Frances Perkins

"The process of recovery is not a simple one. ... We cannot be satisfied merely with makeshift arrangements which will tide us over the present emergencies. We must devise plans that will not merely alleviate the ills of today, but will prevent, as far as it is humanly possible to do so, their recurrence in the future."

"Like many people, I was an ardent admirer of Theodore Roosevelt. ...He had recommended to the people 's book How the Other Half Lives. I had read it, and Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural address of 1905, and had straightaway felt that the pursuit of social justice would be my vocation."

"As a student and professional social worker, I was taking an active part in proposals to use... legislative authority... to correct social abuses—long hours, low wages, bad housing, child labor, and unsanitary conditions."

"He didn’t like concentrated responsibility. Agreement with other people who he thought were good, right minded, and trying to do the right thing by the world was almost as necessary to him as air to breathe."

"The quality of his being one with his people, of having no artificial or natural barriers between him and them, made it possible for him to be a leader without ever being or thinking of being a dictator."

"1911... was the year of the great Triangle Fire in New York City, a terrible industrial accident which burned out the contents of a 9th and 10th floor loft building factory... It caught on fire and the blaze spread very rapidly. There was only one means of exit available, the other two means of exits were the elevator which was ablaze almost immediately as the flames got into this open shaft and spread from floor to floor and the second exit was locked. It was an exit to the roof... it would have saved most of the people in that building if it had not been locked. It had been locked by the employer himself because he feared... he would be robbed either by his employees or by the outsider."

"[T]his was a terrible accident; 147 young people, they were all young men and women, were killed, lost their lives and a number of others were badly injured. Some of them were injured after the fire in the elevator shaft had gone out. Of course the boys that ran the elevator had gone... fled. Some of the people tried to get out by jumping into the elevator shaft and grabbing the cables and letting themselves down... Some of them fell, some of them were awkward and... couldn't hold on. Some of them merely blistered their hands, took the skin and flesh off their hands coming down on the cables and there were a number of people sadly injured."

"Everybody who jumped, and a good many did jump from the 9th and 10th floors, was killed. The other people who died were all people who were burned or smothered by the smoke in the factory itself."

"This made a terrible impression on the people of the State of New York. I can't begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere. It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn't have been. We were sorry. Mea culpa! Mea culpa! We didn't want it that way. We hadn't intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory. It was a terrible thing for the people... to face."

"I remember... we heard the engines and we heard the screams and rushed out and rushed over... We could see this building from Washington Square and the people had just begun to jump when we got there. They had been holding... standing in the windowsills... 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... net to catch people... they couldn't wait any longer. They began to jump. The window was too crowded and they would jump and they hit the sidewalk. The net broke, they [fell] a terrible distance, the weight of the bodies was so great... that they broke through the net. Every one of them was killed, everybody who jumped... It was a horrifying spectacle. We... felt as though we had been part of it all. The next day people... in all parts of the city... began to mull around and gather and talk."

"So we proceeded and it proved to be a most educative experience. This factory investigating commission was continued... for four years and its report, is... seven volumes. ...and it's in great detail ...the recommendations, the testimony. We went all over the state. I was a young person then and certainly not fit for service on any super commission but I was the chief—I was the investigator, and in charge of the investigations and this was an extraordinary opportunity... to get into factories to make a report and be sure it was going to be heard."

"Although their commission was to devise ways and means to prevent accidents by fire in the State of New York, we... kept expanding the function of the commission 'till it came to be the report on [un]sanitary conditions and to provide for their removal and to report all kinds of unsafe conditions... all kinds of human conditions that were unfavorable to the employees, including long hours, including low wages, including the labor of children, including the overwork of women, including homework put out by the factories to be taken home by the women. It included almost everything you could think of that had been in agitation for years. We were authorized to investigate and report and recommend action on all these subjects. I may say we did."

"So that beginning with that report coming in as it did in 1915, it was laid on the table before the legislature, and by this time, was the speaker of the House and well on the way to be governor. We had a very favorable audience and much of the legislation was enacted into law, oh, within a couple of years..."

"[I]t afterwards, seems in some way to have paid the debt society owed to those children, those young people who lost their lives in the Triangle Fire. It's their contribution to the people of New York that we have this really magnificent series of legislative acts to protect and improve the administration of the law regarding the protection of work people in the City of - in the State of New York."

"Women lobbyists, whatever their size, are looked at askance... Men seem to have trouble believing we have brains enough to understand the causes we're championing. ...Maybe I should have said most men."

"From this day forward, I will be a Doer of the Word and not as Hearer only, whenever and wherever I see the need."

"I never really saw really poor people before... My parents always told me nobody had to be poor—that they wouldn't be if they weren't shiftless or didn't spend everything they earned on drink. I don't understand how Mama and Papa could be so mistaken! ...Yes, I guess I do. 'There are none so blind as those who will not see'—and that's a favorite quotation of Papa's too!"

"I shall always be most grateful to him. He made me rediscover that I had a mind. It had lain fallow, I am afraid, since my Mount Holyoke days."

"Who is that tall, thin young man with the pince-nez, who seems constantly to be looking down his nose at people?"

"Well... he'll only win that way once, I imagine. He doesn't look as if he'd be very popular with people. What I mean is, he doesn't look as if he really likes people."

"Upon hearing that Franklin D. Roosevelt won his NY state senate seat because many thought they were voting for Theodore Roosevelt."

"You showed me which, of all the 'hats' a social worker wears, suits me best. ...[i.e.,] You convinced me that man-made evils can be corrected if people can be made to care enough. I intend to make them, if it's in my power."

"His arrogance isn't what disturbs me so much as his self-centeredness... He doesn't seem to care about anything that doesn't concern him personally."

"The mothers don't want to bring their children [in for child labor at a vegetable cannery in Auborn, NY]—they need to. ...That need will never cease until employers pay decent wages! There ought to be a law assuring minimum pay, as well as one limiting hours worked!"

"I will fight for it up to the Supreme Court, if necessary... If the Industrial Commission does not have the right to make essential safety laws, it might as well close up shop!"

"Gentlemen... let me make a plain statement. As I see it, the Labor Commission is duty-bound always to consider two things about every recommendation. One: what will this provide in the way of health, comfort, decency and security? Two: what will it cost?"

"The day I need an armed bodyguard is the day I admit my job's too much for a woman."

"I think any compulsion other than moral compulsion is wrong. Let disputes be settled by public opinion, not statute."

"I know what horror tales you've been hearing from manufacturers... They've told you they can't possibly operate under a forty-eight hour law. Well, they said the same thing twelve years ago when the Fifty-Four Hour Bill was under consideration. So, gentlemen, let us look at the facts. ...[T]here have been fewer industrial accidents, because the workers do not so often become careless through fatigue. Gentlemen, there is every reason to believe things will improve still further when the working day is shorter. ...A million women will be affected by the law... you don't need to fear employers... [T]hose million women have suffrage... Let this bill that means so much to them go to a vote. They'll be grateful to you!"

"His illness had changed him... Having known what trouble is to the very depths of his being, he can now sympathize with other people who have problems. I think he could make a very good governor of the state of New York."

"To know him is to love him... He's honest, high-minded, intelligent and—above all—independent. I have worked with him in government for years. There has never been any conflict between his official duties and his religious beliefs, I am confident there never will be!"

"I would not be where I am today if it were not for you and others like you. ...I do not regard you as paying tribute to me personally, but to Frances Perkins as a symbol of the genuine desire to bring happiness to those who have it not in their own power. So that industry may bear down kindly instead of bitterly. ...I promise to use the brains I have to meet problems with intelligence and courage. ...I promise that I will be candid about what I know, of the Labor Department or of the state of industry in this state and in country."

"It is all-important to keep the human touch in whatever we do... This is the machine age... and we should make machines work for us—but let us not act like robots ourselves!"

"Organized labor has always had one of its own people as Secretary and will expect to continue to have. I do not qualify."

"Would you leave me free to do what I think is best for the Labor Department, Franklin? I'd try to keep you informed, but I wouldn't always be able to... [D]irect unemployment relief, a program of public works, minimum wage and hour laws, unemployment and old age insurance, abolition of child labor... These things need doing no matter who is Secretary of Labor."

"Just let the people know that they matter to you, that your plan is to mobilize the government to help them. If you can give them hope that things will be better, they'll bless you, Franklin."

"The Employment Service is all but dead. It needs resurrecting and reorganizing. The Statistical Bureau needs revamping too, so it will be an honest fact-finding body. As for the Immigration Service—well, really, Franklin, it is altogether too reactionary for today's world."

"I thought witch-hunting was a thing of the past, but that's what this 'red-baiting' immigration squad is doing. They see communists behind every foreign name."

"Harry Bridges is a card-carrying Communist, Franklin, but that's the single black mark against him and isn't illegal. I just don't believe a man should be punished for what he believes or thinks."

"I'm the last leaf on the New Deal tree, and I think perhaps I've clung here too long already."

"We were in a terrible situation... Banks were closing. The economic life of the country was almost at a standstill."

"My generation was perhaps the first that openly and actively asserted—at least some of us did—the separateness of women and their personal independence in the family relationship..."

"I am extraordinarily the product of my grandmother... Scarcely a week goes by that I don't find myself saying, "As my grandmother used to say," and then repeating something that apparently has been a guiding principle all my life."

"One of the girls who was among my best friends came from a poverty-stricken home. Her family was delightful and I used to wonder how such things could happen..."

"I discovered for the first time, under the stimulus of that course and of that teacher, that I had a mind... My intellectual pride was aroused and the grim determination awakened me to get the most I could out of college."

"Like many young people, I was an ardent admirer of Theodore Roosevelt... Out of the period that I was in school a whole generation, particularly women emerged, but men too, who had a great passion for social justice..."

"['s speech] first opened my mind to the necessity for and the possibility of the work which became my vocation."

"What is the trouble? How can we cure this? ...What can be done? ...I had to do something about unnecessary hazards to life, unnecessary poverty. It was sort of up to me. This feeling... sprang out of a period of great philosophical confusion which overtakes all young people..."

"[I] wrote to anybody I knew who had any connection at all with charities to say I wanted a job, but had no experience."

"If facts were to be found, I was to devise ways to prevent it or overcome it either by social representation or by legislation at the municipal or state level. ...Ten cent lodging houses, employment agencies, the offices of the Philadelphia political "gangs," and the two police courts all became my haunts..."