The Road to Character

Frances Perkins was a workers’ rights activist in the first half of the 20th century and a member of the Roosevelt administration. Brooks regards her as an example of the power of vocation in a person’s life. Perkins grew up in Maine in a traditional, unsentimental Yankee family. They taught Perkins to be honest and conservative in her personal life, but active in her community. Although she was a bad student, she studied at Mt. Holyoke College. After graduation, she went to work at the Hull House, a community dedicated to acts of service that improve life for all. Her community service work didn’t become a vocation until she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. This fire, caused by horrible working conditions, made Perkins morally indignant. She felt that the world was asking something of her and that she’d found her calling. She went to Albany to lobby for workers’ rights, doing whatever it took to win the respect of the callous politicians there. She married a man whose mental health and financial affairs later fell apart. Their marriage was unhappy, and their only daughter was badly-behaved and distant from her mother. Perkins kept her personal life very private but once admitted that her own poor intimacy skills were the ruin of her family. She ended up working for Franklin Roosevelt who appointed her first as Industrial Commissioner and later as secretary of labor. She agreed to these appointments on the condition that he make certain changes in workers’ rights. She served Roosevelt until he died, falling quietly into the background as her personal life became more and more scandalous. After Roosevelt’s death, Perkins taught at Cornell and wrote a biography of Roosevelt, but not one of herself. Perkins’s self-discipline was the downfall of her personal life, but it made her an excellent public servant. She devoted herself to her vocation of workers’ rights, sacrificing all that was personally dear to her.