Becoming Madam Secretary

by Stephanie Dray

Churchill once said that meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne, and that knowing him was like drinking it. That wasn’t far off the mark.

was best to stride with a purposeful gait, keeping fixed upon my face an expression that said, Ill-intended gentlemen will very much regret trifling with me.

“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.”

If somebody opens a door of opportunity for you, it’s the Lord’s will, she always said. So walk right in and do the best you can. Which was precisely what I meant to do.

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. In short, she was an extraordinarily learned woman—a suffragist and a true pioneer for equality and other causes I cared about.

“I’m an enlightened man. What have you to fear in accepting my love?” “So very much. Because to be loved, really loved, one must be known, and I find that terrifying. In truth, I think it takes courage—real spiritual daring—to allow oneself to be known.”

I WORE MY wedding dress to march next to Florence Kelley at the Women’s Suffrage Parade that autumn. I also wore white spats and a white tricorn hat, carrying a banner I’d written, which read, Feminism Means Revolution and I’m a Revolutionist. Other states had already granted women the right to vote. New York ought to be next. To convince our fellow citizens, we’d arranged this absolute spectacle. Forty thousand of us marched the parade route, carrying flowers and flags, holding hands in solidarity, and lifting our voices to the heavens in song.

“I think we can never be prepared for the loss of our parents. We know, someday, we’ll lose them. That we’ll have to find some way of going on. We’re taught to memorialize our parents and make meaning of their lives through our own. But no matter how old they get, or how ill they get, it still takes you by surprise.”

“Have you called the doctor? He might have influenza.” A wave of what we were calling the Spanish flu was sweeping the world. We didn’t yet think it was terribly serious, but some people were getting very sick. And Paul had been traveling back and forth a great deal. “It’s possible. I’ll call the doctor just in case, but I worry that Paul is terribly depressed.”

I’m sure your husband will find a way to get back in the political game.” I wasn’t so sure. Paul had taken his responsibilities at city hall seriously, and public criticism smote him to the heart. It hadn’t been a game to him, and he didn’t seem eager to hitch his wagon to a new horse. After all, my husband didn’t have the colossal ego that sometimes seemed necessary to survive the rough-and-tumble of the political world.

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.

THE MAIN THING I remember about the Democratic convention in the summer of 1920 is that it was awash in shortened flapper hemlines and ladies making eyes at Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Nobody who saw the assistant secretary of the Navy at that convention was likely to forget how handsome he looked that year. Irritatingly handsome.

“Frances, I simply don’t have the strength to pretend I want to be here anymore…” I stared at him. “You don’t want to be here, in our house, with me and your daughter?” His gaze fixed on some point in the distance. “I don’t want to be in this world.” Startled, I again reached for him, this time instinctively, to offer comfort, but his hand was lifeless. “I’m a burden to you, Frances. An embarrassment. I’m no good for you, and no good for Susie.”

Slowly the frustration in my heart melted in loving sympathy as it became clear my husband’s brain was very ill. I didn’t understand the illness, but I knew it was an illness. One beyond my capability to cure.

“You see, I can’t let Franklin fall into despair. I happen to know that people give up on life, Miss Perkins. I know it only too well. When I was just about ten years old, my father drank himself out of a window and made an orphan of me…” This private confidence dismayed and disarmed me completely. I could only think how distressed she must be to share it. How distressed we both were, and for such similar reasons. I imagined Eleanor must’ve immediately regretted such an admission. And having no idea what to say—feeling guilty for guarding my own secrets while hers were so open and raw—I unburdened my heart. “My husband is here in the hospital as well, because I’m worried that he, too, will give up on life.” Eleanor’s

my efforts against child labor were being undermined by the Catholic Church. It seemed as if every time we took one step forward in reform, someone tried to push my efforts two steps back. These laws violate the sanctity of the family, priests preached from the pulpit, because it was apparently a father’s God-given right to send little Bobby down into a mine to get lung rot. Governor Smith was losing support over the issue and being pressured to compromise. “They say we’re trying to keep children from doing the dinner dishes!”

All the regulations we spearheaded, all the legislation we passed, all the steps forward seemed insignificant in a country where greedy industrialists, selfish society circles, the Ku Klux Klan, and other small-minded bigots held so much sway.

Despite my contentious relationship with my mother, or perhaps because of it, her death sent me into a tailspin of grief. Losing her unmoored me from my past and left me uncertain about my future. It also forced me to face my own mortality, demanding a reckoning with my life.

“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.”

“Bless your heart, Miss Perkins. It’s good of you to be so loyal, but we can’t have Al Smith for president. He’s going to bring the pope in over us.” I couldn’t hide my astonishment. “He’s going to do what?” “There is a plan, Miss Perkins. Smith has already bought a palace for the pontifex, and he’s going to give the pope control over the military and everything else.” There wasn’t any reasoning with them, and I gather I committed a faux pas when, during conversation, I mentioned that I thought Robert E. Lee was not, in fact, the greatest man the country had ever produced.

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.

Yet most Americans couldn’t weather a change in fortune; if a girl lost her hand in an accident, or if a child lost a father to an illness, or if a woman lived long enough to lose her senses, the catastrophe could rob an entire family of opportunity. Sometimes even an entire community. It was like knocking down one domino and watching it bring down the rest, until society itself crashed to its foundations.

I shuddered to think of all the elderly whose investments were evaporating before their eyes, leaving them no way to ever make it back. At least we’d lost our money when we were young enough to start over…

What had begun as a recession followed by a stock market crash was now a severe economic depression. Hoover said it would all be over in sixty days. With one million out of work—a figure growing every day—nobody else believed that. 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.”

His mind had cunningly contorted itself to convince him suicide would be a selfless, heroic act. And at last, I knew that he was too twisted up now for anything I said to reach him. I couldn’t reason with him. I couldn’t plead with him, as I used to do, to let our love keep him alive. And I will not recount, or even force myself to remember, all the details of the terrible day I committed my husband to the sanitarium. This isn’t Paul, I said when he accused me of being his jailer. This isn’t Paul, I said of the seething, silent stranger he became. This isn’t Paul, I said when he accused me of being an impersonator, demanding to know what I had done with his real wife.

Now the American people had chosen Franklin Roosevelt to lead them out of this horrific time. But given the depths of the economic depression, was it even possible that our nation would recover?

New York City February 1933 I left FDR’S house in a stupor around nine o’clock in the evening, blinded by snow and his offer to make me the first woman in American history to serve in a presidential cabinet. I’d tried to decline, only for him to say, I consider that you have a duty to say yes. But was it

All those years ago, when I’d so foolishly pleaded with God to make me his instrument, my grandmother said if somebody opens a door for you, if you’re quite sure you haven’t pulled wires or made arrangements to get that door opened, and if somebody just opens it for you unexpectedly without any connivance on your part, walk right in and do the best you can. For it means that it’s the Lord’s will… But was this really the Lord’s will?

When FDR announced my appointment, he told the press, You watch her. She’s a brilliant person.

He’s improvising, I thought worriedly. For that is how he sometimes got in trouble. But now, he boldly and confidently said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Given the crisis, President Roosevelt wanted us sworn in right away and on the job Monday morning. After the inaugural balls, he expected the next hundred days to be a flurry of activity. I hadn’t been warned. I’d been told there’d be time to bring Susanna back to New York and get her situated. I hadn’t even packed more than a suit, a plain black dress, and a sequined velvet dress for the inaugural balls.

As the secretary of labor, I had the lowest rank by seniority in the cabinet, so I waited as the others swore first.

The thing I cared most about was implementing a revolutionary plan of social insurance, but Roosevelt still wasn’t convinced. And there wasn’t time to argue with him about it now anyway. First, I had to contend with a thousand different issues that fell under my purview, from public works projects, to labor disputes, to immigration.

My first assignment was the Civilian Conservation Corps. It was FDR’s brainchild. We’d done something similar in New York, but the devil was in the details. So while everyone else in the cabinet was still nodding in approval of the idea to send unemployed young men off into the wilderness with axes, I felt unsettled by what felt like a harebrained plan. “Mr. President, what are they going to do when they get to the woods?” “Well, you know,” Roosevelt said, hesitating to scratch his chin. “Do the work that has to be done with trees. We must preserve our forests. We must build dams to keep the water from running off.”

By one school of economic thought, government spending could make matters worse. That was a defensible position… But it was the wrong one. When a man hasn’t a job, he can’t spend, and if no one else is hiring or spending, the government must.

The Nazis were, after all, a distraction we didn’t need. But FDR had come into power at the same time as Adolf Hitler, and the rising threat weighed on the president’s mind. “What can we do for those poor devils over there?”

I also wish to take this opportunity to remind you that the American experiment has repeatedly proved that people fleeing tyranny make grateful citizens—decent, hardworking, and productive. We’ve reaped tangible benefits by taking in scientists, artists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. And yet even the immigration application of Albert Einstein has faced opposition by your State Department, though any country in the world would be lucky to have him.”

The president smirked at me over the top of his spectacles. “Well, you’ve convinced me that we need unemployment insurance. But I’m not convinced a social insurance program can work for the aged and disabled and orphans and others. And people aren’t going to like how it sounds.” “Oh, I don’t know. People want security. In their personal lives and in their society. They want social security. You might remember that when I talked about it in those terms on the campaign trail, they went wild.”

“How about absolute legal victory? The Justice Department says my solicitor is right. I can legally accept persecuted refugees from Nazi Germany, and there’s nothing the State Department can do to stop me.”

Immigration cases made up only the smallest part of our work at the Department of Labor but always got me beat up in the papers. And they riled up the nativists against me too.

In a list of the president’s most trusted advisors, I’d now been ranked fourth. Some were even saying I was so influential that if I were a man, I might be president. Of course, I didn’t feel influential, because despite everything, the president was still letting General Johnson run the show.

If we want a social security plan, you’ll have to get out there and rally the voters, the president had told me, because we both knew the midterm elections were going to decide the fate of the country.

“They’ll roast you anyway,” she said. “Behind your back. And do I need to mention that you could do better with the press?” I’d recently been described in the newspaper as a frosty schoolmarm who refused to suffer foolish questions, all of which might be true. And now Eleanor said, “Reporters need to see we’re just ordinary people.”

Mrs. Roosevelt’s women’s only masquerade ball was already proving to be the social sensation of the season. More than five hundred women were in attendance, dressed in elaborate costumes as queens, founding mothers, movie stars, and more. It was the first masquerade ball to be held in the White House in nearly a century,

RICHEST WOMAN IN WASHINGTON DEAD That was the headline. And oh, how it embittered me. As if Mary Harriman Rumsey had done nothing and been nothing more in her life than rich. She was so much more than that…

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. Before she died, she’d asked, Isn’t it a great comfort to know that we’ll always have each other? Now that comfort had been obliterated. I

Hearing people laugh seemed a cruel affront, an insulting reminder that the world carried on. Still, I tried to grin and bear it as guests congratulated and complimented me. You must be so proud! —so pretty, and a college girl, too— A real credit to you, Frances. I did take pride in Susanna. There she was, in her beautiful gossamer gown, looking for all the world like a redeeming angel. Thankfully, as the evening wore on, Susanna lost herself to the merriment, which meant I could slink away to splash some water on my face in the powder room.

“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.”

social security plan was dying of a thousand cuts in Congress too. It’s communism, that’s what it is! —unconstitutional and written by Jews— Taxes are already too high!

Hopes weren’t just fading. They’d evaporated. Social Security was dead in the water, and a petition was being circulated for my ouster, calling me the Most Dangerous Woman in America.