Frances Perkins

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21520, 17 June 1933, Page 6 (Supplement)

Frances Perkins

No appointment so far made by President Roosevelt has been more inherently satisfying than that of Miss Frances Perkins to the Secretaryship of Labour, writes Professor H. J. Laski. It is not that sho is the first American woman to bo appointed to Cabinet oflice. It is simply that of all the possible candidates for the post she was quite obviously the most effective and the most competent. " Miss" Frances Perkins is her stage name, as it were. When sho is off the stage of public affairs sbe is Mrs. Paul Wilson and the mother of one daughter. She lias had tho right kind of training. A college graduate, she had some years at Hull House with that great humanist, Jane Addains. She describes herself succinctly as " sociologist." Bat, though sho has been a college lecturer in sociology, with true feminine practicality she does not believe in isolating sociology into a class-room subject till it becomes divorced from reality, as is shown by the number of constructive committees and commissions on which she has served. When, shortly after Mr. Roosevelt became Governor of New York, he appointed her Commissioner of Labour, she proved her capacity for humane and efficient administration. She has really first-rate qualities; indeed, I hazard tho view that she is the one member of the Cabinet all of whose qualities are unmistakably first-rate.

AMERICA'S WOMAN

Her objectives are well-defined in her own mind. She is devoid in a quite final way of the arrogance that is bred by power. She knows, how to find tho right kind of advice and sho does not suffer from tho illusion that tho occupancy of office is itself a justification of existence. She realises that her job is a grim one, and that sho has to fight to make it successful. She has a senso of humour, and, not legs important, a sense of proportion. She has the great gift of winning tho public by taking it into licr confidence. She is, in the best American sense, profoundly liberal-minded. She is not moved by tho self-importance of important people because she has that kind of ultimate humility which realises the littleness of people before the magnitude of impersonal forces. She has begun remarkably well. She got rid, lock, stock and barrel, of the degrading espionage service in the Immigration Bureau. She has started on a big programme of public works, which, if it be given its chance, will give in the next few months some hundreds of thousands of unemployed the chance to reaffirm their self-respect. And anyone who watches the way in which she is organising her department, her effort to get the right men and women, her instant appreciation of the significance of standards, her anxiety to secure maximum co-operation with organised labour, will, I think feel that the Department has a real " man " at its head.