Frances Perkins: Conversion to the World
By The Rev. Charles Hoffacker, ’82
In 2009, the Episcopal Church's General Convention established May 13 as a feast day commemorating Frances Perkins (1880-1965) as a Public Servant and Prophetic Witness. Long overlooked by professional historians, Frances Perkins is being discovered for the first time by many Americans, much to their delight.
In his Introduction to the latest edition of Perkins’ The Roosevelt I Knew, Adam Cohen declares, “If American history textbooks accurately reflected the past, Frances Perkins would be recognized as one of the nation’s greatest heroes—as iconic as Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Paine.” As Franklin Roosevelt’s Labor Secretary from 1933 to 1945, she was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet. Additionally, she was one of the longest serving and more influential cabinet secretaries in American history, rightly referred to as “the woman behind the New Deal.”
From a Christian perspective, anyone can experience conversion, perhaps several conversions over the course of a lifetime. We can be converted to God, to Christ, to the Church, to the Bible, to the sacraments, to the poor, and in other ways.
Raised in the Christian faith, Frances Perkins had her conversions along the way. One in particular, her conversion “to the world,” was less a turning around from one direction to its opposite, than it was the drastic deepening of a commitment already in place. An important moment in this “conversion to the world” took place on March 25, 1911, which she came to call, “the day the New Deal was born.”
At that time, Frances was thirty years old, and studying for a Master’s degree at Columbia University. She worked for her friend and mentor Florence Kelly as secretary of the New York City Consumers’ League. The focus of the League was to oppose the harsh, unregulated working conditions that many laborers in America were forced to endure.
That afternoon, Frances was visiting the home of a friend who lived on Washington Square in Manhattan. The guests were just sitting down to tea when fire whistles and shouts disrupted them. A big fire was blazing across the square. Frances saw flames coming out of the ten-story Asch building where hundreds of workers were employed, most of them young and impoverished immigrant women. The building was a crowded, dangerous firetrap with locked doors. The firemen on the street did not have ladders long enough to make a difference and many workers fell or jumped to their deaths.
Frances Perkins was deeply shaken by what she saw. She knew that almost two years earlier these workers had been rebuffed and persecuted for complaining about the conditions where they worked.
A week after the fire, she attended a large public meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House called by a group of leading citizens. Rose Schneiderman, an immigrant trade union leader in her twenties, gave a historic address, speaking passionately about the numerous workers maimed and killed due to horrendous sweatshop conditions.
Frances Perkins took what she heard as a call to action. She began to realize that much more might be required of her than she had previously imagined. She recognized that making workplaces safer and more humane called for an intense, lifelong commitment on her part. She also saw that the Triangle Shirtwaist fire could be the starting point for widespread social change.
What’s meant by a conversion to the world? Here the world is not to be taken as creation or as society organized against God—as in the old phrase “the world, the flesh, and the devil”—but rather as a creation or society as beloved by God and suffering due to human sin, as broken and desperate for repair.
Following the Triangle factory fire, Frances Perkins lived for more than fifty years, and during this time she acted on her conversion to the world in a host of ways, many of which continue to benefit people today. Here are some highlights of her career:
As factory inspector and later Labor Commissioner for the State of New York, she developed and secured passage of comprehensive labor laws for workplace health and safety, making New York a model for other states.
As United States Secretary of Labor for twelve years, Frances Perkins was the driving force behind many New Deal programs that are still part of the American safety net, among them Social Security, unemployment insurance, the 40-hour work week, and minimum wage.
She made major contributions to laws prohibiting child labor and that support the rights of workers to organize for collective bargaining.
Frances Perkins played a key role in launching the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), one of the most popular New Deal programs. The CCC provided jobs for three million unemployed Americans.
As head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, she was a persistent champion for refugees from Nazism in Germany and Eastern Europe, despite the opposition she encountered from many sectors in American society.
Following her time as Labor Secretary, she served on the U.S. Civil Service Commission, then taught at Cornell University at the newly formed School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
Raised in the Congregational Church, Frances Perkins was received into the Episcopal Church as a young adult, and was active in a series of parishes throughout her life, depending on where she lived. As Labor Secretary, her parish was St. James’ Church in Northeast Washington, D.C., now St. Monica and St. James. During her Washington years, she spent a day every month in prayerful retreat at an Episcopal convent.
In his essay “Frances Perkins and the Spiritual Foundations of the New Deal,” Perkins scholar Donn Mitchell notes that in advocating for the Social Security Act before Congress in 1935, Frances Perkins acknowledged two ways that it represented a departure for Americans.
The Puritans, so influential in the early history of America, frequently represented God as an angry and judgmental deity, and thus their society tended to be a judgmental one. Poverty was dismissed as largely a failure in personal responsibility and worldly success seen as a proof of virtue. The New Deal implicitly challenged these inherited, often unconscious beliefs in favor of a gracious society made in the image of a gracious God. This gracious society was to replace a politics of isolation with a politics of solidarity.
The Puritans also understood the church in congregational terms, and as a result, Americans originally understood their community in local terms. Thus, in early America, social welfare needs came to be seen as a county responsibility. In the New Deal view, on the other hand, people in Maine and California, New York and Texas, were all neighbors to each other. The nation was a community, and social well-being was a matter of national concern.
If Frances Perkins played a leading role in moving America in the direction of a nation of neighbors and a gracious society that reflects a gracious God, then she was not only a devout Christian but also an effective public theologian. Through her persistent efforts, God did much and still does much to benefit the people of the United States and transform this nation into a more gracious society.
What she achieved happened in large part through politics. While never an elected official herself, she held high office in the administrations of New York governors Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt as well as the presidential cabinet of Franklin Roosevelt. Her work in the executive branches of New York state and the federal government brought her into cooperation and conflict with the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of these governments as well as with the general public across the nation. Her views of government, informed by theology, were shaped by political theory and experience.
Her three 1948 St. Bede’s Lectures at St. Thomas Church, New York City, had for their common theme “The Christian in Society.” Several points from these lectures stand out:
Drawing on the teachings of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, as well as her Anglican contemporaries William Temple and V. A. Demant, Perkins recognized politics as an essential and permanent feature of human society on earth. Where the choice lay was in the character of politics and politicians.
She did not believe in forming a Christian bloc or party in politics. Christians may pray together and look at issues in the light of moral law, and then vote in a variety of ways. She held that this was because their different life experiences led them to see issues differently from each other.
She was emphatic that Christians had a duty to engage in politics. “The withdrawal of Christian people of high purpose and great nobility of mind and heart—the withdrawal of people like that from political life—has been a terrible loss not only to the world, but particularly to our form and organization of government and society.” (p. 110)
She had seen enough partisans arrive in Washington offering simplistic solutions to complex problems that she preferred for people to begin their engagement with public affairs at a local level to gain some experience and success before tackling national concerns.
While respectful of science, especially actuarial science, Perkins had little respect for the rigid economics of her time. “I mean there is a lot of talk today about the economic law. You’d suppose it was some terrible overpowering thing that had nothing to do with Man, and Man was just a pawn in the field, which, of course, is not true.” (page 114) She insisted that the economy was made for people, not people for the economy.
The experience and viewpoints of Frances Perkins are a heritage for the church just as her New Deal reforms belong to the nation’s heritage. Christians can recognize conversion to the world as one of many forms of conversion. Those converted to the world can contribute to raising the moral and spiritual tone of politics. Economics is a malleable field of endeavor, and can be healthy only when it is directed by ethics to serve the common good.
How Frances Perkins summarized her role in the nation’s capital provides a standard for the assessment of many sorts of careers, especially in public service: “I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and millions of forgotten, plain, common working men.”
The Rev. Charles Hoffacker (’82) is a priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington who lives in Greenbelt, Maryland. He served as a campus minister, rector of three parishes, and interim in five congregations, as well as a convocation dean, General Convention deputy, and reader of the General Ordination Examinations. Now enjoying retirement, he ministers in various ways, including as a writer, independent scholar, activist, and board member of the Frances Perkins Center.