The Last Leaf

Descended of New England Puritans, victor of many savage Albany battles involving labor-management relations, Frances Perkins was not about to bend before Washington's political winds. "Being a woman has only bothered me in climbing trees," was her one concession to critics who howled when Franklin Roosevelt appointed her Secretary of Labor in 1933--the first woman Cabinet member in U.S. history.

"The accusation that I am a woman is incontrovertible," she allowed at another point, shaking her trim tricorn hat like a panache at the antifeminists. William Green, doughty president of the A.F.L., accepted the challenge. "Labor," he said grimly, "will never be reconciled to her appointment."

"Call Me Madam Secretary." During the following twelve years--the era of New Deal reform, unprecedented labor strife and the huge demands of World War II--the tricorn hat, the patrician Boston accent and the impassioned air of the social worker became a signal for battle to opponents of the Secretary of Labor. John L. Lewis, caustic head of the United Mine Workers, called her "woozy in the head," adding that although she would make an excellent housekeeper she didn't know as much about economics "as a Hottentot does about moral law."

"The attitude of both labor and employer toward Miss Perkins," snapped New York's churlish Robert Moses, "is a good deal like that of habitues of a waterfront saloon toward a visiting lady slummer--grim, polite and unimpressed." Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior was constantly annoyed by her. "She talks in a perfect torrent, almost without pausing to take breath," he complained.

But F.D.R., who as Governor of New York had admired her work as his industrial commissioner, remained a staunch backer and more than once refused her offer to resign. Much of his New Deal legislation, including the monumental social security law, could be traced directly to her influence.

Despite Ickes' blasts, Madam Perkins, as she was often called ("Call me Madam Secretary," she had told her staff), tried to corral her tongue and happily recounted the amazed remark of that gnarled old Texan, Vice President John Nance Garner, after Roosevelt's first Cabinet meeting: "You're all right. You've got something on your mind, you said it, and then you stopped." Said Madam Perkins: "I guess he feared I would be a vague woman--not quite sure of anything. Really I don't believe men would long tolerate vague women in public office."

At Hull House. The press found her positively closemouthed about her private life. "We New Englanders like to keep ourselves to ourselves," she said. She was brisk with reporters. "When I was a child," she said, "my father used to rap on the table and say, 'Don't waste people's time with vaporings. If you have anything to say, say it definitely and stop.' "

Frances Perkins traced her ancestry to prerevolutionary Massachusetts, and from her birth, in 1882, was schooled in the genteel manner of the New England Brahmin, graduating from Mount Holyoke College in 1902. She then served as a social worker for the Episcopal Church, as a high school teacher and finally as a colleague of Jane Addams at Hull House in the slums of Chicago. In 1910, she became executive secretary of the Consumers League of New York, concentrating on the improvement of working conditions for women and children.

In 1911, she ran from a Greenwich Village tea party to witness the grisly Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which killed 146 working women. She redoubled her efforts for the league and successfully pushed factory reforms in New York state, pulling working hours for women down to a then unprecedented maximum of 54 hours a week. In 1919, Governor Al Smith appointed her to the state's Industrial Commission and warned Roosevelt in 1929, "You'd better not let her get away from you."

Part of the Fabric. In 1913, she married Paul Caldwell Wilson, who died in 1952, a financial statistician and adviser to the mayor of New York. She remained "Miss Perkins" in professional life.

Shortly after Roosevelt's death. Miss Perkins' resignation was accepted by President Truman, but she remained in Government for another seven years as a civil-service commissioner. The day Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated she resigned for good, the "last leaf," she said cheerfully, on the New Deal tree. Last week, her accomplishments part of the fabric of American social reform. Frances Perkins died in Manhattan at 83, following a stroke.

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