There was a cost to this philosophy. She was not superbly introspective. She did not excel at intimacy. She did not have a particularly happy private life. It is hard to know what would have happened if her husband had not spent so much time in mental institutions, but it is likely that her public vocation would have crowded out her energy and capacity for private intimacy nonetheless. She was built for the public campaign. She did not receive love well, or give it, or display vulnerability. Even her care for her daughter often took the form of a moral improvement crusade, which backfired. Frances exerted iron control over herself and expected it in her daughter.
But that daughter, Susanna, inherited her father’s manic temperament. Starting when she was sixteen, when Perkins moved to Washington to serve in the Roosevelt administration, they seldom shared a home. Throughout her life, Susanna suffered severe bouts of depression. Susanna married a man who conducted a flagrant affair. By the 1940s, she was something of a hippie, twenty years before the term existed. She became involved with various countercultural groups. She developed a fixation on the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi. She went out of her way to shock polite society and embarrass her mother. Perkins once invited Susanna to a society event and begged her to dress appropriately. Susanna chose a flamboyant green dress and wore her hair piled wildly atop her head, with garish flowers adorning her hair and neck.
“I have given way to morbid superstition that I am the cause of others’ nervous collapse, my husband, my daughter,” Perkins confessed. “[It] frightens and oppresses me.”37 Susanna was never really able to work and was supported by Frances. Even at age seventy-seven, Frances turned over her rent-controlled apartment in New York so that Susanna would have a place to live. She had to take a job to pay her daughter’s bills.
Every virtue can come with its own accompanying vice. The virtue of reticence can yield the vice of aloofness. Perkins was not emotionally vulnerable to those close to her. Her public vocation never completely compensated for her private solitude.
Duty
New York’s Governor Al Smith was Perkins’s first and greatest political love. He was loyal, approachable, voluble and a man with the common touch. Smith also gave Perkins her first big break in government. He appointed her to the Industrial Commission, the body that regulated workplace conditions across the Empire State. The job brought a generous $8,000 a year salary and put Perkins in the middle of the major strikes and industrial disputes. She was not only a rare woman in a man’s world, she was in the manliest precincts of the man’s world. She’d travel to factory towns and throw herself in the middle of bitter disputes between energized labor organizers and determined corporate executives. There is no boasting in any of her reminiscences that this was a brave and even reckless thing to do. To her, this was simply a job that needed doing. The word “one” plays a crucial role in her descriptions of her own life. Sometimes she would use the formulation “I did this,” but more often her diction was formal and archaic: “One did this…”
Nowadays we think of the use of “one” as pompous and starched. But for Perkins it was simply a way to avoid the first person pronoun. It was a way to suggest that any proper person would of course be duty-bound to do what she had done under the circumstances.
During the 1910s and 1920s in Albany, Perkins also had occasion to work with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He did not impress her. She found him shallow and a bit arrogant. He had a habit of throwing his head back as he spoke. Later, when he was president, that gesture suggested confidence and buoyant optimism. But when he was young, Perkins just thought it made him look supercilious.
Roosevelt disappeared from Perkins’s life when he suffered his polio attack. When he returned, she felt he had changed. He almost never spoke of his illness, but Perkins felt it “purged the slightly arrogant attitude he had displayed.”38
One day, as Roosevelt was reentering politics, Perkins sat on a stage and watched him drag himself up to the podium to deliver a speech. His hands, supporting his weight on the podium, never stopped trembling. Perkins realized that after the speech, someone would have to cover his awkward movements as he lurched down from the stand. She gestured to a woman behind her, and as he concluded, they hurried up to Roosevelt, nominally to congratulate him, but actually to shield his movements with their skirts. Over the years, this became a routine.
Perkins admired the way Roosevelt gratefully and humbly accepted help. “I began to see what the great teachers of religion meant when they said that humility is the greatest of virtues,” she later wrote, “and if you can’t learn it, God will teach it to you by humiliation. Only so can a man be really great, and it was in those accommodations to necessity that Franklin Roosevelt began to approach the stature of humility and inner integrity which made him truly great.”39
When Roosevelt was elected governor of New York, he offered Perkins the job of Industrial Commissioner. She wasn’t sure she should take it, because she wasn’t sure she could successfully manage an agency. “I believe that such talent as I may have for public service lies much more in the judicial and legislative work of the Department than in the administrative,” she wrote in a note to Roosevelt. On the day he offered her the job, she told him that she would give him a day to reconsider, to consult with others. “If anyone says it’s unwise to appoint me or will make trouble with the leaders, just disregard today…. I’m not going to tell anyone so you’re not sewed up.”40
Roosevelt responded, “That’s very decent, I must say, but I’m not going to change my mind.” He was pleased to appoint a woman to such a senior job, and Perkins’s reputation as a public servant was exemplary. As one biographer, George Martin, put it, “As an administrator she was good, perhaps even more than good; as a judge or legislator she was quite extraordinary. She had a judicial temperament and a strong sense in all situations of what was fair. She was always open to new ideas and yet the moral purpose of the law, the welfare of mankind, was never overlooked.”41
When he was elected president, Roosevelt asked Perkins to become his secretary of labor. Again, she resisted. When rumors of her potential nomination circulated during the transition, Perkins wrote FDR a letter saying that she hoped they were untrue. “You are quoted as saying that the newspaper predictions on cabinet posts are 80 percent wrong. I write to say that I honestly hope that what they’ve been printing about me is among the 80 percent of incorrect items. I’ve had my ‘kick’ out of the gratifying letters etc., but for your own sake and that of the U.S.A. I think that someone straight from the ranks of some group of organized workers should be appointed—to establish firmly the principle that labor is in the President’s councils.”42 She also touched lightly on her family problems, which she feared might become a distraction. Roosevelt wrote a little squib on a piece of scratch paper and sent it back: “Have considered your advice and don’t agree.”43