POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

If one showed most Americans this photo, they would have no idea who the woman was:

If one added this next photo, a few might guess that she was Eleanor Roosevelt, standing in the background as her husband signed another piece of landmark New Deal legislation:

But, much like Eleanor Roosevelt, this woman was anything but in the background of the New Deal. As the following appreciative piece, written by Wendy Smith for the Los Angeles Times in 2009, makes clear, ordinary Americans owe more to Frances Perkins than they owe to many of the men who have served as presidents:

Frances Perkins knew exactly what she wanted when President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered her the post of secretary of Labor in February 1933. The goals she outlined on that chilly winter night constituted the most sweepingly ambitious to-do list any public official had ever presented: direct federal aid for unemployment relief, a massive public works program, minimum wage and maximum work-hours legislation, compensation for workers injured on the job, workplace safety regulations, a ban on child labor and, finally — and most radically — a national pension system as well as one for health insurance. “Are you sure you want this done?” she asked FDR. . .

She had his full support, Roosevelt assured her. Like Perkins, he believed that the time was ripe for dramatic federal initiatives. The Depression had shaken Americans’ traditional faith in laissez-faire economic policy; after 3 1/2 years of inaction by the Herbert Hoover administration, they were desperate for their government to do something, anything. Frances Perkins, FDR knew, was a woman who got things done. . .

A series of laws establishing the rights of labor and decent working conditions, all bearing Perkins’ fingerprints, climaxed with the Social Security Act of 1935. Packaging together unemployment insurance, old-age pensions and aid to the disabled and dependent children, it promised, in Roosevelt’s words, “security against the hazards and vicissitudes of life.” Passage in 1938 of the Fair Labor Standards Act establishing minimum wages and maximum hours meant that Perkins could check off almost every single item on the list she had read to FDR five years earlier. (Only national health insurance had foundered, due to the American Medical Assn.’s implacable opposition.) She had rewritten the U.S. government’s contract with its citizens.

Yesterday was the 140th anniversary of Perkins’s birth. She was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, but, as Smith makes clear, she was anything but a footnote figure. Her imprint on the New Deal and her lasting impact on American life is reflected not only in the landmark initiatives that she played a major role in introducing, refining, and Implementing but also in the fact that she was one of only two cabinet secretaries to serve for the entirety of FDR’s three-plus terms as president..

As our nation’s workers grapple universally with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clear that the government’s response to the economic impact of this public health emergency is going to be every bit as important to ordinary Americans as the New Deal was in the 1930s. Just as the Great Depression exposed the costs of the growing wealth inequality of the “boom” of the “roaring” 20s, so, too, this pandemic has exposed the yawning inequities in our post-industrial economy, inequities that have their roots in the ideological assertion of a false equivalency between what serves the public good and what enhances profitability.

We are going to need another Frances Perkins. But let’s insure that the gender and racial imbalance in FDR’s cabinet is an anachronism, rather than a lingering challenge:

We clearly do not have the luxury of sidelining talent and marginalizing voices that need to be fully engaged to meet this moment and to prepare us more effectively for the other looming challenges that we have been too ready to ignore or to deny. As we are learning at considerable economic, moral, and human cost, the rhetoric of self-interest rings very hollowly down empty avenues.

P.S. In posting the excerpt from Wendy Smith’s piece, Sam Smith of the Progresive Review included this graphic from the Lawrence O’Donnell show: