SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
frances perkins
Freedom v. Fascism, Redux
But she’s also passionate about freedom from gun violence, freedom to marry, freedom to enjoy clean air and water, freedom from climate pollution, and freedom to vote, as laid out in her convention speech.
Nearly a century after FDR took office at a fearful time with a joyous promise of “nothing to fear but fear itself,” Trump seeks the same office with a dark promise of everything to fear...
Our ancestors—President Franklin Roosevelt and his longest-serving cabinet members—in addition to winning the worldwide war against fascism, created the New Deal, which broke new ground in guaranteeing fundamental freedoms to help Americans recover from the devastation of the Great Depression.
To us, both fascism and freedom are on the ballot this November.
As for freedoms, let’s start with freedom for seniors to retire with a measure of economic security and dignity, as guaranteed by Social Security (which Trump has called a “Ponzi scheme” and promised to privatize or cut, and to terminate its basic funding source, the payroll tax, and Trump’s top benefactor Elon Musk now proposes to destroy).
As for FDR’s freedom for workers to organize and collectively bargain, to be guaranteed a livable minimum wage and unemployment insurance—it’s the opposite of Trump’s historically anti-union, anti-worker record—recently praising the firing of striking workers.
Freedom to have decent health care? Trump says the ACA “sucks” and should be “terminated,” and his plan to terminate the payroll tax would be devastating for Medicare.
Freedom from fascism? It was temporarily vanquished in 1945, but is now bizarrely resurgent, both abroad and in America. Vice President Henry Wallace presciently warned us about “American Fascism” in 1944 – predicting Trump to a “T.”
FDR valued freedom above all else. In 1941, he proposed the most expansive vision of freedom ever, encompassing freedom not only of religion and expression, but also freedom from want, and from fear. During the war, he framed the struggle as essential to lasting peace and security at home and abroad. He paved the way for freedoms yet to come.
Only later came the freedom to vote regardless of one’s skin color, the freedom for women to open a bank account, and the freedom to marry without regard to one’s skin color or gender. And for half a century, the freedom for women to make their own reproductive-health choices was an established constitutional right until Trump’s Supreme Court appointees suddenly decided to kill it.
The first woman presidential cabinet member, Frances Perkins, is shown greeting President Franklin D. Roosevelt upon his return to the White House from the 1943 Tehran Conference. Frances Perkins was US Secretary of Labor under Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945, longer than any other cabinet member has held the post. She died of a stroke at midtown Hospital on May 14, 1965.
Vice President Kamala Harris is picking up the mantle of freedom this election—all the freedoms we expect from good government to empower Americans to pursue individual happiness in life.
Sadly, convicted felon Donald Trump only cares about one person’s freedom: his own. A disgraced and convicted felon terrified of going to prison, he seeks the power to quash all criminal proceedings against himself. He proposes to weaponize the Justice Department, and even the military, against American citizens who displease him—“the enemy within”, expressly including domestic “Marxists and communists and fascists” like Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Trump's ignorance of the role of our Armed Forces is mind-blowingly dangerous. They are trained to kill, not to suppress dissent or enforce U.S. criminal laws.
Nearly a century after FDR took office at a fearful time with a joyous promise of “nothing to fear but fear itself,” Trump seeks the same office with a dark promise of everything to fear—from immigrants and crime, to a rigged justice system, our professional civil service, the news media, windmills, Haitians eating your pets, Obamacare, vaccines, and America’s untrustworthy elections. His pals at Project 2025 have helpfully fleshed out the details.
On the other hand, Kamala Harris joyously challenges us to “show each other—the world—who we are. And what we stand for. Freedom. Opportunity. Compassion. Dignity. Fairness. And endless possibilities.”
Every freedom that touches us personally is on the line on November 5—most fundamentally, freedom from fascism and the freedom to vote to protect our freedoms. Our revered ancestors are screaming at us from their graves.
Honoring Frances Perkins, the 'Mother' of Social Security
"Social Security has already outlived Frances Perkins by 54 years, and will continue to provide Americans with baseline financial security in old age for generations."
Born in 1880, Perkins grew up in a middle-class household in Worcester, Massachusetts. After graduating from Mt. Holyoke University, she was drawn to social work as the Progressive movement of the early 20th century took shape. In so doing, she rejected the views of her parents who had told her as a child that "poverty was the result of alcohol or laziness... and that little girls shouldn't concern themselves with such things."
Having personally witnessed the horror of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York City, Perkins became a passionate advocate for workers' rights and safety. She eventually served as head of the New York Industrial Commission, then as state Labor Commissioner under Governor Franklin Roosevelt. FDR nominated her for U.S. Labor Secretary after winning the presidential election in 1932.
"I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen," Perkins said. But she did not accept the nomination immediately. She first sought FDR's reassurance that the new administration would pursue several ambitious federal programs to help the poor, working people, and the elderly - which would eventually become signature achievements of the New Deal. One of the programs Perkins insisted upon was social insurance for American retirees, many who were literally living in poor houses across the country.
Moved by Perkins' entreaties, President Roosevelt told her to run with the agenda she laid out, including - and especially - what would become known as Social Security. "You care about this thing. You believe in it," FDR told her. "Therefore, I know you will put your back into it more than everyone else. You will see that something comes of it, and you must not delay."
Perkins set to work on Social Security - jumping legal, bureaucratic and political hurdles as only someone with her passion and unflinching commitment to social justice could do. In her biography of Perkins, The Woman Behind the New Deal, author Kirstin Downey recounts that Perkins would lie in bed late at night working on the administration's Social Security plan, intermittently dripping cold water onto her eyelids to stay awake.
"She took very seriously how she as a woman could work in a man's world. She was very hard-headed," says Christopher Breiseth. "She had studied social insurance in Europe and felt that it was indispensable. She assembled a sophisticated team of policy experts in that field to serve on the President's Committee on Economic Security. Secretary Perkins was a strong leader, but also open to the best ideas."
The nonprofit Frances Perkins Center describes the two-year birth of Social Security this way:
The process was rough going, with worries over court challenges to the final legislation [and] internal struggles within the committee. Details were hard to resolve and they were close to bumping up against the... Christmas deadline FDR had set. On December 22 or 23, [1934] Frances called committee leaders to her home, "led them into the dining room, placed a large bottle of Scotch on the table, and told them no one would leave until the work was done," [Kirstin] Downey writes. They met the deadline.
Congress passed the Social Security Act in August, 1935 and President Roosevelt proudly signed it a few days later. The Labor Secretary's grandson, Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall, who knew her for the first decade of his life before she passed away in 1965, got glimpses of the same steely determination that wrought the Social Security program.
"She insisted during our visits that we go to church together," Coggeshall remembers. (Frances Perkins was raised Catholic but eventually became an Episcopalian.) "This was based on her firm belief that the teachings of the church - including the importance of treating your fellow man justly - was something we should take seriously," he says. "I'd get a milkshake after church if I hadn't fidgeted in the pews. My grandmother was firm, but she also wasn't above bribery."
Coggeshall describes Perkins as a loving grandmother - humorous and anxious to pique his curiosity about things in the wider world. He emphasizes that she was a modern, working woman in a way that is commonplace today but not in the 1930s - struggling to balance the demands of work and family. Two years after her first and only child was born, Perkins' husband was diagnosed with what might be known today as bipolar disorder. Coggeshall says Perkins essentially found herself supporting the family while his grandfather grappled with deteriorating mental health.
In fact, he says, on the same day that the Social Security Act was signed, Frances Perkins received a phone call from the family's home base of New York City. "We need you to come back and help find [your husband]. He's gone missing." Coggeshall says the worry and stress are evident on Perkins' face in film footage of the Social Security signing. "She looks agitated and she's kind of shifting around, and yet she looks over FDR's shoulder to make sure he's signing the right papers."
In addition to Social Security, Perkins successfully advocated for minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, and restrictions on child labor. Ironically, her only unrealized policy goal was universal health care. Perkins served as Labor Secretary until 1945, when she was appointed to the U.S. Civil Service Commission by President Truman. She remained a champion of Social Security until her death in 1965.
Social Security has already outlived Frances Perkins by 54 years, and will continue to provide Americans with baseline financial security in old age for generations. "All I can say is that I am proud and humbled by everything she got done, especially Social Security," says her grandson, who founded the Frances Perkins Center to honor her legacy.
That legacy is crucial to every worker, retiree, and individual with disabilities collecting Social Security today. In fact, we all owe a debt of gratitude to the social justice warrior with a tricorn hat, staring down the lens in that iconic photo - surrounded by men.
Gloria Steinem Renews an Old Debate About Socialism and Feminism
Clinton has been counting on women's votes to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency. Unlike in her 2008 campaign, when she downplayed the breakthrough possibility of becoming America's first woman president, this year she's made it a centerpiece of her stump speeches.
But polls and election results reveal that the strategy isn't quite working. In the New Hampshire primary, for example, Sanders won 53 percent of the female vote compared to Clinton's 46 percent, according to ABC News's exit poll. Among women under forty-five, 69 percent of Democratic women backed Sanders. National polls have found similar trends. And Steinem's remarks triggered a backlash from women, especially younger women, who quickly spread the hashtag #NotHereForBoys across social media. ("Women for Bernie" signs were already a fixture at the candidate's rallies.) Steinem soon apologized for her intemperate comment, but the controversy hasn't died down.
It is easy to understand Steinem's consternation. She was born in 1934 and came of age in the 1950s when women were treated like inferiors and second-class citizens in almost every aspect of society. She had to overcome many gender barriers to make her way in the world of journalism, which helped trigger her evolution as a feminist. Her work as a writer and activist catalyzed the "second wave" of the women's rights movement that began in the late 1960s. She helped popularize feminist ideas. Her frequent articles, speeches, and appearances on TV made her feminism's most prominent public figure.
In 1969, there were only ten women in the House of Representatives (there are eighty-eight today) and one in the Senate (compared with twenty today). At the time, the idea of a woman president felt like a distant dream. In fact, in 1969, only 53 percent of Americans said they would vote for a woman for president "if she were qualified in every other respect," according to the Gallup Poll. By last year, that figure had increased to 92 percent. Now that it is finally possible to envision a woman in the White House, many veteran feminists like Steinem are eager for Hillary Clinton to turn that dream into a reality.
Many young women, who have benefited from the work of Steinem's generation of feminists, take the accomplishments of the women's movement for granted. Though much remains to be done to defend abortion, redress the gender pay gap, and stop domestic violence, millennial women don't think that their gender limits their ability to enter most professions (including law, medicine, journalism, and engineering); they play sports in high school, college, and professionally; they count on male partners to do their fair share of housework; and they feel empowered to run for any office. Thanks to feminism, attitudes about gender have changed dramatically over the past few decades among Americans of all ages, women and men. But differences remain. For example, among Steinem's generation (sixty-five and older), only 88 percent are willing to vote for a woman for president. Among those under thirty, 96 percent are willing to do so.
In that context, Steinem's comment about Sanders's female supporters seemed at best stuck in a time warp. Many young women activists resented Steinem's implication that they had to support a mainstream liberal woman candidate over a progressive male candidate. Indeed, many of them believed that, based on his policy ideas, Sanders was not only more of an economic radical than Clinton but also as much of a feminist, as a longtime advocate for women's right to an abortion, paid family leave, and LGBT rights, including support for same-sex marriage years before Clinton came around on the issue.
Both socialists and feminists--and, of course, the socialist-feminists who refuse this split altogether--recognize that the nation's widening wealth and income gap, and the persistent difference between men and women in terms of pay and promotion, are part of the same problem and can't be solved in isolation.
Indeed, despite what Debs and Anthony's 1905 exchange might suggest, radicals of many stripes have long understood issues of class and gender as intertwined. In 1912, Charlotte Perkins Gilman--a writer, editor, lecturer, and activist who could be called the Gloria Steinem of her day--captured this attitude in her poem "The Socialist and the Suffragist." Published in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason (which reached a paid circulation of more than half a million people), it is perhaps the most well-known testimonial to the ongoing debate about the relative importance of workers' rights and women's rights--class and gender--in the struggle for human emancipation.
In the poem, Gilman imagines a conversation between a socialist and a feminist. Its final verses offer a reconciliation between the two:
"A lifted world lifts women up,"
The Socialist explained.
"You cannot lift the world at all
While half of it is kept so small,"
The suffragist maintained.
The world awoke, and tartly spoke:
"Your work is all the same:
Work together or work apart,
Work, each of you, with all your heart--
Just get into the game!"
Around the time that Gilman composed that poem, feminism was making significant headway. In 1910, emulating the mass protests of the burgeoning labor movement, the Women's Political Union organized the nation's first large-scale suffrage parade in New York City. That year, Washington granted women the right to vote followed by California in 1911. By 1912, nine states had granted women the vote. In 1913, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns organized the Congressional Union, later known as the National Woman's Party, which published a weekly paper and staged demonstrations, parades, mass meetings, picketing, hunger strikes, and lobbying vigils to push for women's suffrage and women's rights at the federal level. On March 4, 1913, the duo organized an elaborate parade on the eve of Woodrow Wilson's presidential inauguration. About 8,000 women marched with banners and floats down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House. The crowd watching the march was estimated at half a million people. Many onlookers harassed the marchers while the police stood by. Troops were called to restore order and to help the suffragists get to their destination--six hours after the parade started. The melee generated headlines, making the issue of women's suffrage a topic of conversation around the country.
Simultaneously, the Socialist Party was gaining momentum. In 1912, about 1,200 Socialist Party members held public office, including seventy-nine mayors in cities including Milwaukee, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Reading, and Schenectady as well as state legislators and even two members of Congress. That year, Debs, the party's presidential candidate, garnered nearly 1 million votes for president--6 percent of the total in a four-person race that included Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Republican William Howard Taft, and Progressive Theodore Roosevelt. In the early 1900s, some of the nation's most influential activists and thinkers--including philosopher John Dewey, settlement house founder Jane Addams, novelist Jack London, women's suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair, sociologist and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois, public health pioneer Alice Hamilton, workplace reformer Frances Perkins, working women's rights activist Florence Kelley, crusading attorney Clarence Darrow, labor leaders "Big Bill" Haywood and Rose Schneiderman, birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, and the blind visionary Helen Keller--embraced socialism.
Many socialists were involved in the struggle for women's rights, and vice versa, but each movement had its own organizations, publications, and legislative agendas.
Gloria Steinem's grandmother, Pauline Steinem, was a prominent women's rights activist, president of the Ohio Suffrage Association from 1908 to 1911, a leader of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education. In a testimonial to her grandmother, Gloria Steinem noted that in her campaign for the school board, "she was elected on a coalition ticket with the socialists and the anarchists."
Given that feminist pedigree, Steinem must surely be familiar with Gilman's poem and her book, The Man-Made World, published in 1911, which advocated for women's economic equality, social freedom, and a new approach to family and gender roles.
Like Gilman, Steinem is both a feminist and a socialist. She was a cofounder of the National Women's Political Caucus and of Ms. magazine and is a longtime honorary co-chair of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
In her 1971 speech at the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus, Steinem insisted that feminism had to embrace issues of racism and class. Feminism, she said, "is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism."
One of Steinem's great achievements was pushing the women's movement to address the concerns of working-class women and women of color. Steinem is not only a member of DSA but also a cofounder of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, helping find common ground between the women's and labor movements. She was also a consistent bridge between the predominantly white middle-class women's movement and African-American feminists. As a founder of Ms., she made sure that the pioneering feminist magazine regularly reported on issues of poverty, inequality, and racism as well as sexism. Under her leadership, the magazine published investigative stories about overseas sweatshops, sex trafficking, the gender wage gap, the glass ceiling, women's health (and the medical establishment's sexism), sexual harassment, and date rape, and fought to address the race and class differences within the women's movement.
Steinem was an early advocate of what today's young activists call "intersectionality"--the overlapping problems of race, class, gender, and sexual preference.
So it couldn't have been easy for her to endorse Hillary over Bernie. Perhaps she thought Clinton had a better shot at winning the White House or perhaps she simply believed that the time had come for a woman to be president. (Since she planted her flag in Clinton's camp, she's been all in, urging women to rally behind the former First Lady, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State.)
A century ago, Charlotte Perkins Gilman understood the importance of forging unity among socialists and feminists, radicals and reformers. And, throughout her four decades as a public figure, so has Gloria Steinem. Her recent remarks about Sanders's female supporters was an unfortunate misstep in a lifetime otherwise devoted to building bridges between activists for economic, racial, and gender justice.
We can't address issues like women's access to abortion and health care, domestic violence, and paid family leave, as well as declining living standards, persistent poverty, and abusive corporate practices, without a coalition of Occupy Wall Street-like radicals, feminists, unionists, and racial justice activists. No matter who's in the White House, it will be up to social movements to carry the momentum for real change.
Most Popular