Yesterday I met with three rock stars at the new national headquarters of the Frances Perkins Center in Damariscotta, Maine. One person at the meeting was my friend and neighbor, the Hon. Leah Sprague. Judge Sprague has had a long and distinguished career in the law and working for state government in a number of capacities, protecting the rights of different disadvantaged groups. Aside from her work as chair of the board of the Frances Perkins Center, she's working on a book about women in the judiciary. I also met for the first time Laura Fortman, the center's new executive director. Laura has been Commissioner of the Maine Department of Labor, was executive director of the Maine Women's Policy Center, and she currently serves on the board of the National Employment Law Project.
The third person in this rock group was Frances Perkins, whose life-size cardboard cutout stood next to our conference table. Frances Perkins lived from 1880 to 1965, and her house here in Newcastle Maine has become a kind of shrine to her role as America's first female cabinet official, during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Frances Perkins has also been in the news recently because Maine's Tea Party governor–he who will not be named–took Perkins’ name off the door of the Augusta Department of Labor conference room that is named after her, and hid the mural depicting labor heroes in Maine that included a depiction of Ms. Perkins. He's a real classy guy.
What I want to tell you about today is less well known about Frances Perkins, why smart and capable people like Laura Fortman and Judge Leah are working to reclaim her legacy. Put simply, Frances Perkins invented Social Security. Furthermore, she is responsible for some of the core concepts and regulations that anchor what is left of the social contract in our country, including unemployment insurance, fair labor standards, child labor laws, workplace safety standards, overtime pay, and the minimum wage. While everything in government is a team effort, it's fair to say that Frances Perkins is the one person mainly responsible for national attention to these issues, and she actually created the complex infrastructures to provide basic safety and support for untold tens of millions of people in our country. Perhaps Maine’s current governor is a secret history scholar, and so began his administration with an assault on the memory of someone who believed in government serving the needs of all people, because he knew all this about her.
Here's a conflict of interest disclaimer: I live on Socialist Social Security. But I think I was a fan before it became the mainstay of my life, because I believe that everyone in society benefits from the security of all of us. It's become fashionable in some areas of our public life, as you know, to celebrate greed and the inequality it inevitably produces. But leaving values aside if you must, a society structured in a sharp pyramid is inherently unstable. That instability leads to and requires more and more policing and repression of liberties to protect the privileges of the few and stifle the grumbling of the many.
Thus, the Occupy Wall Street movement.
I believe that the efforts of a conservative minority to limit who can get married, or how women make decisions about their own reproduction, is a threat to everyone including me, even though I am unmarried, heterosexual, and lack a uterus. We are all in this together, and the destabilizing of our society by those who want the rest of us to live by their quirky beliefs is not simply a theoretical problem. Rather it's an assault on the structure of what makes our society function. The funny thing is, I think that central idea – that we’re all in this together - makes me the true conservative: someone who wants to safeguard a coherent, just society.
This brings us back to Frances Perkins. Just as our governor mimics Soviet–era functionaries who famously clipped out-of-favor comrades from photographs, our historians–ever mindful of their grants–have stopped teaching about crucial social legacies of the 20th century. Perkins is the embodiment of that legacy, not as a theoretician, but as an actor, someone who worked over her long life to strengthen the bonds of our entire society, to benefit every single citizen. What a concept! Check out the website of the Frances Perkins Center: francesperkinscenter.org.
You'll see a notice on that website for an important public conversation to be held Saturday, December 3, at 3:30 in the library in Damariscotta. Speaking will be Perkins biographer Kirstin Downey and an historian of the New Deal, who knew Frances Perkins, named Christopher Breiseth. Together, they’ve edited a new book about Perkins called A Promise to All Generations. If for some inexplicable reason you don't happen to live in Maine, you may want to order a copy of this book from the Frances Perkins Center.
I hope I've been clear in the past that I'm an unequivocal supporter of the teaching the Occupy Wall Street movement is providing for our country. But in addition to that, we need to reclaim and extend the heritage that created the ability of our industrial and post–industrial society to survive and thrive. Women around the country need to learn of this women's history hero, and all of us can use what we learn as the best bulwark against the greedy and stupid fulminating of the Tea Party, the libertarians, and their corporate masters.
