If you are a regular reader of my newsletter (and I hope you are) you know that for my upcoming book I have been interviewing tradeswomen and visiting them at their worksites. You also know that I will be providing historical context about women who did similar work in generations past. I’m having flashbacks as I research labor history and come across court decisions that I read many years ago in law school. I’m reminded of parallels and contrasts to our current moment. Also of William Faulkner’s “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
First, a bit of history. Until 1913 there was no federal Department of Labor, even though labor leaders had been advocating for one since the end of the Civil War. At one point there was a proposal to combine labor with agriculture but farmers objected. They already had a department of agriculture and didn’t want to be lumped together with industrial laborers, a group perceived as low status, rowdy and sometimes anarchistic. In 1903, President Teddy Roosevelt backed a plan to combine commerce and labor. The hope was that the two groups, already working together in American industry, would cooperate to their mutual benefit. But that didn’t pan out, in part because of immigration. The Secretary of Commerce and Labor, Oscar Straus, was relatively relaxed about the millions of immigrants who were coming into the country. But Samuel Gompers, founder of the Americal Federation of Labor, was not. Immigrants, he said, were willing to work for low wages and that depressed American wages. Is this starting to sound familiar? And some of the immigrants came from cultures very different from this country’s and could never assimilate, he said. After ten years together, Commerce and Labor were decoupled and each got its own department, with a cabinet level secretary.
Frances Perkins was the Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Roosevelt, the first woman to hold a cabinet position. She is fascinating in her own right, but reading a recent biography by Kristen Downey also opened my eyes to the way immigration was handled then. Because it was seen as an economic issue, primarily affecting labor, the Department of Labor was responsible for immigration enforcement.
When Frances Perkins took office in 1932, a statute then in effect set a per-country quota on immigrants. As the decade progressed, and Frances and others began to see what was happening in Germany, she pushed for more German Jews to be allowed in. She managed to extend visitor visas for those already here but got push back from Congress on more ambitious plans. Some Congressmen cited the quota system as the reason not to change things, while others went public with their antisemitism. Jews weren’t the only disfavored group, but with the situation in Europe becoming increasingly critical, they were the focus of Frances’s efforts. Working with German-Jewish Children’s Aid, Inc., a new humanitarian organization, she did manage to get some children out of Germany. Important thought this was, it was not a complete panacea. Rebecca Graham, author of Dear Miss Perkins, writes that the effort to bring children to the U.S. “separated children from their parents under the illusion of temporariness. The frequent reality was permanent separation. Some children sent letters back and forth with their parents for nearly a decade before the Nais murdered their parents.”
In 1939, after Kristallnacht, Congressional committees considered legislation to accept 10,000 child refugees each year for two years. The bill never made it to the floor of Congress. As a result, 20,000 children who might have come to the U.S. stayed in Europe. FDR, with his eye on the next election cycle, was not as publicly supportive of Jewish immigration as Frances was. Or as we, with the benefit of hindsight, wish he had been.
Also in 1939, a member of the House of Representatives moved to impeach Frances. Rep. J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey opposed FDR’s New Deal legislation, and Frances was very much a part of that. You might wonder what she had done that amounted to a high crime and misdemeanor. According to Thomas, she had failed to deport Harry Bridges, an immigrant from Australia who was head of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and an immigrant from Australia who was head of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and a suspected Communist.
In her defense, Frances appeared at a hearing in the House of Representatives where she said she had no evidence of any crime committed by Bridges, and the Department of Labor would not act arbitrarily, without evidence.
She also said this: “The problems which the immigration laws present are serious, intricate and of the highest public importance. They have a peculiar significance to the future of our country, for it is incumbent upon those who administer the immigration laws to aim at two important goals: First, to preserve this country, its institutions and ideals, from foreign forces which present a clear and present danger to the continuance of our way of living; and second, to show those aliens who together with their families are soon to become our fellow citizens that American institutions operate without fear or favor, in a spirit of fair-play, and with a desire to do justice to the stranger within our gates, as well as to the native born.”
In the end, the impeachment motion failed and Frances served until the end of FDR’s administration. Bridges, too, was vindicated in a series of Supreme Court decisions. Also, with the war in Europe accelerating, immigration came to be seen as more of a security concern than an economic one. In 1940, FDR transferred responsibility for immigration enforcement to the Department of Justice.
I keep thinking about Frances’s statement. It makes me nostalgic for a time when a spirit of fair-play and a desire to do justice to the stranger within our gates motivated a member of the president’s cabinet. Maybe I’m a bit optimistic, too. If a cabinet member, facing the pressures of that era, chose to honor the rule of law and the highest of our values, it can happen again, if the right people are asked to serve. What do you think?
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