Tread the City’s Streets Again: Frances Perkins Shares Her Theology
Tread the City’s Streets Again: Frances Perkins Shares Her Theology by Donn Mitchell (Princeton: Anglican Examiner Publications, 2018) [ISBN 978-1-64254-712-2]
Donn Mitchell has written an engaging and unusual biography of Frances Perkins. Mitchell explores Perkins’s religious beliefs as the motivating force in her life. Tread the City’s Streets Again is two books in one. It opens with a biographical exploration of Perkins’s stunning achievements on behalf of working people. It’s also a deep dive into a series of lectures Perkins gave in 1948 in a Manhattan Episcopalian Church, which articulate her theology (religious beliefs).
Mitchell’s book is full of startling facts. For example, the Episcopal Church has added Frances Perkins to its calendar of saints. Mitchell marshals evidence why this is wholly appropriate: Frances Perkins helped win American citizens the 8-hour-day, the 40-hour work week, overtime pay, aid for children without a parent able to support them. And Mitchell credits Perkins as the chief architect of Social Security, which lifted millions of elderly Americans out of poverty.
What a life Frances Perkins lived! The first woman ever to serve in a Presidential cabinet, Perkins was Secretary of Labor for 12 years of FDR’s Administration.
I had no idea until reading Mitchell’s book that Perkins was a mover and shaker fully 20 years before she joined the New Deal. Mitchell explains she was first thrust into prominence in part because she was competent and indefatigable, but partly, also, by chance. She happened to be having tea with friends near Washington Square, March 25, 1911. The clamor of fire trucks drew her to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (adjoining the square) which claimed 146 lives before her eyes. She watched 47 shirtwaist workers jump to their death from the 8th, 9th & 10th floors of their factory building to avoid the flames. Mitchell presciently quotes Frances Perkins: “The New Deal was born March 25, 1911.”
In the wake of the Triangle Fire, Perkins became Executive Secretary of the ad hoc “Citizens Council” (formed by outraged citizens to make sure there would never be a repeat of that tragic fire). On behalf of NY’s Factory Investigating Committee, (chaired by Robert F. Wagner, leader of the NYS Senate, with Al Smith, leader of the State Assembly as his Vice-chair) Perkins led NY legislators on memorable factory tours: “She would take these overweight, cigar-chomping pols on surprise visits to factories at five o’clock in the morning, take them over to the window and point to the ice-covered wooden ladder propped against the wall, and say, “There, gentlemen. That’s your fire escape.” And out the window and down the slippery ladder they went.”
The tours were so memorable they helped Robert Wagner and Al Smith persuade those legislators to reform state factory building codes and working hours for women and children. Where did Perkins develop that experiential model for learning? Biographer Mitchell discovered that Perkins’s Mt. Holyoke professor Annah May Soule dispatched Perkins and her fellow students to survey working conditions in local Massachusetts factories.
Mitchell cites another college experience as deeply influencing Perkins, hearing a dynamic lecture by Florence Kelley of the National Consumers League. Mitchell credits Kelley with planting in Perkins the idea that the individual can make a difference. One of the strengths of Mitchell’s book is that it includes mini-portraits of a dozen such path-breaking American women, who’ve largely disappeared from public memory.
Wanting to become a social worker – at a time when Mitchell asserts there were not yet any college degree programs to provide training in that field, Perkins learned social work by volunteering in settlement houses. On weekends she helped out at the Chicago Commons, which focused on industrial issues and union organizing. Next she volunteered at Hull House.
Mitchell traces the evolution of Perkins’s personal theology during this period of her life. He says Perkins moved away from the theology of predetermination and personal responsibility she was raised with in the Congregational Church (a theology reinforced during her first teaching job — at a Presbyterian school). He speculates Jane Addams’s associate at Hull House, Mary Gates Starr, may have influenced her at this time. In 1905, at age 25, Perkins joined an Anglo-Catholic church and gave herself a new confirmation name, Frances, by which she was known for the rest of her life. (She was born Fannie Coralie Perkins.)
Mitchell vividly brings to life Perkins’s first years working professionally as a social worker, in Philadelphia. She rescued immigrant women exploited as sex slaves, exposing (at risk of her life) the pimps and thugs running immigrant rooming houses that doubled as bordellos. In addition, she worked with African American women newly arrived from the South. Admiring the hospital ministry of an Episcopalian religious order, All Saints Sisters of the Poor, Perkins began a life-long association with the order. (For much of her life, even during her twelve years in the New Deal cabinet, Perkins spent one day a month in silent retreat at the sisters’ convent. And Mitchell notes that Perkins might have made the convent her home base when she was U.S. Secretary of Labor, but feared press ridicule if she did so. Perkins’s husband and daughter stayed in New York.) It was in Philadelphia, that Perkins joined the Socialist Party of America. And economics classes she took in Philadelphia, at the Wharton School, from an economist Simon Patten who was highly influential in social work circles, led her to New York City, which ultimately became her home. At Patten’s recommendation, Perkins enrolled in a master’s degree program in political science at Columbia University.
While enrolled in the master’s program at Columbia, Perkins lived in settlement houses in New York City. At one of them, Greenwich House, according to Mitchell, Perkins was influenced by its director Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch (who was, like Perkins a New England Congregationalist — turned socialist — and a devotee of the Oxford Movement, the religious movement which inspired Perkins to join the Anglo-Catholic tendency within the Episcopal Church).
Graduating from Columbia, Perkins was hired by the National Consumers League and became their chief lobbyist in Albany, helping win a 54-hour week bill for women and children under the age of 18. Perkins’s work in the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire impressed Al Smith enough that he appointed her New York State Industrial Commissioner when he was elected Governor in 1918. In the 1920s, she traveled to England to study unemployment insurance and workmen’s compensation, deepening her knowledge of the field at prestigious invitation-only conferences at Oxford University, the Anglo-Catholic Summer School of Christian Sociology. Perkins ran New York’s Department of Labor, when FDR was governor of New York. Governor Lehman, who succeeded FDR, wanted Perkins to run that department for him, as well. But FDR insisted she come to Washington, D.C. to help create the New Deal.
Mitchell writes that Perkins agreed to join FDR’s cabinet on one condition: she wanted the U.S. to have social [security] insurance. FDR agreed. “You’ll have to invent the way to do these things, Frances,” he told her. Her first step speaks reams about the methodical way she tackled problems. She consulted with IBM to see if record-keeping was possible for a population as large as the then U.S. population of 135 million.
Mitchell writes: “The cause of social insurance was nothing less than a religious quest for Perkins. She believed insurance was the most moral concept humankind had ever developed because it harnessed the generous impulse of neighbor to help neighbor with human technical skill in the form of actuarial science.”
Perkins’s theology is what biographer Mitchell is most interested in. A religious scholar, Mitchell researched Perkins’s writings in archives on both sides of the Atlantic. (A collaborator helped him read Perkins’s difficult handwriting). Mitchell interviewed members of Perkins’s family, as well.
Mitchell found roots of Perkins’s theology in the history of Anglo-Catholic socialism, a movement within the Anglican Church. Mitchell deftly sketches that movement which first spread to the U.S. in the 1840s as “the Oxford Movement.” Mitchell speculates Perkins found adherents to the Oxford Movement in the settlement houses she was associated with – Mary Gates Starr at Hull House and Mary Simkhovitch at Greenwich House. In keeping with the philosophy of the Oxford Movement, Mitchell believed Christian citizens had to take responsibility not only for conducting diplomacy – but for the principles upon which world affairs were conducted. Similarly, she believed not only that help must be provided fellow human beings in need – but a generous, loving attitude in giving that help was required.
Mitchell’s biography explores in depth three lectures Frances Perkins gave in 1948 exploring her personal theology. Mitchell includes extensive passages from those lectures. They make good reading. Mitchell makes a persuasive case that Frances Perkins was one of the most important American women of the 20th Century. And Perkins weaves enough personal anecdotes into her theology lectures, and Perkins is so candid – and thoughtful – in her answers to questions from her listeners that you feel like you’re sitting in St. Thomas Church listening to one of the masterminds of the New Deal bare her soul on how committed individuals can make a better world.
Considerable personal sacrifice is required to make a better world, Perkins argues. She recalls a physician friend bringing a young woman she had never met, afflicted with a serious illness, to live with her – for months — in her country house in Maine. “She needs the country,” her physician friend explained. So Perkins opened her house to the woman and took care of her. That was her model for how life should be lived, and how the world would improve.
Perkins’s theology lectures grapple with timeless moral and social issues: What constitutes a just price? What’s a fair bargain between employers and their workers? What’s an honorable relationship between the owner and his customers? Thirteenth Century theologian St. Thomas Aquinas loomed large in Perkins’s lectures. She shows her socialist roots in a discussion on wealth and private property. She paraphrases Aquinas saying while man’s right to own property couldn’t be challenged, there were social implications and an obligation to the rest of one’s fellow men, “to use that property in a way which served the ends of the community for their welfare, for the healthiness of their lives, for the building up of public morals, and for the final movement of Man toward God.”
Perkins’s lectures engage with contemporary theologians and ancient theologians, e.g., St. Augustine and 4th century heretic Pelagius. Aristotle, Ortega y Gasset, even Marx and Lenin figure into her analysis. But she manages to discuss all of these “moral theologians,” philosophers and revolutionaries, in such a down-home, self-deprecating, non-pontificating style that the discussions are enjoyable to read.
Be forewarned Perkins sees the world through theological lenses. She worries about the de-Christianization of the U.S. She prescribes a Christian state as the ultimate solution to the ills of the world. But she manages to project such out-of-fashion ideas in a disarmingly agreeable way: Heaven is “not just [for] nice Episcopalians,” Perkins declares. Her theology makes room for Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and people who’ve never heard of Christianity – at the same time she pointedly says that the humanitarian acts required of all human beings have the ultimate purpose of bringing people closer to God.
Perkins builds on that theme in explaining that a primary goal of government is relief, prevention, and mitigation of unrelieved, hopeless poverty. To accomplish that goal Perkins proposes to reorient our economics and politics by developing sodalities (guilds) of Christians in each profession – nudging their particular profession to act in the best interest of humanity. The goal of each profession should not be “to wrest every [possible] dollar from contractual obligations . . . but to draw on their experience to determine right and wrong for themselves . . . lawyers, judges, doctors and nurses, teachers, cab drivers, railroad men, factory laborers, farmers, cooks, housewives . . . how many [of them] know what is a Christian rule of behavior? Yet, a strange sense of responsibility comes over those people, [when] hand on the Bible [they] swear, ‘So help me God!’—even in the smallest Civil Service positions they take the oath.
Relieving poverty, tragically, continues to be one of the most pressing issues of our time. Frances Perkins’s refreshingly unpredictable solutions to that enduring problem – grounded in forty years of hands-on experience – both while living with the poor in settlement houses — and wielding state power at the highest levels of government — are well worth reading. Kudos to biographer Donn Mitchell for this deep exploration of the ideas of Frances Perkins, who, while underappreciated, was instrumental in creating America’s social safety net.
Reviewed by Joe Doyle, U.F.T. Chapter Leader, Newtown High School, Elmhurst (Queens), NY