Frances Perkins
Illustration, not an archive object
Secretary of Labor (1933-1945) · United States
On the regime page: Roosevelt administration
3 quotes, oldest first. Filter with other speakers.
“In broad terms, I proposed immediate federal aid to the states for direct unemployment relief, an extensive program of public works, a study and an approach to the establishment by federal law of minimum wages, maximum hours, true unemployment and old-age insurance, abolition of child labor, and the creation of a federal employment service. The program received Roosevelt’s hearty endorsement, and he told me he wanted me to carry it out.”
Perkins describes her conversation with President-elect Roosevelt in February 1933 about accepting the post of Secretary of Labor. She recalls setting out the programme she would want to pursue before agreeing; the passage was written about thirteen years later.
Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking Press, 1946), p. 152 Source
“I summed up one section by saying, “We are trying to construct a more inclusive society.” I heard that speech over the radio some weeks later, and this is how he, with his instinct for simplicity, wound up that section: “We are going to make a country in which no one is left out.””
Perkins recalls drafting a section on social security for one of Roosevelt's campaign speeches and how he recast her wording when he delivered it. The memoir does not name the speech or give its date.
Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking Press, 1946), p. 113 Source
“Under the immigration law an alien is deportable if he attempts to overthrow the Government of the United States by force and violence or if he is a member of an organization with that program. The evidence forwarded to me from Seattle was mostly hearsay, vague and indefinite.”
Perkins, who as Secretary of Labor supervised the Immigration and Naturalization Service, recounts the 1937 report that the longshoremen's leader Harry Bridges was a Communist and her assessment of the evidence sent by the Seattle office.
Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking Press, 1946), ch. xxiv "Labor Relations" (chapter pp. 302-327), account of the Harry Bridges deportation case Source