The Road to Character

Brooks introduces Frances Perkins, who was an advocate for ending child labor in the early 1900s. In 1911, Perkins witnessed the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City. She stood in front of the burning building and watched workers crowd around the windows. People trapped in the building, including child laborers, started to jump out the windows. Some helped one another, some shouted last words. The firefighters’ nets were not enough to break their falls, and everyone who jumped died.

The fire began when cotton scraps caught on fire. The factory manager was so busy trying to put out the fire that he didn’t call for the factory to evacuate immediately. Even when evacuation began, many workers took the time to punch their timecards. Also, many exits had been blocked to prevent workers from leaving easily on normal days, so as to forcibly maximize productivity. People on the top floors began to crowd into the elevators. Everyone had to make frantic decisions, pushing others aside and hurling themselves at any possible exit to safety.

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire created an uproar. Even before it happened, workers had organized strikes against the factory’s unsafe conditions. After the fire, people protested the cruel employers and laws that allowed such harsh conditions to exist. While Frances Perkins had already been an advocate against child labor, now her “moral indignation” was at such a level that she forgot about her ego and fully devoted herself to fighting for the broader cause of workers’ rights for the rest of her life. Her career became a vocation.

Brooks shifts to modern times and comments that, nowadays, our culture almost exclusively encourages people to follow their dreams and trust their feelings. Life is followed like a business plan in which a person defines a purpose and then comes up with a strategy for achieving that purpose. This way of life defines purpose as beginning and ending with the self. 

However, Brooks points out that Frances Perkins found purpose in a different way. Instead of asking herself what she wanted, she asked herself what the world wanted of her. By this way of thinking, a person does not create their life; they are “summoned by life,” and their life is formed around circumstances rather than beginning in the self. Every person is brought into a world that has needs for them to respond to.

Brooks further describes this sort of calling by referring to Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was captured by the Nazis and imprisoned in a concentration camp without family or friends. Although this life was completely opposed to what his dream life would’ve been, he realized that his character would be shaped by how he responded internally to his circumstances. He couldn’t expect anything or control his suffering, but he could control his inner response to suffering.

Frankl helped other prisoners endure, urging them to think of something they loved even in the midst of a horrific imprisonment meant to destroy their hope, humanity, and ability to love. He assured suicidal prisoners that life still expected things from them. In adversity, Brooks comments, everyone has the opportunity to justify their inner strength.

Brooks distinguishes a vocation from a career. A vocation is not chosen, and it doesn’t necessarily advance you in the career world. Rather, a vocation is “a calling.” People are devoted to their vocations for higher reasons than utility and benefit. Furthermore, a vocation is not about achieving happiness or satisfying one’s desires. Instead, a vocation is about molding oneself to the job put before them.

However, Brooks maintains that people with vocations are usually happy. He makes a distinction between serving one’s community and serving one’s work. If one wholly serves the work at hand, they will benefit the community more richly as a result. These people will have the joy of their values being deeply aligned with their actions.

Brooks now tells Frances Perkins’s life story, beginning with her traditional Yankee upbringing in Maine. She was raised to be frugal, earnest, and honest. This attitude reflected the old culture of New England: New Englanders were unsentimental and aware of their sinfulness. They believed that God showed love through correcting their flaws, encouraging them to become strong where they had been weak. They combined social conservatism with political liberalism, being traditional in their private lives and compassionate and active in their communities.

Perkins never got great grades. However, she went to Mt. Holyoke College, which was different then than most colleges are today. Today, teachers cultivate talents, but back then, education was rigorous and uncompromising. For instance, Perkins was urged to major in her weakest subject in order to test her fortitude. Old Mt. Holyoke taught students that those who pursue struggle are happier than those who don’t.

Mt. Holyoke cautioned against mere acts of compassion and insisted instead that acts of service are duties. It employed women in service jobs and taught them courage, character, and heroism. This was during a time when the Christian Church was responding to industrialization by asserting that sin is not just individual, but that there are sinful social structures and institutions. Therefore, a Christian life should be one of sacrificial service.

Mt. Holyoke pushed Perkins down so she could “push herself upward.” This taught her to be heroic. After graduating, she worked at the Hull House, a community founded by Jane Addams that brought the rich and poor together in a community that performed acts of service to improve life generally.

Today, one performs community service to satisfy their inner moral questions. Instead of teaching students how to build character, institutions these days simply assign community service. Consequently, moral questions are turned into questions of external resources. Jane Addams knew, however, that mere compassion accomplishes nothing and leads to self-satisfaction. At the Hull House, the social workers were practical and humble, letting the poor determine their own lives and become self-reliant.

Jane Addams observed that many people graduated college and fell into dull, cynical lives. In college, students think of society and how they can serve it, but when they graduate, they resort to marriage and individual aims. Therefore, she made the Hull House a place where the rich and poor alike could commit to noble aims. From the Hull House, Perkins went on to do courageous acts of service, “like a missionary.”

Perkins left behind everything and went to lobby for workers’ rights in Albany, New York. In order to effect change, she worked with callous politicians. She suppressed her sexuality and identity in order to be respected as a mother-like figure in political circles. She worked tirelessly to reduce the work week to 54 hours, finally accepting a partial triumph: a bill that reduced work week hours in most industries.

Perkins married Paul Wilson, a progressive political figure. In her letters to Wilson, Perkins was warm and romantic, but outwardly she was reserved and practical about their marriage. Their relationship slowly fell apart. Wilson had an affair, and Perkins felt stifled in work and spirit. They lost their first baby. Although personally devastated by this, Perkins threw her energies into a foundation supporting mothers and infants. Meanwhile, Wilson lost their money in a poor investment and suffered severe mental illness.

In response to these hardships in her personal life, Perkins was stoic. She concealed her private life from the public, believing that personal emotions are too complex and nuanced to be exposed. Brooks defines reticence and exposure as two opposing parties, with different views about proper social behavior. The exposure party believes that anything secret is suspect, while the reticent party, like Perkins, believes that intricate emotions, when taken out of the context of intimacy, are “trampled.”

Brooks shows that Perkins’s reticence had drawbacks. Her private life was unhappy. Her daughter Susanna, in response to her mother’s aloofness, was badly behaved and unsuccessful, and Perkins had to support her financially throughout her life. Perkins feared that both her husband’s and daughter’s collapses were somehow her fault. This goes to show that Perkins’s public vocation was never quite enough to make up for her private solitude.

Eventually, Perkins was appointed to the Industrial Commission—the governmental body that regulated workers’ conditions—by Al Smith, governor of New York. Here, she was in a man’s world, bravely engaging in disputes between labor organizations. When describing her own life, she mostly used “one” instead of “I,” suggesting that her actions weren’t hers but were what any person with a vocation would do.

Perkins ended up working with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Initially, she was unimpressed by him, but when he returned after contracting polio, she found him humbled. He was physically changed, too. During one of his speeches, several women rose to obscure Roosevelt’s awkward descent from the podium. Perkins admired his willingness to accept the help.

When Roosevelt was elected governor of New York, he employed Perkins as Industrial Commissioner. At first, she told him she didn’t feel qualified, but he insisted on having her. She proved to be an excellent administrator but an even more excellent judge of morality in the law.

When Roosevelt became president, he appointed Perkins as secretary of labor. She agreed on the condition that he work to enact certain social policies, such as unemployment relief and social security. She stayed with Roosevelt throughout his entire presidency and was integral to creating the New Deal. She established the nation’s first minimum wage law and procured jobs for women whose husbands were drafted in World War II.

Perkins was the author of The Roosevelt I Knew, the most detailed biography of Roosevelt to date. She noted his quality of accepting mistakes in his judgment and taking small steps toward change. He was more of an “instrument than an engineer.” While working with him, she handled his changes of mind by asking him to confirm his decisions many times so as to cement them in the president’s own mind.

Roosevelt didn’t always support Perkins against the dislike the rest of the Cabinet felt toward her. Her privacy made her unpopular with the press. Many times, she tried to resign, but Roosevelt convinced her not to. When she shielded Harry Bridges, a man suspected of Communist activities and later confirmed to be a Communist agent, she herself was accused of being a Communist and a Russian Jew. Roosevelt was too afraid of ruining his reputation to defend her.

All this time, Perkins held on to her New England integrity, refusing to destroy the “inner core” that made her capable of such good deeds. In reality, it was all she could do to hold herself together. She took to praying at a local convent whenever she could. She asked herself whether a good deed is done for the poor or for God. She concluded that it must be done for God, because only then is it intrinsically good.

In 1939, Perkins appeared before court for her shielding of Bridges and defended herself against brutal accusations. She was cleared, but her reputation was ruined for good. She continued to serve Roosevelt quietly. When he died, she wrote his biography instead of her own memoir. She taught at Cornell and lived in the Telluride House with fraternity boys, taking simple delight in their youthfulness.

Perkins destroyed papers so that biographers couldn’t document her in the future. She died in 1965 at 85, alone in the hospital. Looking at her college yearbook photo, Brooks expresses that it is hard to believe how much hardship this “small, cute, almost mousy” lady survived. It is also hard to believe how much she accomplished. She sacrificed her identity to serve causes and remained steadfast throughout adversity.

Perkins was energetic in activism and traditional in morality. Her self-discipline diminished her personal life. However, this helped her completely devote herself to her vocation and lead “a summoned life.” She didn’t choose her life. Rather, she answered a calling, sacrificing all things dear to her to follow it. Her activities transcended her lifetime. Therefore, she had to commit herself to a “historical process.”