Finally, on February 8, 1939, Perkins was able to meet her accusers. She appeared before the House Judiciary Committee as it considered articles of impeachment against her. She delivered a long and detailed recitation of the administrative procedures initiated against Bridges, the reasons for them, and the legal constraints preventing further action. The questions ranged from the skeptical to the brutal. When opponents made vicious charges against her, she asked them to repeat their question, believing that no person can be scurrilous twice. The photographs of the hearing make her look haggard and exhausted, but she impressed the committee with her detailed knowledge of the case.
Eventually, in March, the committee ruled that there were insufficient facts to support impeachment. She was cleared, but the report was vague and elliptical. It generated little press coverage and her reputation was permanently marred. Unable to resign, she soldiered on in the administration for another six years, helping out mostly behind the scenes. She was stoic about it all, never showing any public weakness or any self-pity. After her government service ended, when she could have written a memoir to give her side of the story, she declined.
During the Second World War, she served as an administrative troubleshooter. She urged Roosevelt to do something to help European Jewry. She became alarmed by the way federal action was beginning to infringe on privacy and civil liberties.
When FDR died in 1945, she was finally released from the cabinet, though President Truman asked her to serve on the Civil Service Commission. Instead of writing that memoir, she wrote a book about Roosevelt instead. It was a tremendous success, but it contains very little autobiography.
Perkins did not really experience private joy until the end of her life. In 1957, a young labor economist asked her to teach a course at Cornell. The job paid about $10,000 a year, scarcely more than she had earned decades before as New York Industrial Commissioner, but she needed the money to pay for her daughter’s mental health care.
At first, she lived in residential hotels during her time in Ithaca, but she was then invited to live in a small bedroom at Telluride House, a sort of fraternity house for some of Cornell’s most gifted students. She was delighted by the invitation. “I feel like a bride on her wedding night!” she told friends.48 While there, she drank bourbon with the boys and tolerated their music at all hours.49 She attended the Monday house meetings, though she rarely spoke. She gave them copies of Baltasar Gracian’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom, a seventeenth-century guidebook by a Spanish Jesuit priest on how to retain one’s integrity while navigating the halls of power. She became close friends with Allan Bloom, a young professor who would go on to achieve fame as the author of The Closing of the American Mind. Some of the boys had trouble understanding how this small, charming, and unassuming old lady could have played such an important historical role.
She did not like airplanes and traveled alone by bus, sometimes having to make four or five connections to get to a funeral or a lecture. She tried to destroy some of her papers, to foil future biographers. She traveled with a copy of her will in her handbag, so that if she died she “wouldn’t cause any trouble.”50 She died alone, in a hospital, on May 14, 1965, at age eighty-five. A few of the Telluride House boys served as pallbearers, including Paul Wolfowitz, who would go on to serve in the Reagan and Bush administrations. The minister read the “be ye steadfast” passage from 1 Corinthians that Perkins herself had read upon her graduation from Mount Holyoke College more than six decades before.
If you look back at her college yearbook photo, you see a small, cute, almost mousy young lady. It would be hard to foresee from that vulnerable expression that she would be able to endure so much hardship—the mental illnesses of her husband and daughter, the ordeal of being the solitary woman in a hypermasculine world, the decades of political battles and negative press.
But it would also be hard to foresee how much she would accomplish throughout the hardship. She faced her own weaknesses—laziness, glibness—early in life and steeled herself for a life of total commitment. She suppressed her own identity so she could lobby for her cause. She took on every new challenge and remained as steadfast as her motto. She was, as Kirstin Downey would put it in the title of her fine biography, “The Woman Behind the New Deal.”
On the one hand she was a fervent liberal activist, of the sort we are familiar with today. But she combined this activism with reticent traditionalism, hesitancy, and a puritanical sensibility. Daring in politics and economics, she was conservative in morality. She practiced a thousand little acts of self-discipline to guard against self-indulgence, self-glorification, or, until the impeachment and the end of her life, self-reflection. Her rectitude and reticence pinched her private life and made her bad at public relations. But it helped her lead a summoned life, a life in service to a vocation.
Perkins didn’t so much choose her life. She responded to the call of a felt necessity. A person who embraces a calling doesn’t take a direct route to self-fulfillment. She is willing to surrender the things that are most dear, and by seeking to forget herself and submerge herself she finds a purpose that defines and fulfills herself. Such vocations almost always involve tasks that transcend a lifetime. They almost always involve throwing yourself into a historical process. They involve compensating for the brevity of life by finding membership in a historic commitment. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it in 1952:
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.51
CHAPTER 3
SELF-CONQUEST
Ida Stover Eisenhower was born in 1862 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, one of eleven children. Her childhood was more or less a series of catastrophes. When she was a young girl, Union soldiers invaded her home, hunting for her two teenage brothers. They threatened to burn down the barn and ransacked the town and surrounding country. Her mother died when Ida was nearly five, and her father died when she was eleven.
The children were scattered among distant relations. Ida became the assistant cook for the large household that was putting her up. She baked pies, pastries, and meats, darned socks, and patched clothing. She was not, however, sad and pitiable. From the start, she had spark and drive and pushed daringly against her hardships. She was an overworked orphan, but folks in town remembered her as something of a tomboy, wiry and unafraid, galloping bareback through town on any borrowed horse, and one time falling and breaking her nose.
Girls were generally not educated beyond eighth grade at the time, but Ida, who in early adolescence had memorized 1,365 Bible verses in six months on her own, possessed a tremendous drive to improve herself, in both Adam I and Adam II terms. One day, when she was fifteen, her host family went off on a family outing, leaving her alone. She packed her belongings and sneaked away, walking to Staunton, Virginia. She got a room and a job and enrolled herself in the local high school.
She graduated, taught for two years, and at twenty-one came into a $1,000 inheritance. She used $600 of that (more than $10,000 today) to buy an ebony piano, which was to remain the most treasured possession of her life. The rest she devoted to her education. She hitched on with a Mennonite caravan heading west, though she was not a Mennonite, and settled with her brother at the grandly named Lane University in Lecompton, Kansas. There were fourteen freshmen the year Ida matriculated, and classes were held in the parlor of a residential house.