"Becoming Madam Secretary"

[fiefoe]

Stephanie Dray's first-person biographical novel of a notable female historical figure in the early parts of the 20th century is head and shoulders above the earlier one I read this season.

• the assassination attempt just days before in Miami. In the face of death, the president-elect hadn’t flinched, and the bullet had somehow missed him. Tragically, a mayor in his entourage was now fighting for his life
• Churchill once said that meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne, and that knowing him was like drinking it.
• A man who put himself through punishing campaigns, risking all the humiliations of his personal frailties. A man whose own family—complicated as it was—would be thrust into the unforgiving world of presidential politics during the worst catastrophe in our nation’s history. <> Considering that, how, precisely, was I to plead that private disasters should exempt me?
• “Get rid of child labor, limit working hours, create a minimum wage…” “All perfectly permissible for a state government,” I pointed out. “But of unknown constitutionality at the federal level.
• He was a shameless political animal, happy to let his underlings execute plans, take credit for them if they succeeded, or pretend he had nothing to do with them if they flopped...
• “Well, except for this social insurance plan. Now, that is crazy, Frances. Just crazy!”... Almost everything else on my list was just patchwork to hold together the crumbling foundations of our country.
• just like some bricks break in the kiln, so, too, did some of my kin crack in the fire of the American Revolution. Madness runs in families, they say. Courage too.
• The dour-faced Miss Mathews was herself dressed all in black like social agitators of the older generation, adhering to the S-shaped corset.
• I see you have a fine education. Mount Holyoke College. Wharton Business School. And now New York’s School of Philanthropy. Our understanding is that you’re here on a fellowship from the Russell Sage Foundation.”... “I’ve been given the opportunity to pursue a master’s degree in economics, and I intend to make a survey of child malnutrition for my thesis.”
• tales of our family’s fiery revolutionaries and abolitionists. James Otis. Mercy Otis Warren. Oliver Otis Howard. With such relations, was it any wonder I had set forth like a vagabond patriot bent on improving the world?
• * A notorious pimp and one of his thugs accosted me on a rainy night when I was returning to my apartment, but I ran them off with my trusty parasol. After that, I persuaded the police to put him out of business,
• Against Hartley House on poor people: I believed they could not afford to keep a neat and tidy home and did not have time to do so when working seventy-four hours a week without respite. This was to say nothing of my objection to the idea that a lack of women’s housekeeping was the source of evil in any community.
• “We also operate a station for the Penny Provident Bank, so child factory workers have somewhere safe to deposit their funds before they’re robbed by gang members.”
• * Mary Harriman, daughter of the railroad baron? The society pages dubbed her “the American Diana” because she was an avid sportswoman... As a debutante, she’d founded the charitable Junior League, and recruited her gaggle of mink-wearing friends to support settlement houses, ...her father had been in a very public quarrel with the former president, who believed men like E. H. Harriman were partly to blame for the terrible conditions in places like Hell’s Kitchen.
• But I never learned jujitsu. My suffragist friends are all learning their own version to defend themselves, but I don’t know what it’s called.” “Suffrajitsu,” I teased.
• Be careful what you wish for, my dearly departed grandmother had said. After having lived through nearly a century of tumultuous years, she viewed the world with a raised eyebrow and strong suspicion that the Lord was a trickster.
• that industrialization, which ought to have modernized and elevated the lot of mankind, was instead plunging people into impoverishment. <> This was what I’d come to study, but I could no longer bear only to study such suffering.
• The real law, so to speak, was The McManus—the Irish boss who ruled the neighborhood as part of Tammany Hall’s political machine. His enemies called him the Devil’s Deputy from Hell’s Kitchen,
• he added, “I don’t know how to put this delicately, but I suppose after your work in Philadelphia you might’ve guessed the youngest child is illegitimate. So, we won’t be able to provide relief.”
• * Florence Kelley was a legendary reformer who trained at Hull House with Jane Addams and had earned a law degree. Having once been appointed as a public inspector in Illinois, she was also a moving spirit behind the recent founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She’d also translated Friedrich Engels’s work into English... “I’d like you to help run New York’s Consumers’ League.”... you’ll be working with the Goldmark sisters.” That was even more enticing because I knew that Pauline and Josephine Goldmark were both formidable researchers, writers, and legal reformers.
• * Florence Kelley was no stuffy, old-fashioned reformer. In fact, she was considered radical. As the only child of an abolitionist congressman, she’d grown up in a family that would not eat sugar or wear cotton because they were the fruits of slavery. Now she refused to wear clothing made from the labor of children,
• I decided that this was going to be the best of jobs and the worst of jobs. On the one hand, I had an entirely legitimate excuse to sample cookies, cakes, and loaves at a different bakery every day, all while sipping coffee and finishing my master’s thesis. On the other hand...—I witnessed so many nauseating things... I saw cats birthing kittens in baking pans that went unwashed right into the oven. Lice-riddled child laborers mixing flour with their dirty hands. Feverish tubercular bakers coughing blood into the dough…
• “Socially responsible consumers look for a league-approved white label to know whether a garment has been sewn in humane conditions.”
• I’ve never minded ambition—and though I didn’t know it yet, it’d be my strange fortune to be on intimate terms with several men of serious presidential ambition—but this admission was too bald and calculating to sound like anything but the most entitled dreams of a trust fund dilettante... Feather Duster Roosevelt. I couldn’t imagine a more apt nickname.
• * his coffeehouse writers’ group. That is where I met Sinclair Lewis, a cloddish cub reporter with flaming hair and a chip on his shoulder a mile wide. <> We called him Red in honor of that hair, his perpetually flushed cheeks, and his occasionally radical associations.
• “Well, he came to believe I wasn’t a good Socialist. He accused me of looking for ways to make the existing system better for the proletariat instead of upending the entire class structure, to all of which I pled guilty. And that was the end of love.”.. But in the end, he burst into laughter. “Only you would get your heart broken over an economic theory.
• “It’s a line for my novel.” Which is what he always said when he was being cutting.
• “Nevertheless, he got her to smile.” <> My lips thinned. “Oh, we all smile at men when we don’t know what else to say.”
• Especially when a heckler pelted you with a tomato. You caught it, thanked him for the tip, made a joke about saving it for a sandwich, and got the crowd laughing at the heckler instead of you.”
• Now, hugging the letter against my chest, I very uncharacteristically squeaked, “Theodore Roosevelt called me My dear Miss Perkins!”
• I found some old peach baskets and fitted them up as basketball hoops. You can’t imagine how much those girls loved to play basketball. They’d race from the factory—their hair still crusted with sugar, their skirts stained with chocolate, all of them burned and bandaged a little here or there from where they’d been spattered by molten caramel. Then they’d strip down to their bloomers and play like the devil himself was chasing them.”
• * I ran in the direction of the firemen, who were struggling to get their equipment into place. But the firemen shouted at us to stay back as more young women began to fall, crashing onto the pavement, where firefighters were forced to scramble over their corpses to get their ladders up.
• When I closed my eyes, I saw the burning girls. The ones who jumped, the ones who fell. And I saw Maria’s apples floating like flotsam on fire hose water and blood.
• only one public official seemed to give a damn. I can tell you right now that it wasn’t Franklin Delano Roosevelt. No, it was Al Smith, Tammany’s man. The bow-tied, cigar-chomping Mr. Smith was there in Greenwich Village that morning, wearing his heart on his sleeve.
• a redheaded girl named Rose Schneiderman took to the podium to say, “I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week, I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year, thousands of us are maimed…because the life of men and women is so cheap, and property is so sacred.”
• Thus, my formal education in fire safety began. Mr. Porter taught me about fire walls. He taught me about the need for a horizontal exit too. He taught me about measured occupancy. And he taught me the three-minute rule.
• * “Oh, don’t judge ’em harshly, Miss Perkins,” Al said. “Empathy takes imagination, and most people ain’t got any. We’ll get to fire safety reform. But first we need to give the public a little razzle-dazzle.” <> He decided that he’d call me as the first witness, knowing that a woman expert would be a curiosity.
• * “You can’t mean it,” I said. “The canning factories are the worst offenders! The Consumers’ League can never support a bill exempting them.” <> “Which is why they put it in,” Al said. “Now the two bills don’t match and there’s no time to reconcile them.”
• * I’d be going against my explicit instructions. But I was tired of having clean hands when someone was doing me dirty. I wasn’t going to be chased off; I was going to stand my ground and let them skewer themselves on the tip of their own dirty dealing. <> Suffrajitsu, I thought. And with sudden conviction, I burst out of the corridor in search of McManus. “Please accept the version of the bill that exempts the canneries.”
• “He can’t fill both roles; so he’ll claim he’s helpless to give ye the rule. No rule, no vote. That’s the plan.” <> The skullduggery of it was crushing.
• * Someone was eavesdropping and raced back to demand a closed call, which meant the chamber doors would be locked. Oh, this was political warfare now. Even if I could get Big Tim back from the boat, he wouldn’t be able to get in the chambers if the doors were locked. <> “We’ll buy time,” McManus reassured me, invoking a rule that would allow every senator to talk for five minutes.
• the owners of the Triangle Waist Company had just been acquitted of manslaughter charges. <> The jury felt prosecutors hadn’t proved the owners knew the factory door was locked when they fled, leaving girls to die. Given the insurance money, the shirtwaist kings would actually profit from the fire.
• “Is that what you call an obstructed exit?” Smith asked, and when I nodded, he beamed like my star student.
• * My friends and I gathered for a Bacchanalia ball at Webster Hall, where the anarchist Emma Goldman was handing out pamphlets on family limitation
• “It’s for the better, because now TR can form his own party.” What would come to be known as the Bull Moose Party represented a complete reordering of the landscape in which my work must now take place.
• Exasperated by this bald-faced lie, I insisted, “I took a head count. I know precisely who voted for it.”
  “You miscounted.” He had the audacity to wink.
  Oh, the popinjay was daring me to contradict him. “You are maddeningly dishonest, sir.”
• In that presidential election, the Socialist candidate, Eugene Debs, won six percent of the vote. Meanwhile, the split between the Republicans and the breakaway Bull Moose Party proved fatal to both. Now incoming Democratic president Woodrow Wilson had rewarded Frank for his support by offering him the post of assistant secretary of the Navy... Go, Franklin, go, all his fellow legislators in Albany advised, because they wanted him gone...  beginning to think that when it came to politics, Frank was some kind of idiot savant.
• Jewelry was certainly not designed for the independent woman, so I was struggling with the pearls when the telephone rang.
• because Paul and the mayor both believed our harbor might fall victim to saboteurs or be attacked by German U-boats, and my husband was determined to be prepared. Personally, I hoped that if men were fighting and dying in trenches an ocean away... the new Woman’s Peace Party, made up largely of mothers who wanted to keep American sons from harm.
• Stillborn: I didn’t want to dwell on a loss that would overmatch me. I must rest and forget. But of course, the scar would always remind me… Some women are not meant to be mothers… Those words felt as if they tore open my still-bleeding wounds. They compounded my grief, threatening to break the thin ice holding me up.
• “If you’re about to compare me with one of your horses who has lost a foal—” “I’m saying there are biological forces at work,” Mary interrupted, her words running over mine. “Your body still hasn’t healed, so why do you expect your mind has?”
• Another crack inside me opened, this one making me unsteady on my feet. “Of course I care, but I couldn’t blame you. I could never ask you to wait for me to feel like myself again, if that’s even possible.”... To think I’d once thought his kiss was like a sturdy rigging. Love was the most dangerous ride in the world. And because of it, I felt as if I were in free fall.
• Mayor Mitchel’s reelection go down in flames... Progress was rarely linear. After all, more than a century earlier, some women in the United States had been allowed to vote, and we were only now winning that right back. But I dared not offer this as consolation to the despondent mayor,
• * Frank threw his head back like he used to, but the old supercilious gesture was gentler now. Almost a little cheerful. “All in good time, my dear Miss Perkins. We have an unfortunate tendency to celebrate the early bird, without worrying about the misfortune of the early worm.”
• “You might have heard of James Otis Jr. though—” <> “I know of him! Otis was brilliant. No Taxation without Representation was a slogan of his invention, wasn’t it?
• * The commission needed to be reformed, and I was in a position to reform it, so I took it upon myself to institute monthly reports. I made sure that factory inspectors were swapped around the state to frustrate too-friendly relations with the business they were meant to regulate. And when workers went on strike, I made sure we took the mediating role we were charged with by state law.
• striking workers:  wanted to solve this without violence. In fact, I wanted to prove that conflicts like this one could be solved without violence. I suppose the truth was that I wanted to prove that I could settle it without violence. <> Which is why I finally called the governor. “Please believe me, sir. If you call off the state police, I can stop the rumpus.”... We’ll hold hearings in the courthouse and proceed in an orderly way and settle this.
• * I climbed on the bench and made a speech in what little Italian I’d learned in Hell’s Kitchen all those years ago. “We’re going to try to have law and order,” I said... And I half expected them to protest that of course there wasn’t any dynamite. Instead, I was horrified as word spread from house to house and people started coming out with suitcases, hatboxes, and even baby carriages filled with explosives.
• there’d been a rash of explosions in the country. A bomb had recently blasted Washington, DC, littering body parts on the doorstep of Frank Roosevelt. The public was at the start of a Red scare, on high alert, and politicians like Al Smith were jittery.
• * The Mitchel administration at city hall had angered the stalwarts of both major parties by refusing to hand out political favors. My husband was proud of that, but they’d paid dearly for it at the ballot box. And now they were out of power, which is why Smith argued, “You don’t get anythin’ by being independent. Look what happened to Theodore Roosevelt and his Bull Moosers.”
• Smith continued to press me. “In our form of government, anybody can aspire to be elected. But does just anybody get votes? No, Commissioner, he doesn’t get any votes unless he’s got a crowd of people who are all bound together in some way. That’s what a political party is—a group of people who stand by each other. They get a candidate. They promote him. Gradually a policy works itself out. If you don’t have a two-party system, you’ll have the kind of bedlam they have in France.”.. He’d taken a giant risk in appointing me. Working with him, and for him, had been the most rewarding fun of my life. So, at the end of the day, if he needed me to be a Democrat, then I’d be a Democrat. That’s the kind of loyalty Al Smith inspired in people.
• Frank was a man on the rise, with a big toothy smile and a big booming voice, and, oh, he had lots to say. Someone had finally impressed upon him the notion that poverty is destructive, wasteful, demoralizing, and preventable. Which, of course, made it morally unacceptable to leave unaddressed in a democratic society.
  And now he was an evangelist.
  During one moment of chaos during the convention, he vaulted over several rows of seats to get to the podium... In the end, the Democratic presidential nomination went to the Ohio businessman James Cox at the top of the ticket and Franklin Roosevelt as his vice presidential candidate.
• Don’t know if he will walk again… I recoiled at the unnaturalness of those words as applied to a man like Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
  Eleanor lowered her gaze. “Yes, well, my grandmother always told me never to cry where people are; cry by yourself.”
  in the year since he’d been struck by polio, everyone spoke of Frank with sorrowful shaking heads over the tragedy that had crippled a man in his prime. Nobody believed Roosevelt could possibly have a future in politics now. Nobody but Eleanor, apparently.
• * “There are pirates everywhere, darling. But you mustn’t be afraid, because I’m very good at fighting them.”
  Susanna looked dubious. “Do you bite off their hands, like a crocodile?”
  “No, I have other methods. But if they do lose a hand at work, Mommy decides who should pay for the hook.”
• And though he was so unsteady on his feet, Roosevelt’s voice was stronger than ever, talking up progress, saying, “America has not lost her faith in ideals—idealism is of her very heart’s blood.” I felt electrified by this line. Roosevelt called Al Smith the happy warrior of the political battlefield, and his speech absolutely tore the place to pieces.
• * I jumped up, grabbing two of my lady friends, and dragged them onstage with me. With our hats and skirts, we made a virtual wall blocking Franklin Roosevelt from the view of the crowd so his son could help lower him into his wheelchair and whisk him away. That wouldn’t be the last time I did that for Roosevelt.
• Mrs. Walker was what I’d come to call a mothball wife. The kind politicians treated like a fancy old hat, to be taken out of mothball storage for public functions.
• Mrs. Kelley: “Governor,” she seethed. “Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning, and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy.”
  “You think I don’t know it?” Al snapped.
  Then he all but tossed her out of his office, and it was left to me to smooth things over, for he needed her support, and she needed his. I’m not sure I ever fully healed the breach, but I tried, because I idolized them both.
• “Think hard about your priorities, Fanny,” Mother insisted. “Remember the Bible. The poor will always be with us. Jesus said that.” “Don’t misinterpret scripture. He didn’t mean that remark as a justification for abandoning—”
• Roosevelt grinned at the memory, biting the tip of his cigarette holder so it shot up at a jaunty angle. “Well, I can’t run away from anybody now. I can’t even walk away if I’m bored, so I’ve learned not to be bored.”
• Then I went to the window and watched, hand on my throat, the slow progress of Roosevelt being carried up the fire escape like a child in another man’s arms. It wasn’t only perilous but looked painfully uncomfortable for him; worse, being carried onstage would be terribly embarrassing. But when he was finally carried over the ledge, set down on a chair so he could lock his braces, and then pulled upright again, it wasn’t humiliation I saw on his visage. <> It was humility. <> One of the greatest virtues.
• On election night, as the results started sinking in, Democrats left the hall in tears, and it was hard for me to keep a stiff upper lip. Al Smith was a remarkable public servant, a genius at government administration. And I loved him deeply. <> So it broke my heart when Al finally realized he’d not only lost the presidency but hadn’t even carried his beloved New York State. Holding his head in his hands, he said, “I guess the time hasn’t come when a man can say his beads in the White House.” <> He’d truly thought better of the American people.
• Roosevelt’s first gubernatorial inauguration, Eleanor dressed in an elegant black velvet gown, and her magnificent hair was piled atop her head like a crown. As women reporters noted, “she could look rather dowdy in daytime clothes,” but in an evening gown she was regal as a queen, carrying off wild jewelry—like her favorite enormous tiger-tooth necklace—with aplomb.
• After the oaths were sworn, we went back to the Executive Mansion for a reception, which should’ve been a joyous occasion for the Roosevelts, but the staff was dedicated to the Smiths and spent most of the event crying in the cloakroom.
• Roosevelt threw his head back. “Then let it smart their pride. You see, Al is a good progressive fellow, but I’ve got more nerve about women and their status in the world.” <> He was proud of himself, and I suppose he told me this to weaken my ties of loyalty to the former governor.
• Roosevelt said, “I want all the sweatshops in New York closed and the rest of the things on your list done, too, Frances. Go as far as you can. When you need help, come to me... He did have a marvelous way of rallying the public. He’d started giving fireside chats on the radio for New Yorkers every Sunday night, and the response was spectacular.
• I sensed this was something she didn’t tell many people, and clearly she was confiding in me in an overture of friendship. Yet I simply could not imagine any situation in which it would be proper to discuss the marital infidelity of one’s employer. <> It’s true that I’d known Eleanor longer than Franklin,
• Doesn’t she know you’re saving the lives of girls who paint clocks?” <> He was referring to young women who contracted radium poisoning while employed to paint luminous dials. The story of these girls had captured his imagination. And I’d learned that was the key. I couldn’t take him to see the horrors of factory work as I’d done with Al Smith. FDR couldn’t get into a factory with his wheelchair, and it’d be too dangerous to try. Thus, he relied on me to paint a picture for him in his mind.
• People were jumping to their deaths in New York again. This time, it wasn’t factory girls burning alive but an overworked brokerage firm clerk...we’d talked about the silly prognostications that the market would never fall. I’d been a little worried that record profits weren’t translating into jobs. But from the start, Paul had predicted the worst. “People are going to lose everything.”
• * And that’s where we found the sleight of hand. One of my people explained, “They’re just reporting seasonal Christmas employment, which always goes up every year.”... But my conversations with federal officials made clear that President Hoover wasn’t simply misinformed; he was lying. And I was appalled. This kind of dishonesty in such a dire crisis seemed to be an immoral abuse of power, ... I called a press conference that afternoon,
• Hoover’s people weren’t just sloppy, they were also cruelly dishonest, so I made no bones about this with the press. I even drove Hoover’s chief statistician to resign in protest. <> It got to the point that whenever Hoover put out new numbers, reporters called my office to confirm them.
• Some enterprising New York companies were experimenting with unemployment insurance. Others experimented with reduced hours and alternating shifts. Eastman Kodak was embracing a five-day workweek in Rochester, and it was working out,
• I wanted a comprehensive system of social insurance... I handed him an index card with ideas Theodore Roosevelt had advanced while campaigning in 1912. <> _It is abnormal for industry to throw back upon the community the human wreckage due to its wear and tear. The hazards of sickness, accident, invalidism, involuntary unemployment, and old age should be provided for through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use._ ... this is the most worthy experiment I can think of. It’d be the culmination of all the other reforms I’ve ever attempted my whole life long. A plan that really does have the potential to end poverty,
• “It isn’t the dole,” I explained patiently. “We won’t be giving a handout. I want an insurance program, as I’ve told you.”
  “Then what’s wrong with how they do it in England?”
  “You won’t believe me, but when it comes to unemployment, the Brits keep stacks of handwritten documentation, and an army of little bespectacled old ladies climb ladders to make notes on each record and keep it up to date. If we were to do this, we’d have to get some of the smart gentlemen at IBM to work on an automated recordkeeping system for us.”
  The image of bespectacled English grandmothers perched atop ladders tickled his sense of humor.
• Al was finally making good money for his family as president of a corporation that was building the Empire State Building.
• * Florence Kelley died at the age of seventy-two. The papers ran headlines that said she’d been the country’s first woman factory inspector. Such a small epitaph for the passing of a giant.
• “I don’t need a doctor! I feel better than I’ve felt in years. I’ve finally made good on my promise as a public servant. This formula will save the country from economic ruin.” <> Dear God, he really believed what he was saying. Gently, I tried to bring him back to reality. “Paul, this doesn’t make sense.”... How badly I wished to be swept up into his beautiful delusion.
• I prayed FDR would not press me for the humiliating details. Details that included my having had to pretend the visiting physician was an official from the Navy sent to confirm Paul’s great algorithmic discovery. <> Thankfully, FDR was a man who knew, all too well, the indignities of illness.
• in the end, Roosevelt had to break a deadlocked convention by getting the Texas and California delegations to throw him their votes... To cement the nomination, FDR flew out to Chicago to give an acceptance speech, which was against all custom. But it was exciting, in keeping with the urgency of the moment, and it showed courage, for planes were a rather new technology and still considered quite dangerous.
• Mary briefly narrowed her eyes, then her entire countenance brightened. “I’ll go with you. Why not? I have business there with a new magazine venture. In fact, I’d like to buy a national newspaper, so why not live in the nation’s capital? I’ll find a place we can share. You won’t have to do this alone, Frances.”
• Then I remembered that no one expected me to start for another two weeks. Now my first order of business was getting rid of my predecessor. How to do this politely?... When I did, a creature jumped out at me. I leapt back, thinking it was a mouse, only to realize it was a cockroach, the largest I’d ever seen.
• I think FDR knew what I was up to, because when it was finally my turn to speak, he smiled at me conspiratorially, like an encouraging sibling goading me to jump into the pool for the first time.
• * Section 24 agents behaving like gangsters, roughing people up and raiding private homes and dance halls looking for immigrants to blackmail with threats of deportation if they didn’t pay protection money. They’d even rounded up thousands of US citizens of Mexican descent and “repatriated” them across the border to “save jobs for white men.”
• I couldn’t just fire them on the spot. But I could eliminate the positions altogether, pleading a lack of funds, which was actually true because they’d already stolen all the money in their budget. <> Thus, I abolished the whole Section 24 first thing the next morning in a lightning strike
• the Civilian Conservation Corps: I knew he felt strongly about this but wondered where unemployed men were going to learn forestry and dam building, and if he’d given any thought to the fact that most of the unemployed were city folk.
• * realizing that they were cooking up a price-fixing, wage-fixing, and employment-quota scheme. This would violate antitrust laws, and they worried the Supreme Court would come down on them like a ton of bricks. But the square-jawed Johnson was saying, “Well, what difference does it make? Before anyone can get these cases to the Supreme Court, we will have won the victory.
• I tried to explain my thinking. “Once I knew the president wanted this bill, I did what I could to make sure we could write it in as fair and sensible a way as possible here in the Department of Labor. If important men are hell-bent on government collusion with private industry, then we need to make sure working people have some rights in this matter too. You see, if we’re going to be locked in combat over the direction of economic policy, then we’ll have to be clever about it.”
  Charlie stared. “Is it quite proper for someone who works for President Roosevelt to try to manage him?”
  “Oh, everyone tries,” I said. “But I sometimes succeed.”
• State Department: We can’t afford to take in a bunch of indigent Jews.”... The undersecretary wasn’t moved an inch—but I’d spelled out my convictions as much for myself as for him, because I realized this was going to be another front on which I’d have to fight... “I need you to find me a legal loophole to get around the State Department.
• “Oh, bless your heart…” Having the president give an order was the obvious solution. Legal and pure. It was also impolitic and betrayed how much Charlie still had to learn. “I know Roosevelt. If he’s getting this much resistance privately, he won’t want to take the blame for it in public. He’d rather the blame fall on me.” “What else are cabinet officials good for?”
• Susanne: “Why not? You’ve hired people to plant trees for the Civilian Conservation Corps. I’m sure not everyone we saw at the soup kitchen was fit to work outdoors, but some of them were artists. So why can’t you give a starving painter or sculptor a job?”
• “Well, I don’t know. I suppose they must ask questions about financial resources. Ask for references, perhaps, some guarantee from a person that they won’t be a burden…” <> Charlie’s coal black eyes lit up. “Exactly. And that guarantee can be in the form of a bond. A little-known fact is that, by law, the secretary of labor”—Charlie pointed his pencil at me—“has the legal power to accept that bond and allow the immigrant into the country.”
• Of course, at that point, the New Deal was becoming synonymous with General Johnson’s National Recovery Administration and its Blue Eagle.
• I said, “This is Miss Perkins, the secretary of labor, and I’m going to ask something quite unusual. It’s extremely important that I get a rush message through to the president. Now, I know the secretary of state is also going to send a message, and I believe it’s about the San Francisco strike, which the president put in my charge. So it’s extremely important that President Roosevelt get my message before he gets the secretary of state’s message. Would you and your mates be willing to make sure of it?”
  I expected the sailor on the other end to panic, to call his superior officer. To tell me I had some nerve. Instead, he gave a jolly laugh. “You got it, Madam Secretary.”
  In my message, I told FDR that I thought sending in troops would be a disaster...Two days later, I got the longshoremen and their employers to submit to arbitration without another shot being fired.
• * After car accident: I started to nod because I ached from head to toe. But I couldn’t cancel the speech. It was Labor Day, and I was the secretary of labor. I needed to report to an anxious country that five million people had now been put back to work and that payrolls were up sixty-three percent since the low point of the Depression. I had to tell them that there was hope and that I had a plan…
• new one given to me by the hatters’ union, with bows and a silver buckle, one side of the brim turned up and the other down, to remind me of the ups and downs of the New Deal
• “What on earth did Mary say to you?” “That’s our secret,” Susanna said smugly. “But I want to live in a country where young people like me have a future. So, you must go.”
• * Oh, this was FDR at his most cagey. He wanted the citizenry to send a flood of angry letters. He wanted the phones in Congress to be ringing off the hook with a demand for social security so they couldn’t backtrack on their election promises to support our plan…
• * Justice Stone: “I’m especially vexed when it comes to the Social Security Act, which I’m working on. The committee is deadlocked. I can’t get them to agree to a plan.”... Instead, he glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening, then leaned near my ear to whisper, “The taxing power, my dear. You can do anything under the taxing power.”
• Many people believed she had an ungainly appearance, and her enemies said her “horse teeth” were worsening with age. But Eleanor had learned to be enormously charming by way of a disarming tendency to share her thoughts and feelings. She didn’t mind being vulnerable even to strangers.
• But of course, there was a hue and cry against civil servants serving past the age of forty.
• For nearly twenty-five years of my life, Mary Rumsey had been my touchstone. She wasn’t my first or only cherished friend but my dearest. I knew her before my husband. Before my daughter. Before Franklin Roosevelt.
  In some sense, I knew her before I knew myself.
  Mary had recently been more of a partner to me than Paul. And without her, I somehow felt a stranger in my own skin.
• For the first time, I saw terror that his father’s illness might one day snuff his genius right out. And now I knew the reason for Charlie Wyzanski’s burning ambition. He feared he was in a race against his own brilliant mind. <> Dear God, he reminded me of Paul in that moment. Hadn’t he always? I had the strangest thought that if our son had lived, he would have turned out just like Charlie…
• “Sure,” Charlie said. “Someone else might do it someday. Maybe in a generation. Maybe in twenty years or fifty years or eighty years.” I squeezed my eyes shut as if to deny his words, but he kept talking. “Miss Perkins, sometimes there’s a man—or a woman—who is made for a moment. I happen to think you were made for this one.”
• Thus, the Social Security Act was hammered out at Mary Rumsey’s table, with her belongings boxed up in the corners and the electricity set to be cut by morning. We decided on a plan around two or three o’clock in the morning.
• * How my salary was too high—It’s not like she’s a husband with a family to support. How I shouldn’t charge speaking fees—The average woman usually needs no inducement to talk!
• “Congress doesn’t want you to have anything to do with Social Security,” Roosevelt explained. “They’ve agreed to establish a board only if they can remove all authority over it from you.”
  I tilted my head in complete confusion. “I don’t understand. How can—”
  “It’s petty malice,” Roosevelt said, his expression softening. “They want to punish you, and that’s all there is to it.”
• // also from Justice Brandeis with his daughter as intermediary. Both justices quietly advised ways to make the bill pass constitutional muster. <> Though Charlie Wyzanski was Madam Secretary’s right-hand man, it was his underling, Tom Eliot, who did most of the drafting of the Social Security Act. Which is to say, many, many other hands went into making this program possible.
• // Perkins had far more complicated feelings for Hugh Johnson than presented. She considered him an eccentric genius and liked him personally. However, the moment she sensed he was a danger, she began using her influence to undermine Johnson’s authority. It was one of the most serious internal battles of FDR’s first administration, and it was a battle Frances Perkins won.