Dear Miss Perkins
A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany
My Frances Perkins bookshelf has become crowded. My favorite acquisitions in recent years include The Courage to Meddle: The Belief of Frances Perkins by Tom Levitt, a former member of the British Parliament; Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made by historian Derek Leebaert; and Becoming Madam Secretary by historical novelist Stephanie Dray. The newest addition is Rebecca Brenner Graham’s Dear Miss Perkins, a detailed historical study of a largely overlooked aspect of the groundbreaking activist and policymaker’s career: how she worked tirelessly to rescue European refugees from Nazism.
Perkins (1880–1965) was the first woman to serve in a United States presidential cabinet, serving as labor secretary for the entirety of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. As such, she was the driving force behind many New Deal programs, such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, the 40-hour work week, and the minimum wage. She is also credited with major contributions to laws that prohibit child labor and that support the rights of workers to organize into unions for collective bargaining. Perkins played a key role in launching the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed three million workers to plant trees, restore lands, and build state and national park infrastructure throughout the United States.
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As head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (then part of the Labor Department), Perkins was a champion for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism in Europe in the late 1930s. She fought against restrictive immigration policies and practices promoted by many in Congress and the State Department. Graham places Perkins’s struggle to save those refugees within the broader context of her career of sacrificial service, where she often found few allies within the federal government or elsewhere. She narrowly avoided impeachment, and she was frequently the subject of insults and conspiracy theories because of her advocacy for European Jews.
In the end, Graham estimates, Perkins was able to save tens of thousands of lives. She accomplished this in various ways, including “relaxing visa requirements, reducing deportation numbers, devising the corporate affidavit for businesses to finance refugees, and collaborating with the German-Jewish Children’s Aid Inc. on a robust child refugees’ program.” The humanity of the refugees and their supporters is especially apparent in the letters to Perkins that Graham located in the course of her research. Graham sets these “Dear Miss Perkins” letters—in which the writers plead for assistance from the astute and compassionate cabinet member—in historical context without diminishing each one’s uniqueness.
Graham devotes one chapter to how Perkins helped the Trapp Family Singers escape to America, demonstrating how their experience differed substantially from what appears in The Sound of Music. Another chapter discusses the unsuccessful proposal to relocate German-Jewish refugees to Alaska, which was at that time a US territory. Each of these instances aims to illuminate a facet of a larger story about Perkins and the country she served, which Graham summarizes in this way:
This is a story of how a high-ranking government official identified a problem, proposed solutions, built alliances among key players, and yet faced defeat amid an overwhelming tide of bigotry. Both her desire to help non-citizens and the structural and societal obstacles in the way of supporting them are quintessentially U.S. history. American responses to the rise of Nazism ranged from American Nazism and U.S. race laws inspiring Nazis to codify antisemitism to the genuinely humanitarian endeavors of people like Perkins.
Perkins cannot be fully understood except as a person of deep faith. Graham makes brief references to Perkins’s religious commitments but doesn’t focus on them. Raised a Congregationalist, Perkins became an Episcopalian in early adulthood and belonged to several parishes over the remainder of her long life. While living in Washington, she went on monthly retreats to an Episcopal convent in Maryland. Especially during her career as a public servant, she endeavored to live her faith quietly and effectively rather than to talk about it in public. However, in 1948, Perkins gave a trio of lectures at St. Thomas Church in New York City that addressed the theological foundations of her vocation. (These lectures are the subject of Donn Mitchell’s Tread the City’s Streets Again: Frances Perkins Shares Her Theology.) The Episcopal Church honors the witness of Frances Perkins with an annual feast day on May 13 and a portrait icon on display at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Newcastle, Maine, near the community cemetery where Perkins and members of her family are buried.
Adam Cohen once wrote: “If American history textbooks accurately reflected the past, Frances Perkins would be recognized as one of the nation’s greatest heroes—as iconic as Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Paine.” Near the end of his presidency, Joe Biden took an important step toward securing that legacy. Standing before an enthusiastic crowd at the Labor Department’s Frances Perkins Building, Biden issued a proclamation declaring the Frances Perkins Homestead a National Monument, one of the few so far honoring the contributions of a woman to American history. This designation will allow the National Park Service to work with the Frances Perkins Center (where I am on the board of directors) and other organizations to continually interpret and present Perkins’s story.
Thanks to authors like Graham, everyday Americans are increasingly seeing Perkins as a role model who confirms their desire to change the world for the better. Amid this Perkins renaissance, Graham offers the details of a complex moment in history that needs to be widely known, especially as our national response to refugees and immigrants is yet again the topic of divisive debate. Dear Miss Perkins is timely in the extreme.
