The woman behind the New Deal

Downey, Kirstin. (2009). The woman behind the New Deal : the life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and his moral conscience. New York: Nan A. Talese

Other than the name, I knew nothing about Frances Perkins. Now I know a great deal. She became interested in social work very early in her life, worked with Hull House in Chicago (with Jane Addams), and wound up in New York. The day of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire she was in a friend's house on Washington Square North, and ran to the location of the fire (on Washington Square East -- I actually took an NYU course in a building in that same location).

FP met FDR early on in New York government. She knew Robert Moses before he worked in State government. She knew Al Smith. When FDR won the Presidency, he appointed her Labor Secretary, the first woman to ever serve in the Cabinet. She accomplished a great deal, indeed.

The book contends that Social Security, Unemployment insurance and others New Deal programs were her ideas that FDR adopted. I have never read about that before. The book also contends that when FDR told Cabinet member of the Pearl Harbor attack, FP suspected that he had known about it, for he did not show the same surprise and shock that other Cabinet members showed.

Revealing, sympathetic, the book does a good job of uncovering a forgotten figure who played an important role in 20th century America. Indeed, the world: she was instrumental in saving LIO people from Europe, and got Churchill and FDR to support it after the War.

In her personal life, FP was quite unlucky. Both her husband and her daughter were bipolar, in an age when there were no medicines to effectively deal with the illness. She did make friends, close personal friends with several women. Mary Harriman Rumsey, older sister of Averell, in particular, was very close friends with FP. They shared a house for some time.

Yet about halfway through, the book gets sloppy in its assertions. I'd like to see more documentation on some of the declarations made.

And then there is the Venona Project.

"The Americans and British long had been skeptical about Soviet intentions. As a result, between 1942 and 1945, the United States and Great Britain engaged in the Venona Project, intercepting encrypted cables between Russian intelligence agencies and Soviet spies based in America. They began successfully decrypting these messages in 1946. National security officials kept the information secret, but released some facts through the FBI, and through that agency to Truman.The deciphered messages exposed several hundred Americans, including some government officials, as communist spies."