for 2010 (yearlong celebration, including January film screening and panel discussion, national conversation/Internet “jam,” book of essays about importance and meaning of Social Security, possible curriculum)
2. Oral History project
3. Historic Structure/Cultural Landscape Report
4. Continuing Outreach through awards program, senior college seminars, etc.
5. Fellowship Program (Perkins Center Scholars)

In discussing the Center’s finances, we focused on ways to generate revenue:

• Earned income (sponsorships for events and publications)
• Grants
• Individual Donors

We set two ambitious financial goals: to submit five grant proposals by December 31, 2009 and to raise $225,000 by next summer. Since the meeting, we have submitted two grant proposals and have raised about $14,000 (only $211,000 to go!).

The meeting ended on a very positive, energetic note. If you’d like to support the Center by making an online donation, go to https://npo.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=7344 and designate the Frances Perkins Center as the recipient of your contribution. Thanks!

Frances Perkins Center welcomes new board member, Sarah Peskin

We’re thrilled to have her. Here’s a little bit about her:

Former chief of planning and legislation for the National Park Service north atlantic region, Sarah Peskin has guided the preservation and interpretation of many nationally significant historic places and managed major new facility projects from concept to operation. A graduate of Smith College, she holds a master’s degree in urban planning from New York University and was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University.

From 1979-90 she was planning director of the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, the public/private entity that helped develop Lowell National Historical Park. From 1990-2009 she did feasibility studies and worked on legislation to establish new areas such as Weir Farm National Historic Site, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum National Historic Site. She led the recent planning effort for the Schoodic section of Acadia National Park where a navy base was transformed into an educational campus to serve multiple audiences.  Award-winning projects she managed include the Mogan Cultural Center, Boarding House Park, and the Lowell Park Trolley System.  She wrote “Cultural Tourism: Where Culture and Economy Meet” (Boston Foundation, 2004) and “America’s Special Landscapes: The Heritage Area Phenomenon” (Ferrara, 2001).  She has recently retired from the National Park Service to spend most of her time at her home in Walpole, Maine, just across the Damariscotta River from the Perkins Homestead.

‘Emphatically and truly, a government of the people’

There was a fine opinion piece in the LA Times yesterday noting the anniversary of the signing of the Social Security Act. The title was “President Barack Obama could learn from Franklin D. Roosevelt” and the author is Nancy J. Altman, who wrote the recently published history, The Battle for Social Security: From FDR’s Vision to Bush’s Gamble.

Altman compares the current health care debate with the fight over the Social Security Act and finds many similarities:

Then as now, opponents played the socialism card. In hearings before the Senate Finance Committee, a senator from Oklahoma accusingly asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, “Isn’t this socialism?” When Perkins emphatically answered no, the senator leaned forward and, with a conspiratorial whisper, pressed, “Isn’t this a teeny-weeny bit of socialism?”

Altman says that the difference is that FDR controlled the debate:

In a series of fireside chats and other broadcasts, the president anticipated arguments and responded before public opposition got out of control. “A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing,” he said in one talk. “Sometimes they will call it ‘fascism,’ sometimes ‘communism,’ sometimes ‘regimentation,’ sometimes ’socialism.’ But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical. … I believe that what we are doing today is a necessary fulfillment of what Americans have always been doing — a fulfillment of old and tested American ideals. … We remain, as John Marshall said a century ago, ‘emphatically and truly, a government of the people.’ “

You can read the entire piece here: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-altman14-2009aug14,0,6660527.story.

Let’s put a real fear of socialism in them

National, or federal, health insurance is not a revolutionary new idea.

In 1883, Chancellor of Germany Otto von Bismarck — a staunch conservative, he was known as the “Iron Chancellor” — instituted a national health insurance plan for workers. Why? Because he was trying to woo them away from the Social Democratic Party. In other words, 126 years ago people were demanding national health insurance and Bismarck found it necessary to deliver.

And fifty years later  in the U.S., it was considered a “practical possibility.”

In 1933, before accepting the job of secretary of Labor that Franklin Roosevelt had offered her, Frances Perkins read FDR a list of nine social programs, “practical possibilities,” for which she asked his support. After 12 years as secretary of Labor, she wrote him a resignation letter. In the letter, dated December 1, 1944, she enumerated all they had done together. This is the last part of the letter:

With one major exception all the items we discussed as “among the practical possibilities” before you took office as President have been accomplished or begun. That exception is a social security item providing for some form of benefit to persons where loss of income is due to sickness and provision for appropriate medical care for the same. [emphasis added]

I hope that this will be upon your agenda for the near future.

Faithfully yours,
Frances Perkins

The president’s response was a short and witty letter saying that her resignation was “refused and rejected.” Unfortunately, FDR died five months later.

The need for a national health insurance program has been recognized for more than 100 years. But you’d never know it today. Perhaps the usually non-political writer Jesse Kornbluth, who has an idiosyncratic blog called Head Butler, said it best (talking about the Obama administration’s effort):

This is leadership? How about staking out a position (say: single-payer) and selling the hell out of it? How about calling out the Congressmen (Democrats included) who are owned and operated by insurance agencies and telling us exactly how much they’ve been paid to vote against their community’s interest?

and

This issue is not beyond explanation. And there are actual facts involved. But all the lazy sots on TV care about is where the ball sits on the field and who’s got momentum. And can we have a brief sneer at the demagogues in the media and the Congress who know better but take pleasure in scaring people with talk of “death panels” and “socialism”?

It’s great to read a “rant” by someone whose regular topic is not politics. The fact is, a majority (72%) of the American public agrees with Jesse and would like to have single-payer option (see my July 16th post for details).

Maybe it would be better if those demagogues Jesse refers to were truly worried about socialism — worried that Americans would turn to a more radical form of socialism if we didn’t get single-payer health insurance. Hey, the “Iron Chancellor” was worried; why aren’t they?

A Chronology of Frances’s Achievement

Written by Sichu Mali, summer intern

I knew that Frances Perkins had worked for the Consumers’ League of New York after receiving her Master’s degree in 1910. I had also known from reading Kirsten Downey’s biography, The Woman Behind the New Deal, that after retiring from her public service job in 1953, Frances had pursued teaching at Cornell from 1956-1965.

However, I wondered what she was involved with after she had retired in 1953 but before she had begun her Cornell employment as a lecturer in 1956. I wondered about this missing link.

Last week, I came across a booklet from the Frances Perkins Branch Library at Greendale and it has helped me uncover this information about Frances’s career that has not been mentioned much in her biographies. Given below is the chronology of her achievements that was published in it.

1907- Secretary of Philadelphia Research and Protective Association, a group organized to assist immigrant working girls
1910- Received her M.D.A. in Sociology from Columbia University
1910- Names executive secretary of the Consumers’ League of New York; lobbied state legislators for social reforms
1912-1913- Investigator for New York State Factory Committee
1912-1913- Executive Secretary of the Committee on Safety
During World War I, served as the director of the New York Council of Organizations for War Services
1919- Governor Alfred E. Smith appointed Perkins to the New York Industrial Board
1921-1923- Director of Council on Immigrant Education
1923- Named to State Industrial Board (Chair in 1926)
1929- Governor Roosevelt appointed her Industrial Commissioner of New York
1933- President Roosevelt appointed Perkins Secretary of Labor. She was the first woman in the cabinet.
1934- Wrote People at Work
1935- Passage of Social Security Act, the basis for which was a report of the Committee on Economic Security, which Perkins chaired.
1935- Passage of National Labor Relations Act, which she worked on
1938- Worked on Wages and Hours Act
1945- Resigned as Secretary of Labor
1946- 1953- Served as U.S. Civil Service Commissioner
1946- Author of The Roosevelt I Knew
1953- Lecturer at the University of Illinois
1955- Lecturer at the University of Salzburg, Austria
1956-1965- Lecturer at School of Industrial Relations of Cornell University

Advocating for a minimum wage

Written by Sichu Mali, summer intern

Prior to being appointed as the Secretary of Labor in 1933, Frances spent 15 years as a member of the Consumers’ League and as an industrial commissioner in New York State. In 1918, she had accepted Governor Al Smith’s invitation to become the first female member of the New York State Industrial Commission. In 1926, she became the chairperson of the commission. During her years as the member and later, as the chairperson of this commission, she championed better working hours and conditions, compensation for work-related injuries, and a minimum wage. An article titled ‘Average Pay is $13, says Miss Perkins’ which was published in the New York American on November 19, 1929 stands as a testimony to Frances’s endorsement of the minimum wage issue.

The article reports that in 1929, a single woman living alone in Manhattan needed $19.70 weekly “to maintain life according to a minimum standard of health and comfort.” Yet the average wage offered to beginner girls and women in the city varied from $13 to $15 a week. It was impossible for the average working girl to make ends meet on the wages she was earning. These points were brought up by Frances, then the New York Industrial Commissioner, in an address before the Association to Promote Proper Housing for Girls, held at the Hotel Pennsylvania.  There, she had asked for wages “high enough so that there should be no demand for a subsidy for working girls.” She expressed her opinion as follows:

While Frances’s idea about a reasonable living wage was not fully realized until she became the Secretary of Labor, as this article shows, she had begun advocating for it earlier in her career.

Frances Perkins Center featured on public television

Written by Sichu Mali, summer intern

On July 3, 2009, the Frances Perkins Center was featured in “Maine Watch with Jennifer Rooks” on the Maine Public Broadcasting Network (MPBN). The program included an interview with the executive director, Barbara Burt, who mentioned that Cynthia Otis, Frances Perkins’s grandmother, had been a major influence on Frances. She also shared the vision of the center with the show host Jennifer Rooks, which includes creating a digital archive of Frances’s documents and a conference center in her name.

Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall, Frances’s grandson and a board member of the center, who was also featured in this program, talked about the fire safety practice he and his grandmother had at The Brick House.

At the MPBN studio, Rooks was joined by Kirstin Downey, author of The Woman Behind the New Deal and Dr. Christopher Breiseth, the immediate past president and CEO of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. Downey discussed Frances’s role in the New Deal and the Fire Safety Code. Dr. Breiseth, who knew Frances personally as a student at Cornell University, spoke about her personality. He mentioned that when he had asked Ms Perkins about her most important accomplishment, she had replied, “Social Security.”

To watch the program, click on the photo below.

Click to watch the video

Not “a policy for a woman to continue with business”

Written by Sichu Mali, summer intern

While cataloging Frances Perkins’s documents at The Brick House this summer, I’ve discovered articles and correspondence on the history of the Perkins family. Among the articles I’ve found was one regarding the Perkins & Butler retail business. According to an article dated 1913, the Perkins & Butler retail business was the largest wholesale paper and twine dealer in Worcester, Massachusetts. Besides carrying paper and twine, their store also carried a line of stationery.

The business was founded by Frederick W. Perkins, Frances Perkins’s father, in October 1, 1882 and was initially known as F.W. Perkins Wholesale. He advanced his business venture alone until 1900 when he admitted George S. Butler to partnership. The business then continued under the firm name Perkins & Butler.

However a letter from George Butler’s attorney to Frances Perkins dated 1916 shows that, with the death of her father, the partnership was automatically dissolved under the Massachusetts law. It became the duty of Frances and her mother to liquidate the business and dispose of the assets or to simply accept a payment worth Frederick’s share in the retail business from Butler and let him continue the business.

In the letter, attorney Willis Sibley suggested to Frances that her mother “should get her money and interest out of the firm” as he did not believe “it was policy for a woman to continue with business with which she could not conveniently keep in touch.” Frances Perkins, who strongly believed in women’s equality, must have found such a remark to be misogynist as well as disrespectful.

By 1916, Frances had already graduated from Columbia University. After receiving her degree, she was appointed the secretary of the Consumers’ League in New York, where she worked for better conditions for working men and women. While we don’t know her actual reaction to this letter, Frances, who defended the labor rights of both men and women, can be imagined to have deemed it appalling. At the same time, such discouraging comments made to her about women may have actually strengthened her will to succeed.