Becoming Madam Secretary

by Stephanie Dray

I believe God has called me to better the lives of my countrymen. I could never allow romantic love to obliterate my responsibility to love mankind.”

“Why economics?” I echoed gamely. “Because many people in America believe poverty is a moral problem having to do with sloth or some other sin we can blame on individuals. But I believe poverty in America is an economic problem that can be solved…and I intend to solve it.”

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. And when I think back on my life, I can’t help but see a sly winking pattern to it. A web of strange coincidences, lucky decisions, and chance meetings with people whose destiny it was to shape the modern world.

industrialization, which ought to have modernized and elevated the lot of mankind, was instead plunging people into impoverishment.

I didn’t think much of Franklin Delano Roosevelt when I first met him. But in my defense, almost no one who met him in those days would’ve dreamed he’d amount to much. He wasn’t born a great man, and I’m not even sure he was a good one. Goodness and greatness came later.

“God help me if that’s the sort who gets elected to Albany,” I said. “Oh, Franklin can’t win an election,” Mary insisted. “Not even the Roosevelts take him seriously. Eleanor is devoted to him, but others in the family call him Feather Duster Roosevelt.”

I stifled a laugh. Feather Duster Roosevelt. I couldn’t imagine a more apt nickname. At hearing it, I immediately dismissed him as a lightweight. Certainly, I never guessed I’d just met the man to whom my fate would be forever tied.

“I can’t imagine why anyone would try to change the world unless they believed in happy endings.” The immigrants in those tenements believed in happy endings, after all; it’s why they came to America in the first place. And I needed to believe in happy endings too. My work would be too depressing without hope.

“It was no sin,” I whispered, trying to smooth her hair. “It was no choice.” What kind of choice could it be? To jump or burn alive was no choice at all! “She fell. Your sister didn’t jump. She fell.”

Sometimes a lie was a mercy. And I was outraged by the knowledge that if the fire had waited another month, when Maria turned fourteen, she’d have been in that factory too. Soon, she would be. If not this sweatshop, then another one, where she, too, could become a human torch unless someone did something about it.

“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.”

the law would always be on the side of those who let girls burn alive.

I’d breathed in the embers of that wicked fire, and now they melted my inner ice away. A hot new rage smoldered inside me, fueled by moral indignation. To think I’d felt disillusioned. To think I’d considered resigning, quitting, taking a step back from my work…

Well, any thought of that burned away in that fire. I had to ask myself why I’d been at a tea party in that square on that day, on that hour. Why had God put me there in that very spot to bear witness? There could be only one answer. God had called me to do something about these injustices. And I would answer that call or die trying.

“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.”

I secretly longed for a child and a family like this for myself, and it made me wonder if it was truly possible for a woman to have a public career and still have a happy homelife, or if that was a blessing reserved only for men.

“We’ll cram it down their throats,” I vowed. It wasn’t a ladylike thing to say, but I hadn’t gotten far being ladylike. I’d made progress only when, like my brickmaking forebears, I’d been willing to put my hands in the mud and get them dirty. That was another lesson I wouldn’t soon forget.

I took a moment to absorb this, putting my hand over my chest as if to guard the object of his affections. “I’ve had my heart broken before.” “I suspected as much,” he said. “Not just by a man, but also by mankind. By the fire. It broke something in me.” He nodded, patient, understanding. And that patience gave me the strength to admit, “But some people say a broken bone will heal stronger than it was before. Maybe the heart is like that.”

His career was progressing exactly the way he said it would two years ago when we met at that tea dance. In fact, I was beginning to think that when it came to politics, Frank was some kind of idiot savant.

I began to see that running as a Democrat let him turn the Roosevelt name to his advantage while being regarded as his own man. I could respect that. At least a little.

You think yourself plain in photographs, but you’re beautiful in motion.” “Like the painting no one liked?” I asked, remembering Duchamp’s controversial work. “Only fools didn’t like it,” Paul said. “You’re more beautiful than that painting and even more likely to change the world.”

In short, the first months of our daughter’s life were the happiest of mine, even though they were grave for my country.

“You’re a model citizen, Miss Perkins. Which is why I’d like to ask for your vote.” I blinked up at him from under my parasol. No one had ever asked me for my vote before. I realized, of course, that this upcoming election would be the first one in which I could vote. But it was still a powerful thing to be asked.

I imagined that my own moral rectitude was hard-won, when the truth is that it’s easy to do the right thing if you’re never faced with temptation to do the wrong thing.”

we talked about the American experiment and our mutual belief that our country was founded for a purpose and with a mission: to provide for liberty and the general welfare. And, of course, that America was still a work in progress. A theme we’d return to many times in our lives…

We shared it. An unexpected silent communion, during which I decided that Franklin Delano Roosevelt might be a more complex man than I had ever guessed.

“Well, but what on earth makes you think it’d be a good idea to appoint me?” “Because you have a male mind.” “No, sir,” I contradicted. “I only have a good mind.” He chuckled. “All right. A good mind.

It’s only that I’ve spent my whole life poking at the system. Now you’re asking me to be part of it.” “That’s the only way to fix it, Miss Perkins.”

Florence Kelley often told me that to be rated as good as a man in a job, a woman must show herself to be better. She must be steadier, more trustworthy, and twice as skilled just to have the same chance. That meant I had to be at least as courageous as a man in my position.

Fortunately for Frank, he still did have two perfectly good legs. Eleanor’s. And it was Eleanor, as a literal stand-in for her husband, who led the convention in chants and cheers.

And hearing that was like hearing the summons of God. Here I was, abed while Roosevelt had managed to get himself and his wheelchair to Houston. And if a man who couldn’t move his legs could keep mustering the energy to battle for a better country, then I had no business taking myself out of the fight. Certainly, my grandmother did not believe—and I would never believe—any interpretation of the Bible wherein the Lord meant us to simply accept the poor will always be with you as a justification to abandon them.

After polio, he had something to prove. Namely, that a man with a disability was fit to hold higher office. I felt terribly protective of him.

“Oh, when you can’t use your legs, you must become adaptable. When they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice, you just drink the milk and say that’s all right and mean it. Otherwise, you’ll be fighting a thousand petty indignities every day.” “You’ve become a philosopher,”

“You should come with me to Warm Springs,” he suggested. “It’s a real education in humanity. In the waters there, I’ve held frail old people in my arms. Black people whose parents lived in bondage on plantations. White people so poor they didn’t have shoes or running water. Uneducated backwoods people. Struggling farmers. All kinds of people, all struggling with polio. Didn’t use to think I had anything to learn from folks like that, but they’ve taught me more than I learned in all the years before.” “What’s the most important lesson?” “That people want to feel heard. Everybody wants to have that sense of belonging, of being on the inside. No one wants to be left out. So it’s not such a trial to indulge them.”

I asked Al whether I should offer you the job, and he told me no. He said you were wonderful, but that men wouldn’t like to have you as a boss. That it would smart their pride to work for a woman. Isn’t that funny?” “He’s right.” 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.”

“It’s my belief that if you women had an equal share in making the laws, then the unspeakable conditions in tenements and the neglect of the poor would never have come about in the first place.”

I was coming to the uncomfortable realization that other women felt a strong personal investment in my career. Even those who weren’t my friends. Beyond any policy I might advance, they wanted to see me succeed. As if my rise validated their own ambitions and self-worth as women. It was both an honor and terribly humbling to hold such a mantle.

What I’d come to like about Eleanor is that she was very much a woman’s woman. She talked with other women on the frankest, pleasantest terms. There wasn’t any of this waiting for the men to come through after their coffee. What she had to say, she was delighted to say to you.

No one on Wall Street seemed the slightest bit concerned. They all told Governor Roosevelt, The economy is roaring! Another governor, I think, would’ve been content with the platitudes that everyone was repeating. But Roosevelt listened to me. And on July Fourth, he made a barn burner of a speech, saying that if Americans wanted to keep their freedom, they ought to don liberty caps like the Founding Fathers and resist the concentration of wealth into too few hands. Or we’d reap the economic whirlwind…

Hoover, after all, wasn’t a foolish man. He also wasn’t without heart. He had, in fact, made his name rescuing people from hunger in Europe during the war. 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, and I felt my Revolutionary ancestors spinning in their graves. Well, I wasn’t going to stand for it.

Some economists advised that we should simply let the system hit bottom no matter how long it took, “even if it means an entire generation dies out except for the best of the herd.”

At hearing this, FDR exploded, “People aren’t cattle, you know!” He told me, “We’re not going to do nothing, Frances. Our nation began as an experiment in self-governance, and by God, in my state, I am determined to experiment.”

The gleam in his eye told me he was gunning for Hoover’s job, and I came to a dim awareness that I was the instrument by which he meant to get it.

“We still have so much poverty. I’ve done as much as I could. But now if I’m to leave any legacy at all, I must count on you to carry on the fight without me. Fortunately, you’ve never failed me. Not even once.” I held her hand, and she gripped mine in return with expectations that I’d struggle the rest of my life to meet. Florence Kelley died at the age of seventy-two.

“Franklin Roosevelt can win.” “From a wheelchair?” Belle sneered. “He can’t even limp over the finish line.” That was absolutely the last straw, and I felt my teeth grind. “Oh, Belle, what you don’t know is that he’d crawl over it, dragging

Frances, if you don’t take this appointment, it might be another hundred years before another woman is asked. You’ve been the first to do so many things so that other women could follow in your footsteps.”

“I know how they’ll treat the first woman cabinet member. I won’t be taken as an individual. I’ll be a lightning rod simply because I am a woman. If ever I do anything the least bit out of step—if I make some error of judgment about my political responsibilities—there will be a terrible public hysteria against me.”

“She will be addressed, hereafter, as Madam Secretary.” Madam Secretary. There it was, spoken like a pronouncement from the heavens. It was the first time I heard the title. And I knew I must somehow embrace it as mine, even though it would give me more trouble than any other in my life.

you’re doing a job that men have always done. Which means they’ll dismiss you if you speak too much like the sort of woman they’re used to, and they’ll resent you if you speak to them in a just-the-facts fashion like a man.”

We’d also passed more than seventy laws. Laws to help farmers, modernize food production, and keep people in their homes. We’d allocated money to build roads, bridges, and vital national infrastructure. We’d started dams that would provide electricity to remote areas. We’d regulated working conditions, raised wages, and, at long last, prohibited child labor everywhere in the country.