This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
The Asch Building was on fire.
Frances Perkins had been in New York for two years, having moved from Philadelphia to work for the New York Consumers League. On Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, the 30-year-old social reform advocate had joined friends for tea in Greenwich Village. During the meal, they heard fire trucks and rushed in the direction of the sirens at Washington Square.
They found the top three floors of the ten-story building engulfed in flames. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the manufacturer of the button-up blouses prized by the era’s working women, occupied those floors. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union workers had protested conditions at the factory two years before. They’d been fired by the owners and replaced with immigrant laborers.
The firemen’s longest ladder only reached the sixth floor.
Perkins saw people in the windows:
They had been holding until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer. Finally, the men were trying to get out this thing that the firemen carry with them, a net to catch people if they do jump … they couldn’t wait any longer. They began to jump … the weight of the bodies was so great, at the speed at which they were traveling that they broke through the net. Every one of them was killed, everybody who jumped was killed. It was a horrifying spectacle.
The 146 victims were mainly young immigrant women from Tsarist Russia, Central Europe, and Italy. A fire escape had collapsed. Others died trying to escape through the elevator shafts. Fearing thefts by their underpaid workers, the owners had the factory doors bolted and locked. When they were able to enter, firemen found skeletons and bodies mutilated by the inferno.
Perkins reflected later that “the New Deal was born that day.”
For the city and the state, the Triangle fire was the September 11th of the 20th century. New York’s Democratic legislative leaders Assemblyman Al Smith and state Sen. Robert Wagner headed the Factory Investigating Commission probing the disaster. Perkins, a familiar face working in Albany, was the chief investigator. The group met every Saturday morning for four years. The commission exceeded its fire safety regulations mandate, proposing reforms on hours and wages, child labor, and sanitary issues in factories.
The owners were acquitted of manslaughter. They received $400 for each victim through their insurance policy and paid $75 to the families of the victims.
In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt selected Frances Perkins as his secretary of labor, the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet.
The trauma of the 1911 fire deeply affected her. Amanda Hatch is the executive director of the Frances Perkins Center, a cultural organization affiliated with the family’s homestead in Newcastle, Maine, which was designated a national monument in 2024. “Her grandson wrote about his memory of visiting his grandmother when he was a child, and one of the first things they did were fire drills,” Hatch says. “She would show him where the rope ladder was, and how to attach the rope ladder to the second-floor window.”
BEFORE PERKINS ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON, her professional journeys took her to Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. Her experiences in those three cities crystalized Perkins’s understanding of the problems of urban workers and informed her real-world solutions to assist the men, women, and children working in dangerous conditions for starvation wages and living in squalid, crowded, and disease-prone tenements.
After graduating from Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts in 1902, Perkins went to Chicago for a teaching job and volunteered over her three-year sojourn at Hull House, the settlement house established by the social reformers Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr.
Hull House was an early multi-service center where immigrants on the Near West Side could locate not only employment listings, but child care, legal information, and other assistance. Addams, who in 1931 went on to become the first American woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize, activated Perkins’s interest in social work and was a key mentor throughout her career.
Perkins’s sisterhood of mentors imbued her with the superpowers she drew on in the White House. “They were really embedded in the community and had experiential knowledge of what they were talking about,” says Judy Whipps, a Grand Valley State University professor emerita of philosophy and interdisciplinary studies.
Perkins left Chicago in 1907 for the Philadelphia Research and Protective Association, where she took on rescuing immigrants and Southern Black women and girls from sex traffickers. After earning her master’s degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University in 1910, she joined Florence Kelley, another Hull House alumna, at the New York Consumers League.
The New Englander gained entrée to the glamorous world of fine homes, country getaways, and cultural events enjoyed by progressive, upper-middle-class New Yorkers. But she was never wealthy. Her parents moved from Maine to Boston, where she was born in 1880, and from there to central Massachusetts, where her father opened a stationery company. She married Paul Wilson, another nonprofit professional, in 1913. Unusually for that time, Perkins kept her own surname. The family’s finances disintegrated after Wilson developed bipolar disorder and was frequently hospitalized. Their only child, Susanna, also experienced mental illness.
Perkins first met Roosevelt at a tea dance in New York City in 1911. Roosevelt was basically a “prince” of the Hudson Valley aristocracy: “There was nothing particularly interesting about the tall, thin young man,” she wrote in her best-selling 1946 memoir, The Roosevelt I Knew.
When Perkins lobbied New York legislators on a plan that would guarantee women a 54-hour workweek, Roosevelt wasn’t curious about it. But “Big Tim” Sullivan, a notorious veteran of the corrupt Tammany Hall machine, was. His 14-year-old sister had had to work, and he put his shoulder to the bill. “[Big Tim] was real,” Perkins told a New Yorker interviewer in 1933. “You didn’t have to show him statistics on the incidence of fatigue poisoning to make him understand that a girl’s back aches if she works too much.”
When FDR was elected governor in 1928, Perkins had already held state labor department positions. The outgoing governor Al Smith had just lost the presidential election, and Roosevelt asked her to serve as the state industrial commissioner, running the entire labor department. Smith had warned him that men would have problems with a woman. “Al’s a good, progressive fellow,” Roosevelt said, “but I am willing to take more chances. I’ve got more nerve about women and their status in the world than Al has.”
PERKINS’S SELECTION AS THE PRESIDENT’S secretary of labor was a bold stroke in 1933. But Perkins initially resisted, reminding Roosevelt that turf-conscious labor leaders would be irate seeing her running their department; if he was intent on a woman, someone with a union track record would be better. When that didn’t work, she thought that if she insisted on very ambitious, politically dicey conditions (ones that would actually dent the 25 percent unemployment), the new president would think twice:
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.
She warned him it was all borderline unconstitutional. “Well, that’s a problem,” Roosevelt said, “but we can work out something when the time comes.”
Like her three liberal colleagues in FDR’s inner circle (Harry Hopkins, Henry Wallace, and Harold Ickes), Perkins came to Washington with specific ideas about how to tackle the Great Depression. But the president left the details to them. Said Perkins, “The notion that the New Deal had a preconceived theoretical position is ridiculous.”
Derek Leebaert, author of Unlikely Heroes, a study of FDR and his “four lieutenants,” credits the social reformer’s “brain power” for her ability to survive the Roosevelt White House. “It was her determined preparation for any meeting, which is why nobody would cross her in a cabinet meeting, because she was always superbly prepared,” says Leebaert. “One of the very first things she did was assemble a group of young high-powered lawyers, most from Harvard Law, to serve as legal advisors to the Department of Labor.”
Perkins confronted relentless misogyny. She kept “Notes on the Male Mind,” a folder of observations about her colleagues. To appear less threatening to the men, she adopted a maternal aura, wearing longer skirts, pearls, and a three-cornered hat. She sat with the cabinet wives at social functions and only spoke in meetings when FDR asked.
If not for Perkins, Social Security, as Americans understand the program today, would not have been created.
After the March 1933 inauguration, Harry Hopkins, who headed New York’s relief efforts, came to Washington with a plan to graft some of the ideas that had worked in the state’s successful Temporary Emergency Relief Administration onto a federal appropriation of grants-in-aid to serve as immediate unemployment relief to the states. He couldn’t get in to see the president on his own—Perkins made the meeting happen.
By mid-May, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration had been signed into law. “One sees that it provided a substantial stimulus to the revival of industry,” Perkins wrote, “by creating purchasing power in a class previously destitute, and that it had a tremendous effect on raising the standards of living of the poorest and lowest paid people.”
Even before the relief programs were launched, Perkins had been thinking long and hard about what came to be Social Security. She never really took credit for her accomplishments and was content to let FDR shine. However, it is an undisputed fact that if not for Perkins, Social Security, as Americans understand the program today, would not have been created. Though the first private pension plan had been launched by American Express in 1875, most workers toiled until they couldn’t. The modern concept of retirement did not exist.
Roosevelt gave Perkins the freedom to develop the program. Since a relief plan was already in progress, FDR wanted to make clear that the goal was to assist Americans during future periods of unemployment and address the problems of “unprotected” old age. And he wanted it for everyone, not just factory workers. He also aimed to keep the two programs separate from the relief programs to avoid having conservative opponents label them as “the dole.” He’d wanted to add health insurance to the mix, but groups like the American Medical Association were dead set against it.
Perkins first lobbied Congress, where there was support for both old-age and unemployment insurance. She branched out to speak across the country. As she tried to figure out how to fund these mammoth programs, Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone provided a bit of unsolicited advice at an event: “The taxing power of the Federal Government, my dear; the taxing power is sufficient for everything you want and need.” She took this intel back to her working group as the premise for creating a viable fund for the benefits. They figured out that aid to the poor and dependents could come out of federal appropriations that the states could match.
She decided that to fund old-age insurance, both employers and workers would be taxed to contribute to a fund that would distribute monies to eligible employees at age 65, who had paid into the fund. One of the drafters of the plan said they wanted a “life-long series of contributions.” “We decided that equal contributions by employers and employees were necessary, with the government contributing a third share as an offset to the assistance costs to be saved.”
AS WORLD WAR II UNFOLDED, Perkins took risks on immigration issues well beyond Roosevelt’s political comfort zone. The Immigration Act of 1924 established a system of national origin quotas to exclude specific racial, ethnic, and religious groups (chiefly, Jews and Catholics). At that time, the State Department issued visas and the Labor Department enforced immigration laws.
Brutal immigration tactics aren’t new. In Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees From Nazi Germany, historian Rebecca Brenner Graham explains that federal labor officials in the 1930s ramped up deportations, initially targeting Mexicans in raids conducted along the southern border, complete with patrols by the KKK and other vigilantes. Boardinghouses and other locations were also singled out. Perkins laid off Labor Department old-timers in the hope of steering remaining employees to help new arrivals rather than seizing and deporting them.
Pressures to admit new Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany or extend visas of people already in the United States led to conflicts with State Department officials. However, the secretary managed to save hundreds of Jewish children despite congressional and bureaucratic opposition. The president allowed her to extend visas for up to 15,000 German Jews. But overall, Roosevelt kept the United States on the sidelines of the crisis.
Perkins ran into more trouble when she prohibited the deportation of longshoreman union head Harry Bridges. The Australian immigrant had led a successful general strike in San Francisco in 1934 and built one of the nation’s most militant unions. Right-wing congressmen called for her impeachment, and in 1939 she defended her decision before the Committee on Un-American Activities. Roosevelt dodged making any statements of support for the stances she took.
Congressional Republicans failed to blunt the New Deal by attacking Perkins, but her political cachet faded though she remained at the Labor Department through June 1945. She wanted to resign right after FDR’s January inauguration, his fourth. Even with the war winding down, Roosevelt didn’t want to think about that. “Frances, you have done awfully well,” FDR told her the day before the ceremony. “I know what you have been through. I know what you have accomplished. Thank you.” By mid-April, the president was dead.
Frances Perkins beat the system for countless forgotten, common working Americans, then and today. She died 20 years after FDR in 1965.
This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.
