>> do i make you laugh? hi. >> how are you? >> great. how are you? >> great to see you. how are you going? >> are you having fun? >> wonderful. >> how are you doing, surely? >> fine. >> thank you for being here. >> my pleasure. >> how are you? >> i love watching you on fox. ..

>> i'm so pleased to be here today. i love the library of congress. i spent many hours here doing research and have made some very fun and amusing find some here. often people are interested in the big collections that libraries have, but at the library of congress it sometimes with a smaller, less known collections of really proved so fruitful and i will mention one thing because i don't want to forget and i have other things we are going to be talking about, but in the collection of the obscure to new yorker named

john kingsbury stored away in boxes in the outer suburbs of maryland at the library of congress staffed kindly kept bringing back to me i found a yellow paper hand written in pencil with kingsbury describing how teddy roosevelt hit frances perkins to head the committee on safety after the triangle shortwave fire. i knew frances perkins tied to roosevelt went far back. but that really tied very closely to teddy roosevelt and was even a big surprise to the teddy roosevelt scholars that learned about it after we found it and discussed it with them. let me start by asking you all a question. how many of you have heard of frances perkins and know who she is? >> wow. that's great. first of all, this is wonderful. i've got a great audience.

and i also have a fairly rare audience in that most people in america have no idea who frances perkins is, and i know that myself because when i started on this road, i didn't know who she was either. i came from a family that didn't care much for roosevelt, and i kept stumbling across her name though again and again over the years and finally it was almost like a doorbell that kept ringing and i had to go answer to. let me -- one of the things i think is important though is that it's difficult to even say all the things frances perkins did, and i'd like to start with a short reading, and it's just two pages. i would drag it out too long but they are important pages because they will give you a sense of the breadth of the things she did and then i will tell you a few other things and then i

would like to turn the talk to how she did it, how this woman accomplished so much. when i started out on this book i thought she was publicly one of the most important american women and our american history and by the time i was done with the research and began writing, i had come to the point i decided that she was probably one of the most important social progressives in american history and that her sex was just a coincidence or a fact in her life but let me start by giving you a sense of the breath of some of the things that she did. on a chilly february night in 1933 a middle-aged woman waited expectantly to meet with her employer on east 65th street in new york city. she held a scrap of paper with written notes and finally ushered into the study the woman brushed aside her nervousness and spoke confidently. they entered casually as a while and then she turned serious.

her dark side is holding his gaze. he wanted her to take an assignment but she decided he wouldn't accept it unless she were allowed to give it her own way. she held a piece of paper in her hand and he motioned for her to continue. she kicked off the items. authority hour workweek, a minimum wage, workers' compensation, unemployment compensation, a federal law banning child labor, direct federal aid for unemployment, social security, a revitalized public employment service and health insurance. she watched his eye is to make sure he was paying attention and understood the implications of each demand. she braced for his response coming that he often shows political expedience over idealism and was capable of callousness and even cruelty. the scope of the list was breathtaking. she was proposing a fundamental radical restructuring of american society with an act of

historic social and welfare laws. to succeed, she would have to overcome opposition from the court, business and labor unions, conservatives. nothing like this has ever been done before in the united states, she said. you know that, don't you? the man sat across from her in his wheelchair with the boxes and rugs. soon he would head to washington, d.c. to be sworn in as the 32nd president of the united states. he would inherit the worst economic crisis in the nation's history. an era of rampant speculation had come to an end. the stock market collapsed rendering the investment's value listened thanks for shutting down stripping people of their lifetime savings. about one-third of workers were unemployed, wages are falling, tens of thousands were homeless. real-estate prices plummeted and millions of homeowners faced foreclosure. his choice of labor secretary would be one of his most important early decisions. his nominee must understand

economic and employment issues but be equally effective as a coalition builder. he was a handsome man with aquiline features and he studied the plane matronly woman before him. no one was more qualified for the job. she knew as much about labor law and administration as anyone in the country. he had known her for more than 20 years, the last four in albany where she had worked. he trusted her and knew she would never betray him. placing a woman in a labor secretary job would expose him to criticism and ridicule. her list of proposals would stir heated opposition even among his loyal supporters. the eight hour day was a standard plank of the socialist party. unemployment insurance seemed improbable. direct aid to the unemployed would threaten the campaign pledge of the balanced budget. still, he said he would back her. it was a job she had prepared for all her life. she had changed her name, her appearance, even her age to make

herself a more effective labor advocate. she studied how man thinks she could better succeed in a man's world. she had spent decades building commercial alliances. still, she told the president she needed more time to make her decision. the next day she visited her husband, a patient in a sanitarium. he was having a good day and understood when she told him about the job offer. his first impulse was to front for himself asking her how the new job might affect him. when she assured him he could remain where he was and that her weekend visits would continue, he gave his permission. that night the woman cried in deep solves that frightened her teenage daughter. she knew the job would change her life forever and should openers of to constant media scrutiny, harsh judgment from her peers and public criticism for doing the job no woman had ever done before. yet she knew she must accept the offer as her grandmother had

told her whenever a door opens to you, you have no choice but to walk through it. the next day she called franklin roosevelt and accepted the author. frances perkins would become the nation's first female secretary of labor. well, we know what happened. the social security act passed in 1935 and it gave the unemployment insurance, social security and our welfare system but became aid to dependent children which was originally designed to help the children of mothers who were left to care for their children alone and these were mostly widows at the time. the fair labor standards act passed in 1938 said a 40-hour workweek to prevent workers from becoming broken from exhaustion. it set the minimum wage to ensure they would receive at least a minimum level of compensation. there was a ban on child labor

and they created the concept to overtime pay in which workers who are asked to work longer hours can receive higher pay for doing so. but that's not all she did. she was a major supporter of fha insurance which has provided housing over the years to millions of american families. she was a primary architect of the civilian conservation corps which became one of the most popular early programs in the roosevelt administration coming universally popular. almost universally popular. [laughter] and she was the largest single supporter of the works progress administration which led to a vast expansion of public works projects, highways, tunnels, schools and art projects all across the country that provided a lot of the basic infrastructure in which our country expanded its economy so dramatically in the 1950's, and

it gave people enough money to feed themselves until the economy recovered on its own. it really is an extraordinary list of accomplishments, and that's not all. the immigration department was then part of the labor department. so, frances perkins also played an international role in the 1930's as the world moved towards a global war. and she had to -- she was an early proponent of bringing many refugees in. she did it quietly and listened what laws she could. she interpreted things in ways that she could, and in consequence hundreds of thousands of people made it to safety in the united states before much of the world actually went up in flames. national health insurance it never passed. there was too much opposition from the american medical association whose members said they would kill social security

if that is what was needed to prevent socialized medicine. fdr back of the national health insurance to save social security. frances perkins achieved almost all of her agenda. she became the most successful social progress of an american history. how did that happen? over the years it's been very difficult to get progress of legislation passed in the united states for the kind they have in europe. there are many obstacles. frances perkins was one of these people but for every young age found a path through obstacles in a way to get things done. coming here when i first came to washington, d.c. in 1980 as a reporter for "the washington post" and i didn't know who frances perkins was myself. i think i was familiar with the name. i took a tour mobile tour of the sites of d.c., and one of the things that stuck in my mind was the huge labor department

building that was named after a woman, frances perkins. i thought wow, you know, there aren't many government buildings named after women and so i sort of stored away in my mind. and in a little while, as we continue our trip along the mall, the tour bus driver said he had a joke for us, and it was what american woman had the worst child birth experience? long pause: frances perkins, she spent 12 years in labor. [laughter] this is how much the tourists to and were informed about what frances perkins had done. and you can only imagine how many people on the bus had relatives that were collecting social security checks. maybe they had the free time to be on the tour bus ride because they were collecting unemployment and had no idea who had allowed for the creation of those benefits. one of the things that makes francis perkins so extraordinary

was the time she was born and she did visit the particular time she was born in 1880 in a time of great national transformation. she was descended from revolutionary war met patriots and always considered herself a new englanders and it was very proud of her new england heritage. hearst was designed strength in the face of adversity. that turned out to be enormously valuable when she got to washington. she grew up middle class. the time she was born, the industrial revolution was in full swing. the gap between rich and poor was growing larger and larger, and a huge surge of immigration changed the country. it wasn't really that great a time to be a woman. women didn't have the right to vote. in fact frances perkins was 40-years-old before she had the right to vote. when she went to college only 3% of american women got a college education summit is extraordinary she had the

self-confidence to take on the things she did. people were even afraid of women getting high year education back then, fearful they would become intellectuals and injure themselves. [laughter] after she graduated, frances perkins went to work at three whole which is a woman's college in lake forest. the rules were very rigid. even the teachers were required to live on campus and their lives were circumscribed like the students but she managed to get over the house where she became a close ally of james adams and the women and became a very big advocate of the settlement house movement. she learned a lot there and from them, but she also learned a lot about what they were not succeeding at. they were very effective at raising consciousness and making people aware of problems that they didn't have a lot of success in implementing legislation that could change some of those problems and

provide solutions. she began to think very clearly now in her mid-20s that she needed to -- she needed to bring new ways to solve some of these problems, and one of the first things she did this begin to change who she was herself. she wasn't born frances perkins. she was born fanny perkins. would have been hard for fanny to become secretary of labor and when someone wanted to make fun of her they would start to call her fanny. but she began to call herself frances perkins, and people wonder why. she never really said why she chose that name. some people felt she loved linens and wanted to keep her initials the same. that might have been part of it. it was also a gender neutral name that allowed her to be not so obviously a woman at a time being a woman was such a

handicap. she changed her religion. she even raised as a congregational list in lake forest she changed to episcopalian as some. now she was truly develop and religion is a defining characteristic in the whole life. but it also put her in the right social circle in of lake forest. the swift family, the hour mur family, those were her fellow parishioners of the church that she went to come and it provided introductions and contacts for the rest of her life. this is a recurring facet of the character. advocating for the poor and the underclass little socializing the ability to make change. frances perkins went to new york city to become a social worker. a lot of the women at the house were aris is come had family

money they could afford to live there. francis hadn't seen all her life. she went and became a social worker in new york city. she was working for the national consumers league which was an organization that was headed wife florence kelley, a very important woman it was then when she was in newark that she had a life changing even come and that is that she witnessed the shortwaves fire. she saw 146 young workers, mostly immigrants jump to their death trees gave a fire that had broken out on the top floor of the converted office building that had been turned into the factory where they were working. now this was a horrifying sight until that time people said frances perkins wasn't quite sure what her destiny was going to be. she had a great sense of motivation, she had a missionary zeal to improve the world but also had a lot of the feelings women have of wanting to marry, wanting to have children.

seeing herself in a more conventional woman's life probably giving a lot of philanthropic work but she saw herself in a more conventional life witnessing the triangle fire changed that and she realized ale more aggressive strategy was going to be needed and that is where we see her start to begin to actually deploy some of these tactics. this is when teddy roosevelt picks her to head the committee on safety and she leads the charge on improving five-year cd standards. first nationally and internationally. anytime you go into a building and see a glass case and there's an occupancy limit and you see five-year and the signs for the exits are when there's a fire drill, there's water sprinklers over your head, when the janitor comes at night and cleans out the trash gets in your office, none of that happened by magic. a lot of those things frances

perkins was a major motivator in making that happen and she made speeches to the national fire prevention association her talks were disseminated globally and you will see those standards in the hundreds of thousands of lives all over the country. the triangle fire is important to me, too. i was a reporter at the washington post. as i said, i knew very little about frances perkins but i had a sense that she had done important things and i began a column that ran in a number of papers around the country that people could pose questions about the workplace problems, and i got a letter from amine and i guess this was medium dearly nineties who said he was being walked into his office every night while they counted the money in the cash register and said did i think that was on safe? [laughter] it happened we had just been writing about the terrible

paltry fire in north carolina. i was aware of the triangle fire but i decided to call the historian at the labor department to get a little bit more information. i called the leader who happens to be in the audience today coming and he told me about the try eagle fighter but he told me something really important. he said did you know that frances perkins sold at fire and that is what started me on the path at this point there were all of these threads i am hearing this is something that puts it together and becomes fascinated to the idea at this young woman 30-years-old witnessing something and going forward to change the world and succeeding. frances perkins had been lobbying for a few years by the time of the trillion bullfighter, so she had already lost a lot of her dirty early idealism naivety and she began to use this much more effectively the system of cultivating all allies and

cultivated some allies most people who are idealistic don't like people are corrupt. for good reason. what she did is often worked with people who work corrupted and had a streak of goodness in them and wanted to participate in something better. frances perkins began in early age to col de tamie hall. she becomes very close friends with robert wagner who initially showed very little interest in workplace legislation, and the person who was so close to him was l. smith, frances perkins was involved with helping both of those men had a chance their careers. she orchestrates hearings on factory conditions where the man began to shine.

robert wagner becomes an important u.s. senator from new york, sheep's the labour legislation for decades to come. al smith becomes governor of new york and a presidential candidate. when he goes to run for president, he needs somebody in his corner he can count on who is going to be a good governor to new york, and he turns to franklin roosevelt frances perkins is friends with al smith before she becomes very close friends with fdr and as fdr arrives she arrives with him. al smith was the only person to come out of the politics that frances perkins became a great friend to read another person she saw during the altar of candidacy is harry truman who she first met at an event in

independence missouri when they were being screened and yelled out by the ku klux klan who were opposed to l. smith running for president. harry truman was also widely believed to be a partisan politics but also was someone she saw greatness in and became a friend and ally of his as well so even when fdr died she went to work in the civil service commission and did very many things for truman on the loyalty review board including voting out communists in the federal government before they got into trouble. this is a woman obviously who did many things. at the end of her life, she looked back at her life and the thing she was the proudest of was the creation of social security. and indeed that really is remarkable. 50 million people the latest

figures came out on the unemployment insurance and set a record 5 million people now are on unemployment insurance. if we didn't have that 55 million people in the united states getting that income now we would be in a much more serious bad place than we are now as we face another bad downturn. so frances perkins handiwork is even more important today than it has been for the last several decades and is a remarkable person. she didn't do it for glory. she said to felix frankfurter why she did it and to me one letter sums of the motivation comes a point court justice felix frankfurter wrote her a letter as she stepped down as the secretary of labor. he congratulated her on her success and he noted that she had suffered much criticism for doing it and she responded i came to work for god, fdr and the millions of forgotten

working men. the last conversation i had with fdr was that such a nature i could say my cup runneth over yet surely goodness and mercy shall follow me. and i say to frances perkins amen. i would be happy to take your questions. [applause] she also befriended women or had close female friends? >> [inaudible] >> yes, i'm sorry to read the question was we have heard about her male friends and she did have many, but when put into her were her zero female friends? the mass movement really was intelligent women banded together even living together to

do things they felt needed to be done to make the world a better place. this is a jury close female alliance and the house is spread all over the country that frances perkins is very much a part of the movement. so those friendships were enormously important to her and jane addams was one of the most when fdr was considering her secretary of labor, one of the most enthusiastic letters came from jane addams saying please, take this woman who's already been by your side because frances perkins had an industrial commissioner. the other women that were important, a lifelong supporters were her friends from the suffrage movement. the women that fought for their right to vote were really, really brave. this is a time women were not even supposed to go out into public places. they were not allowed to sit in a bar, they were considered embarrassing for them to stay in the hotel by themselves. there were a lot of rules

restricting women's behavior. they went to the soap box to the street corner, often picked a corner where for bars, one on each corner because you could get a good audience of men that would come out to look at the girls on the blocks to read out they would come. these women would start to make their speech about why it was necessary for women to get to vote and usually they would start to get catcalls and ridicule. the women learned to turn them into laughter shared by the group, and they learned about the support that you need from your female friends to get out there and face that kind of thing. it was very scary. the suffrage that francis had lasted a lifetime, and when frances perkins suffered an impeachment attempt in 1939, because of her failure to quickly deport the active labour

leader it was the women from the suffrage movement that had come forward and had spoken on her behalf and every point of the diversity in her life that's the case. she also had close female friends here in d.c. that were meaningful to her. the admiral's papers that are sure the library of congress give some clues to the importance of his older sister. these are the children of the famous robert herron. they are enormously wealthy and mary herrmann is a friend and supporter to frances perkins through her whole career and they live together in a house in georgetown when the social security act was drafted. so mary herrmann is beyond a friend, she is actually at points supporting frances perkins because frances perkins, remember, has a friend whose institutionalized and for whom she has to provide care. so having wealthy female friends would help her and allows her to

provide for first, her husband who has bipolar disorder, and then for her daughter who develops it as well. >> can you tell us about her parents and their influence on her? >> that's interesting. the question was can you tell us about frances perkins parents and their influence on her? for frances perkins it isn't just for parents you have to talk about it's also this remarkable grandmother that she has, she wasn't close to her mother although her mother seems to have run the house in a well ordered by a but the mother was a more conventional woman and had actually difficulty understanding this very unusual child that she had to actually kind of scared her. her father had initially been very enthusiastic about having such a bright daughter and taught her to read greek.

he was an educated man himself thinking from an old a dillinger and family. they paid for her to go to mount holyoke but at some point, she became a little worried about her becoming an intellectual himself and then worse yet she became a liberal intellectual, even worse coming and you see a discomfort in the relationship in adulthood between frances perkins and her parents. her grandmother, however, lived to be 101-years-old, and she was very important to frances perkins her whole life. she had a lot of sayings about sort of putting your shoulder into things and then the door opens, go through. you know, in the american people can rise quickly and fall quickly. you have to be prepared for either one. she told a different things that helped frances perkins deal with adversity but another thing that was really remarkable is there was such a long lived family.

the grandmother, 101. her mother left to be 101. when frances perkins was a child, people talked about the war. they were talking about the french and indian war. they had a remarkable grasp of history that went back. they had a stockade on their property where they defended themselves against attacks. they had fought in the revolutionary war. she was a defendant of james otis who was famous for thinking that taxation without representation is on just. and she was also close relation to otis howard who was the founder of howard university. having these kinds of memories and her family meant that she brought to her job in d.c. a great sense of the nation's economic history not just its political history. and their effort to create the new deal was an attempt to deal with what they had seen to be the cyclical boom and bust.

her grandmother had told her about what had happened to the girls that had went to work in massachusetts. that story, economic boom, profitable, too much competition, wages fall, prices fall, jobs migrate, migrate to pleases the wages are lower. this is what they were dealing with in the new deal. this comes from frances perkins' grandmother. >> this has been a wonderful lecture. i read an oral history from the court society by an attorney whose last name was gardiner, a very prominent attorney in d.c. and he had worked with her in the labor department and in this oral history -- i understand times were very different then and he said wonderful things about her but one of the things he says that isn't wonderful as he said she was anti-semitic and

that she would not let him higher any jewish applicants to the department whom he had wanted to hire. do you know anything about that? is that accurate? >> yes, the question was someone found in the history about an attorney named gardiner who said that he believed that frances perkins was anti-semitic and that that is why she hadn't given him a job that she would have liked to -- >> [inaudible] she had a high job in the department of the work. he worked with her and he wanted to hire jewish attorneys under him and that she would not let them do it is what he said. >> it may be that there were some people that she did and higher but i can tell you that a top attorney was charles, he was jewish and was her closest ally. she counseled him for everything in it together deutsch of the policies that would enable the jewish immigrants to get to the united states before the holocaust. this was even a surprise of some

holocaust scholars to have frances perkins's name emerged. he wrote the letters home to his parents in boston. the letters are at the massachusetts historical society talk about what she did to try to bring jews and labor leaders and intellectuals to the united states. but specifically at one point she sent him to the ilo to represent the united states in the 1930's, the international labor organization, and he asked her are you worried about me going? you are sending me to the middle of europe. on the u.s. representative and dillinger risch. and she said don't be ridiculous. of course i'm sending you. you are our best person. >> what reaction -- i will start

again. of like to ask what reaction frances perkins may have had in 1947 with the taft hartley act i'm sure she was displeased with it what did she react publicly or simply say it's all in a day's work and let it go? >> she was very concerned about the passage of the national labor relations act for just that reason. it's interesting because she never testified in opposition to it but she said in her oral history she wasn't really a supporter of it. she was very worried about allowing the federal government to get its nose into the labor union matters, that they would need the labor movement a captive of changing the political winds and it might hurt the labor movement in the future. she wanted the national labor relations board to be under the labor department showed she could better control it but she was so unpopular and there was so much sex is some against her

on capitol hill that the decision was purposely made not for her to head the national labor relations board. she picked many of the board members in fact i think she picked them all. she had to talk to 200 people before she finds three people that are willing to take those hot seat jobs. even then in the depression when jobs were hard to get it was known being in a job trying to negotiate labor relations was going to be a hot seat. she had been fearful that there would be many additional changes, legal changes to what name over the years that could harm the labor movement. she believed in the right to organize. she had gotten it written into the act that the workers had the right to organize and she didn't want the government closely involved for just that reason. >> i wonder if he would address

your view having done all this research on her relationship with eleanor roosevelt. the rose about scholars that had written any number of books about allin or herself or franklin roosevelt to come all over the map on that subject and i am curious what your views were on that relationship. >> that's actually a really interesting relationship. when the women met, frances perkins was a well-known work place safety advocate. she was a fan s suffrage leader and had spoken all over the city on all kinds of controversy issues, she was a public figure, she was a pivotal person in the settlement house movement. at that time, and we are thinking about 1910, eleanor was shoddy and was retiring at that

point. she didn't know whether she believed in suffrage or not. she was active in the settlement house movement that as a volunteer where frances perkins was a leader. at the time they met, frances perkins was the much more important person, and the person who was much more of a career woman. early on, the letters seem to suggest that a lot our legal frances perkins quite a bit in her early years that she learned and prepare herself in these remarkable ways she grew in the ways that she did in her confidence. she had a remarkable gift for reaching out to people. frances perkins would have big ideas she would implement. roosevelt had the gift for making people understand why it was needed. the relationship changes where eleanor roosevelt becomes a very

important promoter of the things that frances and fdr are doing and then leader after fdr dice, eleanor roosevelt is active in the u.n. and she's also active in the civil rights movement. and at the end of her life, eleanor roosevelt is the one who is lionized as the most important woman in the new deal and frances perkins is forgotten living in a small upstairs dormitory bed and at cornell where she's a visiting lecturer. >> i want to thank you first of all for writing this book. i'm a social worker by training, and we've always heard about frances perkins, but we've been going back and doing some more research into the new deal and with the social workers did and the more than i hear and learn about her life, the more i understand the foundation that she created for an entire

profession which still struggles to this day to get recognition for but she was in that tradition and helped frame that tradition many of the ethical principles that we work on today things that she learned like her social justice, her commitment to social justice, bringing the kind of disparate groups together to create change so i want to thank you so much for doing that and helping us know a little bit more about our history and helping everybody else know a little bit more about the history of social work and the importance of the profession and anything more you want to add about what you found out about that would be interesting. [laughter] >> thank you. i agree, she is probably the most effective social worker in american history. one of the things i think is an interesting and recurring push and pull in her life and in ours today as social workers do you deal with changing the person to fit in society or do you find

ways to change society to better the human needs and i think frances perkins went in the direction of trying to change the society to better fit the human needs that she saw and the was a sort of interesting push and pull. she went the legislative rich but was a deutsch believer in social work and in fact when she went to europe in the late thirties, she became very fearful that the french were much weaker than we thought and when she said why, she said because i'm a social worker and i could observe the little -- i could see the freeing of the social fabric. >> i was thrilled to see the book because here again this is a woman who needs a little more pra and unfortunately eleanor roosevelt blocked out a lot just

as you know of the revolutionary era it is all thomas jefferson and in a civil era it's martin luther king and there's so many important people to get blotted out. but i'm also uncomfortable with that because people are always comparing ehlers about frances perkins and they both were interested in social work, they were both progressives, they both have followed the into this and they're the comparison stops. they've different lives, and for training estimate different burdens and different roles. when you are on fdr's team, you played a role. frances perkins was an offensive linemen she only got her name called when she was charged with holding the three bridges, things like that. she was on the left, there to take hits and three blocks. [laughter] and occasionally she catches a touchdown pass. everybody played a role so it isn't fair to compare. it's more fair to compare some

one who was a brilliant the eurocrat in the wave of frances perkins was sent to the he was a brilliant publicist in the way that frances perkins wasn't so we need to get francis and eleanor out of the same room because they are different. [laughter] >> first is a great point. this two things i'd like to say. first i talked about the friction between eleanor roosevelt and frances perkins but in my book there's a beautiful picture which i think best shows them and it's eleanor roosevelt and frances perkins in old age the had been close together you see how much they loved each other for whatever friction there was they loved each other, the appreciated each other. eleanor listened to frances perkins, frances was always very concerned about all the more roosevelt's opinions. you see her very attentive to eleanor roosevelt. there is no question they were close and important allies to

each other. a feminist historian, not sure who she was, someone mentioned to me. where did we get the idea there can only be one important woman at the time? [laughter] >> it's true in the press crazy because they didn't have room for all of them. >> so some have to go. >> i have one more question to you think fdr should have done more to defend her? i was disappointed always have been that he just let her get beat up. >> that's true. there's no question that he did occur get used as a punching bag. he deflected the things we consider the new deal that fdr did come he sort of let her be the one that got criticized for it and then he would sort of hold back during the sitdown strikes that were controversy will when the reporters when asked about was he going to drag those workers out of there she

would say why don't you ask. so she did play that role for him, but they both understood the importance of the rule that she played. she kept trying to resign after the late 1930's she tried to resign every year. he would never let her resign and she was about to leave d.c. and he put his arms are now at her and said frances, how can you be so selfish? [laughter] >> my grandfather worked with frances perkins she ended up being the director of the new york state department of labor statistics and he would come down to washington and he would come to new york.

he supported most of the hour's programs and so on, but i do know that he was very much opposed to the pact get my question is not to pay tribute to my grandfather so much, but are you aware in your research of any points of friction of the programs between fdr. estimate frances perkins told fdr in the cabinet meetings in front of the other cabinets that the court packing thing was a very good idea and not to do it and was egg on the of the people of the cabinet particularly cummings who was hoping she believed a big expansion of the court would allow him to become a justice, that he couldn't ordinarily have gotten it any other way. she writes about it obliquely. she says she didn't like to criticize fdr even after his

death, but she said she thought of as a rear failure of political judgment on fdr's part that he did it but harold wrote in his diary angrily that frances perkins was trying to oppose the court packing plant and he said of course i would still be pussyfooting around. [laughter] >> at the back of the room you had mentioned that there were some things that were cut from the book that you had written, that there was so much more. without pointing figure i guess at doubleday or would you like to do that? >> much of the fault is leone. the book i wrote was 900 pages, would have been a 900 page book. but frances perkins had done so much. she has done as much as involved in many things. it was very long. we were trying to find places to

cut. her personal life is interesting to read we only talked about it a little bit today that her personal life is interesting and we thought would that be more appealing to the broad audience to hear more about the personal life? we are not being taught labor in america. we don't know it, and was often difficult for me to find these facts by understanding the background to understand how they constructed the new deal so i fought for more lieber things. there was originally a lot about the onset of the great depression what brought it on and some of that got cut a few years ago when they were trying to finalize at there was concern about whether that was just a bizarre pat and know what would be interested in insuring that again. [laughter] i'm happy to pay more of that back in at the end.

it's shocking how eerily similar it is, and frances perkins decided oral history and other papers watching it come on so when she's crafting a solution she's crafting a solution to what she saw getting built. >> time for two more questions. >> i am pleased to call on the justin. [laughter] >> did frances perkins have any relations with mary mcleod bethune or any other black civil rights leaders? >> it's interesting, frances perkins wasn't a civil rights leader. she was not -- she picked her spot. her issue was economic and labor conditions. her belief was everyone will improve if we deal with those

things. she also was trying to get legislation through the congress the was donated by southern democrats who are opposed to civil rights changes. she needed their votes so she doesn't take the lead on civil rights issues. what we do know is the first person she hired as a young woman was a black woman cornell graduate and when she became secretary of labor was to desegregate the cafeteria at the labor department. we do know of she came from a family strong abolitionist nine of her relatives fought in the civil war at a time that a lot of people bought their way out. but she is not a civil rights leader in the way that eleanor roosevelt is, and she backs away from some very contentious issues to get other things done so she's also for example a very

strong supporter of the family limitation movement. that's a very controversial, remains controversial. in 1916 she is way out in front of that. by about 1930 she never talks about it again. >> [inaudible] >> never mind, sorry. [laughter] >> one more question here. i also have the sense there is three or four more. behind the book that you wrote but my question how does it do on the international side there is the peril to what's happening in england at this time one of the things that is interesting almost unknown to days the trains as perkins was very active in the international labor organization which was part of the old league of nations. she got to the united states to

join the ilo in 1934. now, you know that the topic was radioactive, the league of nations in the united states. she got the united states and the ilo. fdr, when he hit in the young assistant secretary of the needy had actually helped arrange one of the early ilo meetings in 1919 here in washington. so, frances perkins attended that meeting in 1919 so that international labor organization bring sleeper officials, government officials and business officials together to talk about the. so frances perkins is very aware. part of that discussion she's a major lever officials of those years, and that is -- and the english at that point they are leading away what unemployment compensation. she actually goes to england in the 1920's to learn how the english do their unemployment compensation system. she sees workers climbing on

letters and using shoeboxes and she said that's not going to work in america. ibm help us. [applause] you're watching book tv on c-span2. 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. let me preface my talk about kurt vonnegut by reading the first page of a prolonged and that will serve as a springboard for what i have to say to you about his life and his work and the relationship i have with him, our friendship. this is from the prologue out of print and scared to death and it starts like this. kurt vonnegut planned to give this teaching job at the university of iowa his best shot.

as he zoomed across the midwest and early september, 1965 and his son's new volkswagen beetle his six-foot frame pressing against his head, pressing his head against the roofline and it was as a failure or clattering behind him like tin cans tied to the bumper. the ashtrays stuffed with crushed pall mall cigarettes and the windshield with nicotine from his chain-smoking. he had a lot to think about and that will hundred nine lacrosse drive between his home on cape cod and audio city iowa gave him all the time he needed. he was bored by his 20 year marriage to his first love the four merging cox whom he married barely five months after his release from a prisoner of war camp at the end of world war ii. this past summer he had been trying to start an affair with a woman in new york 20 years his junior who in turn was leading four william fox to divorce his wife so they could marry. if this writer job and the respected all u.n. writers

workshop didn't suit him, he was going to leave it and compensate himself for his troubles by coming on strong. on the other hand, he would remind her he was just an old booze held on the hunt for affection and she was just a girl and he was old enough to be her father. she needed him like shingles. why i started the book in the rest like that in the middle of his life it's because kurt vonnegut will send famous, wasn't popular until he was almost 50-years-old. for the first part of his writing life, the majority in fact, kurt vonnegut was a free-lance writer who was writing fiction for popular magazines like collier's and ladies' home journal and the evening post and just barely making it. he had a large family of six children. they lived in a big a ramshackle house on cape cod and kurd was living from paycheck to paycheck to try to put food on the table he not only wrote stories, but he tried to teach

special-education for a semester. that didn't go all that well, then he received an inheritance from his father and decided that he should go into selling automobiles on the cape. to put the new cars in the room and you can sit in the back and write all day. succumb occurs wasn't doing well in 1965 when he went out to iowa for the writer's workshop. jump ahead just a few years to when he sort of swings into my view and into the view of a generation. in 1969 in volume a college student at university of illinois, draft eligible, facing the war in vietnam, and like so many of the young men my age, our fathers fought in world war ii so we were facing tralee a moral dilemma. where we serve, where did our duty of lake? what we fight if we couldn't

what would we do instead? and then suddenly breaking like a storm over us is slaughterhouse five in 1969, and we embrace did because we were feeling a bewildered and disoriented, not knowing what we would do in a slaughterhouse five a private trying to be a good soldier who doesn't know what's happening and worse than that, suffering from the strange phenomenons where he ricochets in time. looking back now, we know that was probably a manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder which was undiagnosed at that time, and they find themselves talking to rotary, and then somebody would say something and suddenly he's back in the battle of the old logging in the snow, and then he's back in front of roosevelt, and then he is in his office and then he is somewhere on a far-flung plan that at the far end of the universe where she's safe and there's someone

who loves him and time has no meaning and then he is back again. this book with its long chronology, with its flashbacks, with its goal schumer and moments of terror really seem to capture what a lot of us were feeling pity is, when i finish mockingbird and was looking enough for another subject on a biography, first of all, i wanted to know who hadn't had a biography written about him or her and who had a big impact on people my age. well, kurt vonnegut came to mind right away, and i was surprised that he had in fact never had a biography written about him. and it turned out that he was a little bit messed that nobody had ever taken the time. half a century of writing, 14 books in print color and nobody had ever written a biography of him. so i wanted to find out who was kurt vonnegut, the author of these books that suddenly became so popular so suddenly because, you know, he was out of print, as i