The Perkins New Deal

 Somebody probably not associated with the greeting card industry has designated March as Women’s History Month.  It so happens that this month I’ve been reading about the 1930s, a decade in which several of the women in American history I most admire were prominent, including Jane Addams, Dorothy Day, Eleanor Roosevelt and Halle Flanagan (who ran the Federal Theatre Project.)  But the woman I’ve been reading most about is Frances Perkins.

 Maybe it’s an oxymoron by now that this incredibly important woman in history is not very well known. But as FDR’s first and only Secretary of Labor, she was not just the first woman to run that department—she was the first female Cabinet officer in US history.  She was also one of the longest serving cabinet heads in history: all 12-plus years of FDR’s presidency. 

 She was among the most consequential cabinet heads in American history as well, mostly for the innovations during the New Deal that she advocated and worked to achieve, some of which she designed.

  And she knew what she wanted when she took the job at the crucial moment of the Great Depression in early 1933, and told FDR so: immediate federal aid to states and local governments to support relief for the unemployed; a large scale public works program; federal minimum wage and maximum hours laws; a ban on child labor; unemployment insurance and old-age insurance we now know as Social Security.  Eventually she got them all. 

 She was also an effective advocate for unions’ right to organize, and for workplace health and safety, with particular attention to the needs of women in the workplace.  All of these were new, and most were controversial and opposed by vested interests and reactionaries.  She was the model for effective compassion, for the practical heart.

 When she left office a little known and apparently unpopular figure, Collier’s magazine boldly suggested that “when the definitive history of this Administration is written, it is quite likely that [Secretary] Perkins will be hailed as the most successful of the New Dealers, for the Roosevelt pattern of government contains more of her ideas than any other of the President’s followers...What this country has been operating under for the past twelve years is not so much the Roosevelt New Deal as the Perkins New Deal.”

 But what she began did not end with the New Deal.  Consider the provisions of the new Covid Rescue Act that echo her innovations, as well as proposals for the infrastructure package.  Plus the safety net that so many of us depend on, and the further innovations that structures like Social Security have made possible, like the Affordable Care Act. 

 Nor was her contribution only in the ideas.  She knew how to get things done, to bring people and ideas together, to solve problems, gather support—and convince an often reluctant FDR.  She dealt with determined and underhanded opposition, including out-maneuvering FDR’s devious budget director.  She was an able administrator, who helped turn FDR’s idea for a Civil Conservation Corps into a reality that saved young lives and supported entire families, including my father’s.  She transformed the Labor Department from a clubhouse for cronies into a large and effective administrative arm.

 Though she also had to deal with family tragedies, she managed to survive the Roosevelt years and beyond (as FDR and Harry Hopkins did not).  She met President Kennedy, taught and lectured, describing her political experiences in a speech, part of which Laurence O’Donnell played on his MSNBC hour in 2014 or so, all when she was in her eighties.

 She taught at Cornell in her final years, and was so beloved that the male students of Telluride House, a residence for high-achievers, invited her to move in.  She did.  Secretary Frances Perkins remained at Cornell until her death at the age of 85.

Poetry Monday: The Frog After Dark

The Frogs After Dark

I am so much in love with mournful music

 That I don't bother to look for violinists. 

The aging peepers satisfy me for hours. 

 The ant moves on his tiny Sephardic feet. 

The flute is always glad to repeat the same note.

 The ocean rejoices in its dusky mansion. 

 Bears are often piled up close to each other.

 In caves of bears, it's just one hump

 After another, and there is no one to sort it out.

 You and I have spent so many hours working. 

We have paid dearly for the life we have. 

It's all right if we do nothing tonight.

 We've heard the fiddlers tuning their old fiddles,

 And the singer urging the low notes to come. 

We've heard her trying to keep the dawn from breaking. 

 There is some slowness in life that is right for us.

 But we love to remember the way the soul leaps 

Over and over into the lonely heavens.

 --Robert Bly 

 Bly apparently started this poem with the last three stanzas, which he read to interviewer Chard DeNiord for the September/October 2011 issue of The American Poetry Review. Those are the verses that attracted me, when I found this issue in a basket of old newsprint.

  He must have added the first three stanzas later, when the poem was published in his 2011 collection Talking Into The Ear Of A Donkey and then in the 2013 Stealing Sugar From The Castle, Selected and New Poems 1950-2013. Like this one, almost all of Bly’s late poems have six stanzas of three lines each. These represent—or are at least influenced by—a version of the Persian form called the Ghazal, which Bly knew through his reading of the Sufi poets such as Rumi and Hafiz. Other American poets like Jim Harrison and W.S. Merwin adopted and adapted it as well.

 In that 2011 interview, Bly talked about the ghazal form as handling several thoughts, and balancing different subject matter. He said it preserves some wildness, and the playfulness that energized American poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, through the infusion of European poets (including Surrealists but also Lorca and Rilke) and South American poets like Neruda.

 Sound is very important in Bly’s writing and reading. He loved the playfulness with sound in Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium for example. In this poem, one way the imagery is linked is by music and musical instruments (though I'm still puzzled by the bears, and the absent frogs.) To some extent Bly organizes his poems by sound (he liked those last three stanzas because of the “o” sounds, especially in the last line), and sometimes seems surprised at the meaning that emerges, especially when other people find it first.