August 26, 2024 • 53 mins
Margaret talks with Caitlin Durante about the first "Madame Secretary," who burned her political capital to keep the US border open and save Jewish children.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly reminder that when there's bad things, there's people
trying to do good things like podcast. Wait, no, that's
the thing that talks about the things like save thousands
of people from Nazis. I'm your host, Marta Kiljoy. I've
only done one of those things, and it's not the
(00:25):
saving people thing. It's the podcast thing. But with me
is my guest Caitlyn Durante, who is host of the
hit podcasts Sitting on my couch with Caitlyn Durante and
sitting in my bed with Caitlyn Durante. How are you well?
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Yeah, my most famous works. Also, I would argue that
having a podcast has the potential to save thousands of lives. Okay,
so maybe you are doing both. Yeah, personally saving everyone.
That's the Cool Zone Media motto. With our producer Sophie.
Speaker 4 (01:02):
Hi, Sophie, I don't feel like saving everyone.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Yeah, that's fair.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
I'd save both of you though, Oh thank you. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Well, hopefully we won't enter a world in the next
couple of years where that needs.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
To happen, but yeah, you know, wishful thinking.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Also part of making this podcast is our audio engineer, Rory.
Everyone say hi to Rory. Hi. Rory Hi, Ri Hi.
And our theme music was written for us by unwoman.
And this week I want to do something I probably
haven't done enough of yet. I want to talk about
someone who worked within the system. I'm going out of
(01:42):
my comfort zone here. I genuinely had a little bit
of a crisis about it. It's worth it. It's so good.
I want to talk about someone who worked within the
system to do that thing that we care so much
about on this show, save people's lives from fascist violence.
I find this story really fascinating. I'll tell you what
it is in a minute. But I find ifascinating because
it gets at the limits of what can be done
(02:02):
working within the system, or rather it gets it how
we can get people, can get a lot done, and
then there's certain things that can't get done. And it's
a story about a woman who broke not only like
every glass ceiling, but actually non glass ceilings. I think
the idea behind a glass ceiling is that it's like invisible.
You think you should be able to be whatever, but
(02:23):
you can't because you're a girl. Right, that's the I.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Actually don't know that I know what the metaphor means
exactly now that I think about it.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
That's what I've always assumed, right, is that you're like, Oh,
no one's telling you you can't be CEO. You just
can't be CEO. Right. That's like the glass ceiling, I think, right.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Because the boys won't allow it.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, but this person broke not glass ceilings, but regular ceilings,
just probably plaster and lathe. I think drywall didn't get
popularized until after this. I really should have spent more
of my time researching different construction methods of ceilings in
the nineteen thirties, but I didn't. Women were not supposed
to do what she did. Because today we are going
(03:07):
to talk about the longest serving Secretary of Labor of
the United States, who was the first woman to be
secretary of anything in the US government. She was the
woman for whom Madam's Secretary was coined as an honorific
and her name is Francis Perkins. Either of you ever
heard of Francis Perkins?
Speaker 3 (03:26):
I have not.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Nope, I hadn't either. In certain circles, she's very popular
because of all the stuff we're going to talk about,
but overall, for some weird reason women get left out
of history, even when they are the first woman minister,
but also the longest or not minister secretary whatever, but
(03:48):
of a department of the government, as well as the
longest serving secretary of labor the US has ever had,
and no one ever talks about her. She is most
famous as the woman who brought us the New Deal,
and she was heavily involved in the fight for Social Security.
You could honestly make the case that this is the
(04:09):
woman who brought you the weekend. But we also like
talking about how the labor unions brought us the weekend.
But like obviously, lots of different things happened in order
to make things laws, and usually union striking people don't
make laws, but sometimes people like this do. But I'm
going to talk about her not because of that work,
but because of how hard and endlessly she worked, with
(04:33):
both success and failure, to rescue German Jews during Hitler's reign,
which is a good thing to do, I'll say, especially kids,
and her whole thing was rescuing kids.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
So she was born Fanny Carly Perkins on April tenth,
eighteen eighty, in the South end of Boston to sort
of middle class Protestant parents of the Republican variety. But
back when Republican meant like Abraham Lincoln's party, you know,
the like center left party. I even I think I
(05:12):
got a better understanding now of like when these two
parties switched than I ever have.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Ooh, please say.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
It's basically during it's the beginning of the twentieth century.
But like the New Deal is kind of what did it?
It seems like so like FDR in the nineteen thirties.
So she was born into this Republican family and then
they moved to not Worcester, Worcester, I.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Believe Wooster, Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
When she was two, and her family opened a stationary shop.
And she lives most of her life like fairly wealthy,
even though she was born on the wrong side of town, right,
and there's a lot of like she kind of she
kind of liked being upper middle class or like kind
of rich, and so she would always like when people
would claim that she was born in the rich part
of Boston, did not correct people.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
Well, South End, I mean it's probably different than it
was because South End and Southee are different neighborhoods. Southea
is like the working class.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Oh okay.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
And then the South End at least now again, it
might have been different one hundred years ago or whatever.
South End is like the gighborhood. Oh interesting in Boston. Yeah,
I think, Oh my gosh, it's been ten years since
I'm about to celebrate my ten year living in La anniversary. Wow,
brag to me.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Are you from Boston?
Speaker 3 (06:34):
I'm not from there, but I lived there for four years.
I went to famously, but I would never mention this.
I went to grad school at Boston University, where I
got a master's degree in screenwriting.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Wow. Again, never mentioned that.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
I would never mention that. But yeah, I lived there
for four years. And you know, twenty ten, South End
was like a very expensive you had to have a
pretty high income to be able to afford the rent there, okay,
And it was like specifically gay men, Yeah, live there
(07:07):
because lesbians live in Oh my god, Jamaica plane. I
want to say, is that the name of I don't
know it's again, it's been so long.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
As one of the only neighborhoods I've spent any time
in Boston, so I want them to be full of lesbians.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Okay, Well, there you go.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Okay, no. See. See, I haven't spent that much time
in Boston besides, of course jamake a plane hanging out
with the lesbians, of course. And that's actually useful to know.
I like the book that I was reading about this
part of it was like kind of saying, how this
is sort of a humble beginning, right. But I don't
know whether that's just as compared to where she ends
(07:46):
up classwise when she gets married, because she marries up
in a little bit okay, or whether in the eighteen
eighties the South End was like a more heavily immigrant
neighborhood or something like that, or of working class neighborhood.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
I'm sure it's something like that.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yeah, her parents were not immigrants. Her parents were wasps
all the way down and like had come from Maine
to live in Boston. She went off to college at
Mount Holyoake in eighteen ninety eight. And this wasn't her
family being like, oh, we're feminists. It's like, this is
her family being like, we're middle class, you know. And
(08:21):
she was in Stem she studied chemistry, biology, and physics whoa,
and the liberal education had its effects on her. I
think she was raised probably like kind of like raised
right politically from the start anyway.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
But right as in like correct or right yea again right, sorry,
that's correct, yeah, so left yeah, or progressive like I
would say that her politics are progressive.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
And she's one of the most progressive bureaucrats and in
power we've ever had in the United States. Certainly, by
today's standards, she's wildly progressive, and by her own her
year's standards, she was too. In college, she read a
book that had an impact on her that's come up
a bunch of times on this show before W E.
De Boys is the Soul of Black Folks. And she
(09:08):
went on tour with her school to the factories to
see how fucked up things were in the factories, and
she grew up with I've never had a positive impression
of like the Protestant work ethic, right, she grew up
with a version of the Protestant work ethic that I
think has been lost to time, which is the work
really hard at your chosen vocation, not work really hard
(09:31):
to get rich and fuck everyone over. And her chosen vocation,
she stated very explicitly, she was like, my chosen vocation
is social justice. Hell yeah, And then she worked into
her fucking eighties. It's social justice and then you know
stop because she died. After she graduated, she started teaching,
(09:55):
first in New England and then in Chicago. In Chicago,
she changed her name from Fanny to Francis, which from
my point of view just needs no defense, just sure,
no offense to Fanny as a name, but it doesn't
hold up.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
She was born like birth certificate says Fanny. Yeah, and
then she so she was born with the nickname, and
then she gave herself the formal version of the name.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Basically I guess so right, like, is Fanny short for Francis?
Speaker 3 (10:26):
I you know what, no one was either the name
Fanny or Francis.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
I could not say, yeah, I know of Francis, but
I think I would get in trouble if I call
them Fanny. I'm under the impression that she changed her
name specifically to Francis because she was into Saint Francis
of ASSISI the like Catholic and also Episcopal saint. Okay, okay,
because around this time she left the Protestant she grew
(10:54):
up New England Congregationalists, which I know nothing about, to
become an Episcopal, which is like the Anglican church, but
in America Catholic light, you get ritual and ceremony and
you still get to have Saint Francis. Okay, she took
the social justice thing very seriously, and soon she was
volunteering at the Hull House in Chicago, which was founded
(11:16):
by this person who's probably gonna end up a future
friend of the Pod, this social reformer named Jane Adams.
And this concept is real funny, like it doesn't hold
up great, but it's interesting. These are called settlement houses,
and the idea is that recent college graduates from like
the middle class would go live in these impoverished neighborhoods
(11:39):
in settlement houses to do social work within those neighborhoods.
And so it's kind of a like learn how the
other half live internship.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
What's it teachers? Teacher for America? Is that sort of
like that?
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah? Is that the thing that the movie with the
crap that the song is is about from the nineties?
Speaker 3 (12:02):
Probably I almost called it Teachers without Borders, so it
shows you how much I know about it. But that's
my understanding of teach for America. It's uh, I don't
think you necessarily even have to have any kind of
like teaching credentials or like a background in education, but
like they'll hire recent college grads in low income school
(12:24):
districts and have them teach for a year I think,
or some short amount of time. But yeah, it sounds
kind of like.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
That, Okay, Yes, And then the song is called Gangster's
Paradise by Coolio and it was then it was in
a movie Dangerous Minds. It was in the movie Dangerous Minds.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Okay, I've never seen it.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Okay, I think I watched it in the nineties when
it came out, but I couldn't promise you. A white
woman goes and teaches in a black school, and it's
like exploitation as best as I can tell, or at
least like and so it's like, is this thing that
obviously like there's a lot of problems with like rich
white people showing up until like migrant neighborhoods and stuff
and being like I know how to help things, right
mm hmm. But overall, everything I've personally read about these
(13:08):
settlement houses is actually fairly positive.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
But her duties included, quote, helping the nurse with a
sick family, working in a political campaign, joining a picket line,
compiling statistics on infant mortality, proofreading the magazine, browbeating employers
into paying wages unfairly withheld, or raising money to keep
the settlement going, all right, And so just like, all right,
(13:34):
if you're down there on the picket line and you
are browbeating employers into paying wages, okay.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
Pretty good thing to do.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Yeahuh yeah. She moved back to the East Coast after
she did that. For a couple of years, she went
to Philly. She worked full time with an organization that
seemed to be fighting sex trafficking as best as I
can tell, but all the writing about it is super euphemistic,
because no one is ever willing to say sex work
or even prostitution in old timey stuff.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
Right.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
She was there for two years. She moved to New
York City. She got her master's at Columbia, and her
master's thesis me, I feel like this just gives you
the idea of, you know, character, who she is is.
Her master's thesis was called a study of malnutrition in
one hundred and seven children from public school fifty one
mm hmm. And so she's just paying attention to and
(14:26):
studying and trying to alleviate the you know, impacts of poverty. Yeah,
she graduated in nineteen ten. She got a job running
the New York City Consumers League, fighting for workers' protections.
Their whole big radical idea was what if women and
children only had to work fifty four hours a week?
Speaker 3 (14:48):
So radical, I too radical for me. I think I
think we should be working these as much as they
wanted to do eighty hours a week at least.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah, how many hours are there, you know, yeah, figure
out always stick some more in there.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Because this was pre child labor laws, right.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Yeah, okay, which largely exists because of her and the
forty hour work week. All right, So there's not federal
child labor laws. There's like individual, piecemeal child labor laws
that keep coming up every time, like enough children fall
down a shaft in a mind that people get upset
or whatever, you know. Yeah, And so she's this style
(15:32):
of person that isn't super common anymore. That was a
really important part of the political landscape of the early
twentieth century, the social reformer. Most of these are white
women from middle class or upper class families, and some
of them did really incredible things. Some of them did
a bunch of fucked up things, same as any group
of people with any ideology or practice.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Yeah, FRANSS.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Perkins is one of the coolest social reformers I've ever read.
Nice because she really did seem to mean it and
stuck up for things at great personal expense regularly.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Mm hmm. Yeah, I guess I don't know how long
the practice of virtue signaling has been happening, but I
guess it wasn't like as advantageous to people back then
as it is or could be now.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
So Yeah, she like got called a kami Jew a lot,
you know, like and not in like derogatory in parentheses,
you know right, despite not being either of those, uh
and M. Although whenever people will call her accuser being
a Jews, she would write a thing being like, I
(16:48):
would not be ashamed to be a Jew. Jews are great,
but I'm not one, which is the Tolkien approach. That's
what Tolkien did when the Nazis were like, hey, we
want to translate your work into German by we don't
know if you're Airyan enough. M.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
I did not realize that happened.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Yeah, he kind of told them to fuck off. He
wrote like a polite fuck off. And a mean fuck off,
and he gave them both to his publisher and was like,
send them one of these. It's up to you.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Okay, all right, I have even more respect for Tolkien now.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Yeah. So Parkins was living in New York City in
nineteen eleven when a workplace mass murder took place. That
usually gets called a tragedy, but I don't think it's tragic.
I think it's mass murder. The triangle shirtwaist fire.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
You heard of this, I've heard of it. I know
very little detail.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Well, let me tell you some details about it.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
It'll be one of the more horrific parts of this
week's episodes. But before I tell you something horrific, I'll
tell you something even more horrific. Did you know that
in the middle of a show, someone's going to just
start talking to you in a different voice and try
and convince you to buy things?
Speaker 4 (18:00):
Hmm?
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Yeah, I did know about that, and that is truly
the most horrific thing that could happen.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Well, brace yourselves and remember this podcast is brought to
you by medieval weaponry. Whenever you have a problem, you
can solve it with a mace or a flail. Or
a sword or a spear or a polearm. But they
didn't pay me enough money to read off the different
kinds of polearms because most of those sound French and
I can't pronounce them. Here's other ads, ed, we're back,
(18:37):
So which of those medieval weapons did you find? You
know during the ads about different weapons?
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Well, I just googled flail because I didn't know what
that was. And I mean, now that I'm looking at it,
I have definitely seen these, but I feel like, I mean,
speaking of Tolkien, this is what the witch king of
whatever the fuck tries to kill one of two women
in the whole French highs. Yeah, and also don't remember
her name?
Speaker 2 (19:03):
A Win no, A Okay, See, now I'm going to
lose all of my credit because I'm in a token
themed black metal band and right now I can't remember.
I think it's the way it's King of Agmar.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
Yeah. Yeah, and he's trying to kill I think a
Win on the battlefield at the end of the third movie.
I haven't read the book, so I don't know if
it lines up. I don't think. I don't think these
the women are in the books.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Really, no, this this thing is in the books. I've
heard that Tolkien's like daughter or something or someone was like,
what the fuck are you doing? Why are there no
women in this?
Speaker 3 (19:35):
And he was like, oh right, fine, final add one
in the book, and then a second one in the
appendices or something. But anyway, so the witch King of
Agmar is using something very similar to this weapon to
a flail to try to kit and she's like I
am no. And he's like no, living man can't kill me.
(19:55):
And she's like I am no. Man stabs him in
the face.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Yeah, yeah, So that's your pick as a flail.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Cool, So the triangle shirtwaist fire. The garment industry is
a big part of New York City. He still is, honestly,
but the garment industry, the conditions were atrocious around that time.
In nineteen oh nine, the Yiddish speaking garment workers, about
twenty thousand of them, had an uprising. It's called the
(20:29):
Uprising of the twenty thousand, just both fairly literal and
yet also evocative. We'll probably cover this more at some point,
because I've always wanted to cover I have like this
like sort of master spreadsheet of topics that at some
point I swear I'm going to cover. And there's a
Jewish labor organizer named Clara Lemlich who's been on that
list since the very beginning, and she was one of
(20:52):
the primary organizers of this. Okay, but that strike was
twenty thousand Jewish women on strike for eleven weeks and
changed the way that labor organizing works in America. We're
actually gonna do two. There's gonna be two strikes during
this this week. That will change a lot of things,
because we often on the show talk about how shitty
the AFL, the American Federation of Labor, used to be,
(21:14):
and they hated the idea of organizing anyone who wasn't
a white man from one of the approved of European countries,
and so they were not organizing the Jewish women of
New York City. Most of these workers weren't unionized, but
essentially a bunch of spontaneous strikes broke out at once
(21:35):
over the conditions that they were living under. Traditional unions
showed up and were like, oh, like maybe we should strike,
maybe we shouldn't, And then folks were like, now we're
not fucking waiting for you, We're just doing it. By
the end of the first day, there was twenty thousand
people on strike. Ninety percent of these workers were Jewish
and seventy percent of them were women. In one month,
(21:57):
seven hundred and twenty three people were arrested or any strikes.
Clara Lemlich, one of the main organizers, had her ribs
broken and was arrested a total of seventeen times during
this month. Whoa you gotta like work at to get
arrested that many times.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
That's like one every other day in a month.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Yeah, totally. You get let out the next morning, you
take a day off, get some catch of breath, but.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Then the day after that you're back at it getting arrested,
I know, and h honestly good for her.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Yeah. And my favorite is that a ten year old
girl is convicted of assaulting a scab and I hope
she did it.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
Yeah, yes, that well. I recently rewatched Newsy's Excellent, which yes, yes, yes, yes,
and that invokes memories of just scenes of that movie. Yeah,
where you know you've got kids just like beating the
crap out of scabs and stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah, And folks are interested, they can check out our
two parter on the actual Newsy strike. After eleven weeks.
The strike ended in something of a partial victory. The
strikers won the fifty two hour work week and they
no longer had to pay for their own tools.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Okay, yeah, I mean it again, sounds a little too
radical for me.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
But yeah, totally, and they won a few other things besides.
It also won women the attention of the large like
moderate unions for better or worse, honestly, and more of
them started being less afraid of unionizing women. Meanwhile, there's
already the industrial workers of the world who are going
to come up again in this episode later, who are
organizing with people of color and women and were started
(23:42):
in part by a woman of color and things like that.
But the big moderate unions didn't bother with women. This
didn't turn everything around this strike, and it didn't stop
one of the largest workplace accidents. It gets called in
history the Triangle shirtwaist fire. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was
(24:03):
this fucked up fire trap. It was the top three
floors of a ten story building, and it was filled
to the brim with fabric. Because like when you'd finish
making your shirt waist, you would just leave the scraps
in a bin under your workstation had two shitty elevators
that barely worked. There were no sprinklers. And then here's
the most fun part. Workers were locked in all day.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Oh okay, so trapped. Yeah it's not unlike the m
Night Shamalan movie Trap.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
I believe you, but have not seen this.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
I haven't seen it either, but I have seen the
trailer and that's enough for me.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yeah. Fair.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
We did a deep dive on the triangle shirtwaist fire
on bastards too.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Oh cool. Okay, yeah, that makes more sense. There's not
really a I will present two heroes of the shirtwaist fire, but.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
It's mostly a bomber.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Yeah. Yeah. So they were locked in to keep them
from taking unauthorized breaks, which is stealing time from the
bosses or stealing things outright. And then on March twenty fifth,
nineteen eleven, the place caught fire. The guy holding the
key to the exit doors was one of the first
people to escape, so the door stayed locked. He took
(25:17):
the key with him. Wow, and this is mass murder
by the capitalist class. The flimsy fire escape fell like
the fire just destroyed the fire escape, which meant that
twenty people who were standing on it fell one hundred
feet to their death. The fire department didn't have ladders
tall enough to reach the eighth floor. The two heroes
(25:38):
are the elevator operators, Joseph Zito and gasper Montereo. They
went up and down three times into the fire, and
one of them stopped because the elevator itself was disabled
by the flames, and the other one stopped when the
elevator was disabled by people fall to their deaths on
(26:00):
top of it. But they went three times up into
the fire and rescued as many people as they could.
So yeah, one by one, people, mostly women and girls,
jump to their death from a burning building while people
watched in horror. One hundred and twenty three women and
girls died and twenty three men died. It is one
of the worst industrial workplace murders in US history. And
(26:25):
in the crowd outside of this, Francis Perkins was standing
watching all of this happen, unable to help. And so
she'd already dedicated her life, right she was like, Oh,
I'm going to go help people, you know, But obviously
this like double dedicated her. And actually, you know, she
later has a quote being like the New Deal was
(26:46):
born while I watched this fire happen and it it
kind of you know, there are these things that happen
all the time, and then there's sometimes there's just too
much and people are like, Okay, that's that's a step
too far, right, because people have been dying in these
workplace quote unquote accidents for years to centuries, you know,
and the Triangle shortwaist fire was like too much for people.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
Yeah, it's a tipping point, I guess.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Yeah. So lots of things came out of it. But
one of the things that came out of it that
involves Francis Perkins is that people formed a new citizens group,
the Committee on Safety, and Perkins was the executive secretary
of this group, and they developed new fire codes and
they basically like developed things to bring to legislature and
be like, do this goddamn thing, Hey, please save people's
(27:36):
lives or whatever. And that's what she worked on for
a long time. But she worked on something else too,
and this isn't an ad transition. She worked on moving
up in class by marrying a rich guy, which is
good work if you can get it.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
I mean I'm trying. Yeah, I've been applying to these jobs. Yeah,
for years you know, and so far haven't really landed one.
But one day I'm not going to give up hope
that I will get the job of being partner to
(28:11):
a person much richer than me. Yeah not, because here's
what it is. I want to trick a rich man
into marrying me to secretly redistribute his wealth. Yes, and
so that I can have a swimming pool. Those are
the two big things I would like in my life.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Yeah, like one nice thing for you and then share
the rest. This is one for me, one for them.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
I genuinely see no problem with this plan, Thank you
so much.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
So.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
A couple of years after the shirtwaist fire, France has
got married and this wasn't a big deal to her.
She she wasn't sure she ever wanted to get married
at all. She married this rich asshole named Paul Wilson,
and I say asshole in the technical sense, and that
he was a piece of shit. M She changed her
name legally, but she never went by missus Wilson or
(29:01):
anything like that. She stayed Francis Perkins. And for years
this was like always used against her, like, oh, you're
a communist because you didn't take your husband's name or
whatever you know, so dumb. Yeah, this is the stupidest
thing ever heard. Yeah, okay, And so she marries his man,
and she starts living in a more upper class life,
like now she's like servants and shit. And then he
(29:25):
cheated on her and she was like, all right, well,
I'm gonna dump this man. But then she realized she
was pregnant and she decided, probably due to whatever, for
whatever reason, she was like, divorce is no longer an option.
And he was at this point became physically abusive to her.
Pretty soon though. He wound up institutionalized, and he spent
(29:45):
most of his life, the rest of his life in
various psychiatric institutions. He like drank himself into oblivion and
then started losing all of his money by sinking his
family fortune into gold. That would have been a good
ad transition, but it's still not one because if you
you think all of your money into gold right before depression,
you lose all of your money, despite what advertisers claim.
(30:08):
And he kind of just lost track of reality, and
he spent most of his time institutionalized, and she spent
most of her time sleeping alone in a twin size bed.
It is probable that Francis Perkins was queer. She had
that hallmark historically close friendships with a few women, like
one at a time where she lived with a woman
(30:28):
for decades and then later after that woman died, she
moved in with a different woman. Right. There's no direct
evidence of her having a sexual relationship with any women,
but there likely wouldn't be. And it's one of the
sort of interesting quirks of queer history where like when
you look at like historically close friends that like you're like, oh, well,
(30:50):
they're lesbians. Sometimes that's true, and sometimes that just doesn't
map to our modern conceptions of queerness, right, because like, hmm,
she absolutely had a close and intimate sexual or not
relationship with these women, and you know, it was probably
the most important relationship in her life besides the relationship
with her daughter, and like what it looked like, we
(31:13):
don't know. She was a very private person despite as
she like got more and more higher up in the
government and stuff, and she also burned all of her
personal correspondence.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
So okay, all right, well maybe there's some saucy things
in there and she just I don't want she had
to protect herself. Yeah, that's the thing. About you know,
queer history and speculations of whether or not people engaged
in any manner of like queer romance or sexuality or
anything like that. Is that you know, most people do
(31:47):
sex in private, and and it leaves not that much
evidence behind. So yeah, there is, there's a lot of speculation.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Especially gay sex.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
Yeah, there's no pregnancies to show for it, so yeah, Yeah,
that's the tricky thing about confirming suspicions like that.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Yeah, And like she's sometimes considered a queer icon. I
think it's fair. Yeah, you know, but we can't like
confirm nor deny. Sure, and she kept her personal life
out of the press as much as possible, and I
don't mind respecting her on that here. Okay, to be clear,
if I had all the saucy details, i'd be telling
(32:29):
you I have tose yeah, But instead, what I'll tell
you about is that the flail our sponsor the flail
there's several different versions of it. There's the one that's
sort of you know, a ball and chain, right with
spikes attached to a short handle, And these are fairly
effective at getting past someone who has a shield or
other armor, right, because it goes over it you know,
(32:51):
these are not necessarily particularly historically accurate weapons. They were
sometimes only used in jousting. But the flail, as a
peasant weapon, was a big two handed stick with a
small length of rope and then another piece of wood,
and this was used in agricultural work, and so these
(33:12):
became what peasant uprisings preferred to bring down mounted knights.
M okay, and you too can bring down mounted knights
by buying medieval weaponry from our sponsor, the village Blacksmith.
Here's other ads, just in case. Other ads are part
of it too, and we're back, Sophie. Which of those
(33:43):
weapons did you find most appealing?
Speaker 1 (33:46):
I mean, I'm always going to go for an axe.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Yeah, it's classic, gets the work done.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
Yeah right.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
So Perkins continued on her career, and soon she was
appointed to New York's Industrial Commission, which put her into
negotiations with labor unions. If all liberals were like Perkins,
the world would be such a better place. She was
working on this like negotiation with a bunch of miners
when it came out in court. I think in court
that the miners were planning on blowing up their bosses
(34:17):
with dynamite, and like destroying their workplace. Hell, yeah, I
know that would have gotten them onto this show. And
she is like the representative of the government here, right,
and she's like negotiating, and she manages to convince the
court to not put them on trial for conspiracy by
dredging up inflammatory letters from the employers that kind of
(34:40):
made it be like, yeah, well, I don't know, it's
like would have been fine.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
You know, they were gonna get what's coming to them.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Yeah, And so she saves all these miners from a
conspiracy trial.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Franklin Roosevelt became Governor of New York in nineteen twenty nine,
and he appointed her Industrial Commissioner for New York State,
and this makes her the first woman in the governor's
cabinet in New York. As historian Rebecca Graham put it,
Perkins managed the largest and likely the most progressive state
level labor department in the nation. Together, they established a
(35:15):
State Committee for the Stabilization of Industry, which spearheaded jobs
programs to curtail unemployment in New York between nineteen twenty
nine and nineteen thirty two. And obviously, the Great Depression
hits in nineteen twenty nine, Right, Yeah, and so everyone
is like, oh, us having jobs again would be kind
(35:36):
of cool. We don't like starving to death. What if
we had someone who could do that for the country,
Like that guy's doing it in New York. Can he
do it for the whole country? And so in nineteen
thirty two, FDR won the presidential election by like an
overwhelming degree. It is the fourth least close election in
US history, with the other two like I think number
(35:59):
one and too or George Washington. Well makes sense, Yeah,
he was sort of grandfathered in practically. Yeah, an FDR
ends up going on to become the US's longest serving president,
and he's like, I learned a lot of bad stuff
about him during this episode, right, but a lot of
(36:19):
his good stuff comes from Francis Perkins, you know.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Okay, so the credit that he usually gets for doing
good stuff is probably actually credit that is owed to her.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah, right, And which is funny because she wrote one
of the first books on him, and she gives him
credit for all of her own ideas. Oh man, because
she's so like, I'm just doing this for the public.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Yeah. Well she's humble, I guess.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
And so there's like times that historians have had to
go back and debunk her own claims in which she's
claiming to not take credit for a bunch of stuff, huh.
And part of that is because she's so humble, right,
But part of it is she is a woman politician
in a place where you are not supposed to be
a woman politician, right, And so people are constantly attacking
(37:08):
her and constantly deriding her, and like she has to
play the political game of like, oh, this isn't my idea,
and like.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
I'm a silly woman with a small woman brain. I
didn't come up with any of this.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Yeah, And she like can't seem arrogant or her career
will be over, you know. And so FDR becomes president
and he immediately turns around's like, hey, you are my
secretary of labor in New York. Do you want to
be my secretary of labor in the federal government even
though that's never been done? And she's like, no, I don't,
(37:47):
and she turns him down. She's fifty two years old,
she's got sixteen year old daughter, her husband's in an institution,
and she just doesn't want the attention. I also, and
this is like subtext, this is like my inference, and
I'm not the world's expert on this person, right, I
think she might be a little bit too radical. I
think she might be like, the fuck is the government's
(38:08):
not gonna be able to do any of this shit,
like the federal government. You know, she might be cynical,
and that might be my own like reading into it.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
I don't know sure.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
But then FDR gohoest tour and says what will it take?
And she's like, fine, I will do it if you,
and she writes this pie in a sky list. She's like,
I want minimum wage laws, I want unemployment insurance, I
want public works projects, I want general economic relief across
the entire country.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Hmmm.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
She describes the new.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
Deal mm hmm, thinking that like, oh this, he's never
going to go for it. And the way that like
if there's a job that I don't really want to do,
all like jack up my rate, right, be like what's
the most expensive I would be willing to do this
for thinking that no one's going to pay for it,
and I'm like this is my rate, and then people
will be like okay, and I'm like fuck now I
(38:59):
have to do this. Yeah, but I've been getting the.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Money for which explains your first three husbands.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
Yeah right right, yeah, yeah, precisely. But it's still no pool.
I still don't have a swimming pool. So I have
to keep going.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Keep trying. Yeah, And so he looks at this list
and he's like, yeah, okay, I'll back you in that.
So she agrees and she's sworn in and she's the
first Madam Secretary and it like literally people are like, well,
we don't know what to call you, and like someone
who's like really versed in that book, Robert's Rules of Order,
was like, I think Madam Secretary. And so she becomes
(39:34):
Madame Secretary.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
Most of what's been written about her, which is worth
talking about, but is not what I'm going to focus on,
is her work fighting for the New Deal in the
nineteen thirties. She was instrumental to the Social Security Act
of nineteen thirty five. She drafted the Fair Labor Standards Act,
which is what banned child labor in the United States,
setting up the minimum wage and cementing what thousands of
(39:57):
workers have been fighting for for like one hundred years
at this point, the forty hour work week. And I like,
I want to give her credit but I also want
to give credit to all the people who have been
fighting and dying for one hundred years to get to
this point. But like, absolutely a lot of this is
the wildest progressive in government, being like all right, we're
(40:19):
doing this, you know. So if you enjoy the Weekend,
thank Francis Perkins as well as all the labor people.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
You mean, pop R and B star the Weekend. That
was her, She just coverd the Weekend.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Wow, yeah, totally, which I totally know.
Speaker 4 (40:35):
It is from the famously worst show on television.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
The Idol of the Weekend.
Speaker 3 (40:43):
Yeah, oh man, a lot of time.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
But more important to our story, the crux of our story.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
What do you mean.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Is I don't know any TV show that could I
even know some TV shows I watch TV. I they
live under a and I don't remember actors' names. But
I watched a television I watched Over the Garden Wall
the other.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
Wow, oh my gosh, the animated show.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Right, yeah, it's so good. It was so good. I
have like two episodes left, but I'm like so into
it just to you wait, it's probably what I'm gonna
do after after we finished recording. Nice. So the Department
of Labor that she's now in charge of, oversaw both
the Immigration Services and the Naturalization Services, which are two
separate things in the United States. At that point. The
(41:32):
Department of Labor was reasonably new when she took over.
It was formed in nineteen thirteen, and the first heads
of the department had very explicitly anti immigrant labor stances.
Did you know that Herbert Hoover, the Quaker president of
the nineteen twenties, deported up to two million people to Mexico,
(41:54):
about half of whom were probably US citizens.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
I did not know that.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
No, either. It's not talked about much. It's pretty fucked up.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
I also didn't know he was a Quaker. Is that
what you said?
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Yeah? No, I think no one knows he's a Quaker,
which honestly, he doesn't deserve it, because he's a fucking
racist who deported two million.
Speaker 3 (42:11):
Right. Quakers are pretty cool, right.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
He basically just was like, Oh, all of the economic depression,
it's probably Mexican's faults, and then like just like deported
a ton of people, including US citizens.
Speaker 3 (42:25):
Well fuck him.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
Then.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Yeah, Anyway, immigration law in the US, so the heads
of the department before her had all been explicitly anti immigrant,
and it was weirdly worked out for her, like you
know how, like right now, especially when Trump looked like
he was likely to the next president. Whenever Biden would
do something to like bring power to the president, everyone
(42:48):
would be like, what the fuck are you doing. You're
gonna have a fucking Trump's gonna be after you. Why
would you put more power into his hands? Yeah, all
of these, like previous Department of Labor people who ran
immigration were all super right wing and assumed that everyone
else would forever be super right wing because both political
parties were entirely anti immigrant at this point, right right,
(43:08):
So they gave a lot of discretionary power to the
head of the Department of Labor.
Speaker 3 (43:16):
Assuming that they would be anti immigrant.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Yeah, okay, Immigration law in the US, this is going
to shock you, has always been racist as shit. What
I know, from the very first we can show up
and kill everyone we want pilgrims to the also, let's
own a lot of black people, folks. To the first
federal immigration law, which is called the Chinese Exclusion Act
(43:39):
of eighteen eighty two. Right, just you know, racist, which
is also particularly interesting because they had Chinese labor had
just built the railroads, like right, just crossed the fucking
continent with railroads, and then we were like, all right,
they built that for us. Fuck them.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
Now.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
By nineteen twenty five we had a border patrol. And
the general attitude of xenophobic Americans has been from the
start basically white Protestants are good and everyone else is
somewhere in a hierarchy of bad. And one of the
types of people that WASPS really really didn't like was Jews.
But anti immigration laws didn't start specifically with Jews, because
there wasn't a lot of Jewish immigration in the US
(44:18):
until like the Pograms in Russia and Eastern Europe like
really started kicking in in the eighteen eighties or so.
After banning Chinese people in eighteen eighty two, the eighteen
ninety one Immigration Act banned polygamists. I want to know
more about that. I want to know who the polygamists
were who were coming into the country. Yeah, because the
only polygamists I can think of are were from the US.
(44:41):
They live in Utah. Yeah, I don't know anyway.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
Ooh, I'm intrigued.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
I know. So the eighteen ninety one Immigration Act band polygamists.
People with contagious diseases, people with quote moral turpitude, and anyone.
Speaker 4 (44:54):
Who might that's intentionally vague.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Yeah, absolutely, and anyone who might need welfare. Like one
of the main things that they talk about all the
time is to like not become a public ward. Then
the next law the anarchists can claim because it was
a law specifically nineteen oh three law specifically bans anarchists.
To be fair, an anarchists had just shot at US
(45:19):
President's of death. The Immigration Act of nineteen seventeen banned
poor people, sick people, and disabled people.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Adding ableism to the mix.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
I see, yeah, because they're basically like, well, we only
want people who make our country stronger on both a
like racial level and a like labor and economy level.
Has nothing to do with morality or making sure that
people can live or anything like that.
Speaker 3 (45:45):
Right in the US has never been about that.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
No, which is why it's so interesting when there's people
like Perkins who are part of the US government who
are about that. But then there's a lot of things
that they can and can't do because of who like
when they try and play these games, it gets really interesting.
And then in nineteen twenty four, the US passed like
probably the worst of all of these. The Immigration Act
(46:09):
of nineteen twenty four is sometimes called the National Origins Act,
and it set up quotas about how many people can
come from what countries. And you will be shocked to
know that those quotas were based on how white the
people were. All of this is happening during peak like
race science eugenics times, when it is considered established science
(46:32):
that Italians are prone to crimes of personal violence and
Jews are driven by profit and greed and are physically weak.
This is science for forty years until it is repealed
in nineteen sixty five, only a certain number of people
per country could come to the US. I'm going to
talk at the end about why refugees from Palestine can't
(46:54):
get to the US. But we'll talk about at the end.
If you're from the UK, people from the UK can
come Germany and Ireland. Those are like second best Eastern Europe,
not looking so great anywhere else in the world, Like,
I don't know what the fuck you're thinking. Sixty five
thousand people a year could come from the UK, thirty
three hundred from Sweden. Most countries in the world, from
(47:16):
like Japan to China to Iceland, India to Australia, to
Palestine to Nepall and all of those one hundred people
a year.
Speaker 3 (47:25):
Whoa so much for a melting pot?
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, yeah, not really. And the quotas themselves were you know, racist,
not just in terms of national origin, but they also
divided the world into seven different racial categories. And this
system was used for massive deportations. This is the system
by which Herbert Hoover deported somewhere between three hundred thousand
(47:49):
and two million people to Mexico, forty to sixty percent
of whom were United States citizens. I mean, it really
just sounds like it's just now hundred years ago. The
KKK and quote unquote cowboys patrolled the borders and like
would round people up, and they were like raiding weddings
and they were raiding like social centers and anywhere that
(48:11):
they thought that migrant labor might be. You know, Hitler
himself complimented the quota system of the US.
Speaker 3 (48:20):
Yanks, and that's how you know it's the worst thing.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
Yep. Ever, her yep, so Perkins is now in charge
of labor and therefore of the immigration services. She does
a number of things right off the bat First, she
combined immigration services and naturalization services into the i INS,
which is of course now the precursor to the modern
ICE Immigration Customs Enforcement, which is under the Department of
(48:46):
Homeland Security, but for her it was under Labor and
she shifted its focus from deportations to helping immigrants feel
welcome and get their feet on the ground underneath them.
She didn't have total control. She couldn't get rid of
these quota systems. For example, right Congress controlled the quotas,
and then like US, consuls in different countries controlled who
could apply, like who got visas?
Speaker 3 (49:08):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
But what she did manage to do was be like, whoops,
we ran out of money and we have to lay
off the following fifty three people, who were all the
most xenophobic people in the agency.
Speaker 3 (49:19):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
She brought social workers to Ellis Island and improve the
conditions in the waiting rooms there. She tried to ban
arresting immigrants without warrants, but this policy only lasted for
a few years before massive pushback from Congress and interest
groups reversed it. She appointed a Scottish immigrant to the
position of Commissioner of Immigration, and his whole idea was like, well,
(49:42):
we're going to do stuff until they find out that
we're not allowed to do this stuff.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (49:47):
Yes, And she desegregated the Department of Labor because one
of the fun things is that the federal government was
actually desegregated, like shortly after the Civil War or whatever, right,
and then it was resegregated because we live in a
racist hellhole and progress is not linear, and every time
we advance causes through great effort, if we let down
our guard at all, things slip back into horrible fascist
(50:09):
hell whole. Yes, so that's what she did, and she
did an awful lot more, and specifically she did a
lot of work getting people away from the Nazis. But
that's not what we're going to talk about now, because
what we're going to talk about now is one we're
gonna make fun of everyone for having to wait till
Wednesday in order to hear the rest of the story.
Speaker 4 (50:27):
Hah haha, losers.
Speaker 2 (50:29):
Yeah, and we're going to talk about how people can
watch and listen to your podcast, including the ones that
aren't jokes, like sitting in on the couch with Kaitlin Dorante.
Speaker 3 (50:40):
Yes, So if you want to consume that you can
follow me on Instagram at Caitlin Dorante and watch my stories,
which periodically. I used to do it a lot more,
but now most of my stories is me sharing things
about Palestine and Congo and Sudan and things of that nature.
(51:05):
But every once in a while I'll be like, hey,
it's another episode of sitting on my couch with Caitlin,
and it's usually to promote screenwriting classes that I'm offering.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
I've heard you have a master's degree in screenwriting.
Speaker 3 (51:19):
Well, again, I would never mention it, but I do
use it to teach screenwriting classes and I have a
whole cluster of them coming up in September, So if
you're interested in that, you can go to my website
Kaitlindronte dot com slash classes, and I have like an
intro class, so that's suitable for beginners or you know,
(51:41):
people who want a refresher, and then I also offer
workshopping classes, so if you already have a little bit
of a background and you're currently working on something that
you want to workshop and get feedback on, you can
take that class. So that's what I've got, and then
I also, of course the Bechdel Cast with my co
(52:03):
host Jamie Loftus, and we talk about movies through an
intersectional seminus lens. So that's all the places you can
find me.
Speaker 2 (52:12):
Yay. You can find me by going to your bookstore
or library and being like, do you have The Sapling
Cage And they'll be like, it's not September twenty fourth,
how could we have it? It's not out yet, And
then you can say, well, I really want it when
it does come out, and then they'll say, oh, we know,
because everyone wants it. Hopefully it'll go like that. But
(52:32):
if it doesn't go like that, it's still worth doing
because I have a book called The Sapling Cage that
someone asked me for a three sentence pitch of it,
and I gave them a three word pitch in which
that's a transwitch ya hell yes, And that comes out
on September twenty fourth. Sophia You Got Anything.
Speaker 1 (52:49):
Behind the Bastards is now on YouTube. You can look
at our phases if you so desire. That's YouTube dot
com slash at Behind the Bastards and Closing Media has
a brand new weekly show hosted by Molly Conger called
Weird Little Guys.
Speaker 4 (53:03):
Check it out if you dare.
Speaker 2 (53:05):
Hell yeah, all right, we'll see you all on Wednesday.
Speaker 3 (53:08):
Oh babe.
Speaker 1 (53:15):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly reminder that when there's bad things, there's people
trying to do good things like podcast. Wait, no, that's
the thing that talks about the things like save thousands
of people from Nazis. I'm your host, Marta Kiljoy. I've
only done one of those things, and it's not the
(00:25):
saving people thing. It's the podcast thing. But with me
is my guest Caitlyn Durante, who is host of the
hit podcasts Sitting on my couch with Caitlyn Durante and
sitting in my bed with Caitlyn Durante. How are you well?
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Yeah, my most famous works. Also, I would argue that
having a podcast has the potential to save thousands of lives. Okay,
so maybe you are doing both. Yeah, personally saving everyone.
That's the Cool Zone Media motto. With our producer Sophie.
Speaker 4 (01:02):
Hi, Sophie, I don't feel like saving everyone.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Yeah, that's fair.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
I'd save both of you though, Oh thank you. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Well, hopefully we won't enter a world in the next
couple of years where that needs.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
To happen, but yeah, you know, wishful thinking.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Also part of making this podcast is our audio engineer, Rory.
Everyone say hi to Rory. Hi. Rory Hi, Ri Hi.
And our theme music was written for us by unwoman.
And this week I want to do something I probably
haven't done enough of yet. I want to talk about
someone who worked within the system. I'm going out of
(01:42):
my comfort zone here. I genuinely had a little bit
of a crisis about it. It's worth it. It's so good.
I want to talk about someone who worked within the
system to do that thing that we care so much
about on this show, save people's lives from fascist violence.
I find this story really fascinating. I'll tell you what
it is in a minute. But I find ifascinating because
it gets at the limits of what can be done
(02:02):
working within the system, or rather it gets it how
we can get people, can get a lot done, and
then there's certain things that can't get done. And it's
a story about a woman who broke not only like
every glass ceiling, but actually non glass ceilings. I think
the idea behind a glass ceiling is that it's like invisible.
You think you should be able to be whatever, but
(02:23):
you can't because you're a girl. Right, that's the I.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Actually don't know that I know what the metaphor means
exactly now that I think about it.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
That's what I've always assumed, right, is that you're like, Oh,
no one's telling you you can't be CEO. You just
can't be CEO. Right. That's like the glass ceiling, I think, right.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Because the boys won't allow it.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, but this person broke not glass ceilings, but regular ceilings,
just probably plaster and lathe. I think drywall didn't get
popularized until after this. I really should have spent more
of my time researching different construction methods of ceilings in
the nineteen thirties, but I didn't. Women were not supposed
to do what she did. Because today we are going
(03:07):
to talk about the longest serving Secretary of Labor of
the United States, who was the first woman to be
secretary of anything in the US government. She was the
woman for whom Madam's Secretary was coined as an honorific
and her name is Francis Perkins. Either of you ever
heard of Francis Perkins?
Speaker 3 (03:26):
I have not.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Nope, I hadn't either. In certain circles, she's very popular
because of all the stuff we're going to talk about,
but overall, for some weird reason women get left out
of history, even when they are the first woman minister,
but also the longest or not minister secretary whatever, but
(03:48):
of a department of the government, as well as the
longest serving secretary of labor the US has ever had,
and no one ever talks about her. She is most
famous as the woman who brought us the New Deal,
and she was heavily involved in the fight for Social Security.
You could honestly make the case that this is the
(04:09):
woman who brought you the weekend. But we also like
talking about how the labor unions brought us the weekend.
But like obviously, lots of different things happened in order
to make things laws, and usually union striking people don't
make laws, but sometimes people like this do. But I'm
going to talk about her not because of that work,
but because of how hard and endlessly she worked, with
(04:33):
both success and failure, to rescue German Jews during Hitler's reign,
which is a good thing to do, I'll say, especially kids,
and her whole thing was rescuing kids.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
So she was born Fanny Carly Perkins on April tenth,
eighteen eighty, in the South end of Boston to sort
of middle class Protestant parents of the Republican variety. But
back when Republican meant like Abraham Lincoln's party, you know,
the like center left party. I even I think I
(05:12):
got a better understanding now of like when these two
parties switched than I ever have.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Ooh, please say.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
It's basically during it's the beginning of the twentieth century.
But like the New Deal is kind of what did it?
It seems like so like FDR in the nineteen thirties.
So she was born into this Republican family and then
they moved to not Worcester, Worcester, I.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Believe Wooster, Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
When she was two, and her family opened a stationary shop.
And she lives most of her life like fairly wealthy,
even though she was born on the wrong side of town, right,
and there's a lot of like she kind of she
kind of liked being upper middle class or like kind
of rich, and so she would always like when people
would claim that she was born in the rich part
of Boston, did not correct people.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
Well, South End, I mean it's probably different than it
was because South End and Southee are different neighborhoods. Southea
is like the working class.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Oh okay.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
And then the South End at least now again, it
might have been different one hundred years ago or whatever.
South End is like the gighborhood. Oh interesting in Boston. Yeah,
I think, Oh my gosh, it's been ten years since
I'm about to celebrate my ten year living in La anniversary. Wow,
brag to me.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Are you from Boston?
Speaker 3 (06:34):
I'm not from there, but I lived there for four years.
I went to famously, but I would never mention this.
I went to grad school at Boston University, where I
got a master's degree in screenwriting.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Wow. Again, never mentioned that.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
I would never mention that. But yeah, I lived there
for four years. And you know, twenty ten, South End
was like a very expensive you had to have a
pretty high income to be able to afford the rent there, okay,
And it was like specifically gay men, Yeah, live there
(07:07):
because lesbians live in Oh my god, Jamaica plane. I
want to say, is that the name of I don't
know it's again, it's been so long.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
As one of the only neighborhoods I've spent any time
in Boston, so I want them to be full of lesbians.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Okay, Well, there you go.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Okay, no. See. See, I haven't spent that much time
in Boston besides, of course jamake a plane hanging out
with the lesbians, of course. And that's actually useful to know.
I like the book that I was reading about this
part of it was like kind of saying, how this
is sort of a humble beginning, right. But I don't
know whether that's just as compared to where she ends
(07:46):
up classwise when she gets married, because she marries up
in a little bit okay, or whether in the eighteen
eighties the South End was like a more heavily immigrant
neighborhood or something like that, or of working class neighborhood.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
I'm sure it's something like that.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yeah, her parents were not immigrants. Her parents were wasps
all the way down and like had come from Maine
to live in Boston. She went off to college at
Mount Holyoake in eighteen ninety eight. And this wasn't her
family being like, oh, we're feminists. It's like, this is
her family being like, we're middle class, you know. And
(08:21):
she was in Stem she studied chemistry, biology, and physics whoa,
and the liberal education had its effects on her. I
think she was raised probably like kind of like raised
right politically from the start anyway.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
But right as in like correct or right yea again right, sorry,
that's correct, yeah, so left yeah, or progressive like I
would say that her politics are progressive.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
And she's one of the most progressive bureaucrats and in
power we've ever had in the United States. Certainly, by
today's standards, she's wildly progressive, and by her own her
year's standards, she was too. In college, she read a
book that had an impact on her that's come up
a bunch of times on this show before W E.
De Boys is the Soul of Black Folks. And she
(09:08):
went on tour with her school to the factories to
see how fucked up things were in the factories, and
she grew up with I've never had a positive impression
of like the Protestant work ethic, right, she grew up
with a version of the Protestant work ethic that I
think has been lost to time, which is the work
really hard at your chosen vocation, not work really hard
(09:31):
to get rich and fuck everyone over. And her chosen vocation,
she stated very explicitly, she was like, my chosen vocation
is social justice. Hell yeah, And then she worked into
her fucking eighties. It's social justice and then you know
stop because she died. After she graduated, she started teaching,
(09:55):
first in New England and then in Chicago. In Chicago,
she changed her name from Fanny to Francis, which from
my point of view just needs no defense, just sure,
no offense to Fanny as a name, but it doesn't
hold up.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
She was born like birth certificate says Fanny. Yeah, and
then she so she was born with the nickname, and
then she gave herself the formal version of the name.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Basically I guess so right, like, is Fanny short for Francis?
Speaker 3 (10:26):
I you know what, no one was either the name
Fanny or Francis.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
I could not say, yeah, I know of Francis, but
I think I would get in trouble if I call
them Fanny. I'm under the impression that she changed her
name specifically to Francis because she was into Saint Francis
of ASSISI the like Catholic and also Episcopal saint. Okay, okay,
because around this time she left the Protestant she grew
(10:54):
up New England Congregationalists, which I know nothing about, to
become an Episcopal, which is like the Anglican church, but
in America Catholic light, you get ritual and ceremony and
you still get to have Saint Francis. Okay, she took
the social justice thing very seriously, and soon she was
volunteering at the Hull House in Chicago, which was founded
(11:16):
by this person who's probably gonna end up a future
friend of the Pod, this social reformer named Jane Adams.
And this concept is real funny, like it doesn't hold
up great, but it's interesting. These are called settlement houses,
and the idea is that recent college graduates from like
the middle class would go live in these impoverished neighborhoods
(11:39):
in settlement houses to do social work within those neighborhoods.
And so it's kind of a like learn how the
other half live internship.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
What's it teachers? Teacher for America? Is that sort of
like that?
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah? Is that the thing that the movie with the
crap that the song is is about from the nineties?
Speaker 3 (12:02):
Probably I almost called it Teachers without Borders, so it
shows you how much I know about it. But that's
my understanding of teach for America. It's uh, I don't
think you necessarily even have to have any kind of
like teaching credentials or like a background in education, but
like they'll hire recent college grads in low income school
(12:24):
districts and have them teach for a year I think,
or some short amount of time. But yeah, it sounds
kind of like.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
That, Okay, Yes, And then the song is called Gangster's
Paradise by Coolio and it was then it was in
a movie Dangerous Minds. It was in the movie Dangerous Minds.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Okay, I've never seen it.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Okay, I think I watched it in the nineties when
it came out, but I couldn't promise you. A white
woman goes and teaches in a black school, and it's
like exploitation as best as I can tell, or at
least like and so it's like, is this thing that
obviously like there's a lot of problems with like rich
white people showing up until like migrant neighborhoods and stuff
and being like I know how to help things, right
mm hmm. But overall, everything I've personally read about these
(13:08):
settlement houses is actually fairly positive.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
But her duties included, quote, helping the nurse with a
sick family, working in a political campaign, joining a picket line,
compiling statistics on infant mortality, proofreading the magazine, browbeating employers
into paying wages unfairly withheld, or raising money to keep
the settlement going, all right, And so just like, all right,
(13:34):
if you're down there on the picket line and you
are browbeating employers into paying wages, okay.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
Pretty good thing to do.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Yeahuh yeah. She moved back to the East Coast after
she did that. For a couple of years, she went
to Philly. She worked full time with an organization that
seemed to be fighting sex trafficking as best as I
can tell, but all the writing about it is super euphemistic,
because no one is ever willing to say sex work
or even prostitution in old timey stuff.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
Right.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
She was there for two years. She moved to New
York City. She got her master's at Columbia, and her
master's thesis me, I feel like this just gives you
the idea of, you know, character, who she is is.
Her master's thesis was called a study of malnutrition in
one hundred and seven children from public school fifty one
mm hmm. And so she's just paying attention to and
(14:26):
studying and trying to alleviate the you know, impacts of poverty. Yeah,
she graduated in nineteen ten. She got a job running
the New York City Consumers League, fighting for workers' protections.
Their whole big radical idea was what if women and
children only had to work fifty four hours a week?
Speaker 3 (14:48):
So radical, I too radical for me. I think I
think we should be working these as much as they
wanted to do eighty hours a week at least.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah, how many hours are there, you know, yeah, figure
out always stick some more in there.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Because this was pre child labor laws, right.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Yeah, okay, which largely exists because of her and the
forty hour work week. All right, So there's not federal
child labor laws. There's like individual, piecemeal child labor laws
that keep coming up every time, like enough children fall
down a shaft in a mind that people get upset
or whatever, you know. Yeah, And so she's this style
(15:32):
of person that isn't super common anymore. That was a
really important part of the political landscape of the early
twentieth century, the social reformer. Most of these are white
women from middle class or upper class families, and some
of them did really incredible things. Some of them did
a bunch of fucked up things, same as any group
of people with any ideology or practice.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Yeah, FRANSS.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Perkins is one of the coolest social reformers I've ever read.
Nice because she really did seem to mean it and
stuck up for things at great personal expense regularly.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Mm hmm. Yeah, I guess I don't know how long
the practice of virtue signaling has been happening, but I
guess it wasn't like as advantageous to people back then
as it is or could be now.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
So Yeah, she like got called a kami Jew a lot,
you know, like and not in like derogatory in parentheses,
you know right, despite not being either of those, uh
and M. Although whenever people will call her accuser being
a Jews, she would write a thing being like, I
(16:48):
would not be ashamed to be a Jew. Jews are great,
but I'm not one, which is the Tolkien approach. That's
what Tolkien did when the Nazis were like, hey, we
want to translate your work into German by we don't
know if you're Airyan enough. M.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
I did not realize that happened.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Yeah, he kind of told them to fuck off. He
wrote like a polite fuck off. And a mean fuck off,
and he gave them both to his publisher and was like,
send them one of these. It's up to you.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Okay, all right, I have even more respect for Tolkien now.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Yeah. So Parkins was living in New York City in
nineteen eleven when a workplace mass murder took place. That
usually gets called a tragedy, but I don't think it's tragic.
I think it's mass murder. The triangle shirtwaist fire.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
You heard of this, I've heard of it. I know
very little detail.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Well, let me tell you some details about it.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
It'll be one of the more horrific parts of this
week's episodes. But before I tell you something horrific, I'll
tell you something even more horrific. Did you know that
in the middle of a show, someone's going to just
start talking to you in a different voice and try
and convince you to buy things?
Speaker 4 (18:00):
Hmm?
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Yeah, I did know about that, and that is truly
the most horrific thing that could happen.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Well, brace yourselves and remember this podcast is brought to
you by medieval weaponry. Whenever you have a problem, you
can solve it with a mace or a flail. Or
a sword or a spear or a polearm. But they
didn't pay me enough money to read off the different
kinds of polearms because most of those sound French and
I can't pronounce them. Here's other ads, ed, we're back,
(18:37):
So which of those medieval weapons did you find? You
know during the ads about different weapons?
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Well, I just googled flail because I didn't know what
that was. And I mean, now that I'm looking at it,
I have definitely seen these, but I feel like, I mean,
speaking of Tolkien, this is what the witch king of
whatever the fuck tries to kill one of two women
in the whole French highs. Yeah, and also don't remember
her name?
Speaker 2 (19:03):
A Win no, A Okay, See, now I'm going to
lose all of my credit because I'm in a token
themed black metal band and right now I can't remember.
I think it's the way it's King of Agmar.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
Yeah. Yeah, and he's trying to kill I think a
Win on the battlefield at the end of the third movie.
I haven't read the book, so I don't know if
it lines up. I don't think. I don't think these
the women are in the books.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Really, no, this this thing is in the books. I've
heard that Tolkien's like daughter or something or someone was like,
what the fuck are you doing? Why are there no
women in this?
Speaker 3 (19:35):
And he was like, oh right, fine, final add one
in the book, and then a second one in the
appendices or something. But anyway, so the witch King of
Agmar is using something very similar to this weapon to
a flail to try to kit and she's like I
am no. And he's like no, living man can't kill me.
(19:55):
And she's like I am no. Man stabs him in
the face.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Yeah, yeah, So that's your pick as a flail.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Cool, So the triangle shirtwaist fire. The garment industry is
a big part of New York City. He still is, honestly,
but the garment industry, the conditions were atrocious around that time.
In nineteen oh nine, the Yiddish speaking garment workers, about
twenty thousand of them, had an uprising. It's called the
(20:29):
Uprising of the twenty thousand, just both fairly literal and
yet also evocative. We'll probably cover this more at some point,
because I've always wanted to cover I have like this
like sort of master spreadsheet of topics that at some
point I swear I'm going to cover. And there's a
Jewish labor organizer named Clara Lemlich who's been on that
list since the very beginning, and she was one of
(20:52):
the primary organizers of this. Okay, but that strike was
twenty thousand Jewish women on strike for eleven weeks and
changed the way that labor organizing works in America. We're
actually gonna do two. There's gonna be two strikes during
this this week. That will change a lot of things,
because we often on the show talk about how shitty
the AFL, the American Federation of Labor, used to be,
(21:14):
and they hated the idea of organizing anyone who wasn't
a white man from one of the approved of European countries,
and so they were not organizing the Jewish women of
New York City. Most of these workers weren't unionized, but
essentially a bunch of spontaneous strikes broke out at once
(21:35):
over the conditions that they were living under. Traditional unions
showed up and were like, oh, like maybe we should strike,
maybe we shouldn't, And then folks were like, now we're
not fucking waiting for you, We're just doing it. By
the end of the first day, there was twenty thousand
people on strike. Ninety percent of these workers were Jewish
and seventy percent of them were women. In one month,
(21:57):
seven hundred and twenty three people were arrested or any strikes.
Clara Lemlich, one of the main organizers, had her ribs
broken and was arrested a total of seventeen times during
this month. Whoa you gotta like work at to get
arrested that many times.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
That's like one every other day in a month.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Yeah, totally. You get let out the next morning, you
take a day off, get some catch of breath, but.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Then the day after that you're back at it getting arrested,
I know, and h honestly good for her.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Yeah. And my favorite is that a ten year old
girl is convicted of assaulting a scab and I hope
she did it.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
Yeah, yes, that well. I recently rewatched Newsy's Excellent, which yes, yes, yes, yes,
and that invokes memories of just scenes of that movie. Yeah,
where you know you've got kids just like beating the
crap out of scabs and stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah, And folks are interested, they can check out our
two parter on the actual Newsy strike. After eleven weeks.
The strike ended in something of a partial victory. The
strikers won the fifty two hour work week and they
no longer had to pay for their own tools.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Okay, yeah, I mean it again, sounds a little too
radical for me.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
But yeah, totally, and they won a few other things besides.
It also won women the attention of the large like
moderate unions for better or worse, honestly, and more of
them started being less afraid of unionizing women. Meanwhile, there's
already the industrial workers of the world who are going
to come up again in this episode later, who are
organizing with people of color and women and were started
(23:42):
in part by a woman of color and things like that.
But the big moderate unions didn't bother with women. This
didn't turn everything around this strike, and it didn't stop
one of the largest workplace accidents. It gets called in
history the Triangle shirtwaist fire. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was
(24:03):
this fucked up fire trap. It was the top three
floors of a ten story building, and it was filled
to the brim with fabric. Because like when you'd finish
making your shirt waist, you would just leave the scraps
in a bin under your workstation had two shitty elevators
that barely worked. There were no sprinklers. And then here's
the most fun part. Workers were locked in all day.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Oh okay, so trapped. Yeah it's not unlike the m
Night Shamalan movie Trap.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
I believe you, but have not seen this.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
I haven't seen it either, but I have seen the
trailer and that's enough for me.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yeah. Fair.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
We did a deep dive on the triangle shirtwaist fire
on bastards too.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Oh cool. Okay, yeah, that makes more sense. There's not
really a I will present two heroes of the shirtwaist fire, but.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
It's mostly a bomber.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Yeah. Yeah. So they were locked in to keep them
from taking unauthorized breaks, which is stealing time from the
bosses or stealing things outright. And then on March twenty fifth,
nineteen eleven, the place caught fire. The guy holding the
key to the exit doors was one of the first
people to escape, so the door stayed locked. He took
(25:17):
the key with him. Wow, and this is mass murder
by the capitalist class. The flimsy fire escape fell like
the fire just destroyed the fire escape, which meant that
twenty people who were standing on it fell one hundred
feet to their death. The fire department didn't have ladders
tall enough to reach the eighth floor. The two heroes
(25:38):
are the elevator operators, Joseph Zito and gasper Montereo. They
went up and down three times into the fire, and
one of them stopped because the elevator itself was disabled
by the flames, and the other one stopped when the
elevator was disabled by people fall to their deaths on
(26:00):
top of it. But they went three times up into
the fire and rescued as many people as they could.
So yeah, one by one, people, mostly women and girls,
jump to their death from a burning building while people
watched in horror. One hundred and twenty three women and
girls died and twenty three men died. It is one
of the worst industrial workplace murders in US history. And
(26:25):
in the crowd outside of this, Francis Perkins was standing
watching all of this happen, unable to help. And so
she'd already dedicated her life, right she was like, Oh,
I'm going to go help people, you know, But obviously
this like double dedicated her. And actually, you know, she
later has a quote being like the New Deal was
(26:46):
born while I watched this fire happen and it it
kind of you know, there are these things that happen
all the time, and then there's sometimes there's just too
much and people are like, Okay, that's that's a step
too far, right, because people have been dying in these
workplace quote unquote accidents for years to centuries, you know,
and the Triangle shortwaist fire was like too much for people.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
Yeah, it's a tipping point, I guess.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Yeah. So lots of things came out of it. But
one of the things that came out of it that
involves Francis Perkins is that people formed a new citizens group,
the Committee on Safety, and Perkins was the executive secretary
of this group, and they developed new fire codes and
they basically like developed things to bring to legislature and
be like, do this goddamn thing, Hey, please save people's
(27:36):
lives or whatever. And that's what she worked on for
a long time. But she worked on something else too,
and this isn't an ad transition. She worked on moving
up in class by marrying a rich guy, which is
good work if you can get it.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
I mean I'm trying. Yeah, I've been applying to these jobs. Yeah,
for years you know, and so far haven't really landed one.
But one day I'm not going to give up hope
that I will get the job of being partner to
(28:11):
a person much richer than me. Yeah not, because here's
what it is. I want to trick a rich man
into marrying me to secretly redistribute his wealth. Yes, and
so that I can have a swimming pool. Those are
the two big things I would like in my life.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Yeah, like one nice thing for you and then share
the rest. This is one for me, one for them.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
I genuinely see no problem with this plan, Thank you
so much.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
So.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
A couple of years after the shirtwaist fire, France has
got married and this wasn't a big deal to her.
She she wasn't sure she ever wanted to get married
at all. She married this rich asshole named Paul Wilson,
and I say asshole in the technical sense, and that
he was a piece of shit. M She changed her
name legally, but she never went by missus Wilson or
(29:01):
anything like that. She stayed Francis Perkins. And for years
this was like always used against her, like, oh, you're
a communist because you didn't take your husband's name or
whatever you know, so dumb. Yeah, this is the stupidest
thing ever heard. Yeah, okay, And so she marries his man,
and she starts living in a more upper class life,
like now she's like servants and shit. And then he
(29:25):
cheated on her and she was like, all right, well,
I'm gonna dump this man. But then she realized she
was pregnant and she decided, probably due to whatever, for
whatever reason, she was like, divorce is no longer an option.
And he was at this point became physically abusive to her.
Pretty soon though. He wound up institutionalized, and he spent
(29:45):
most of his life, the rest of his life in
various psychiatric institutions. He like drank himself into oblivion and
then started losing all of his money by sinking his
family fortune into gold. That would have been a good
ad transition, but it's still not one because if you
you think all of your money into gold right before depression,
you lose all of your money, despite what advertisers claim.
(30:08):
And he kind of just lost track of reality, and
he spent most of his time institutionalized, and she spent
most of her time sleeping alone in a twin size bed.
It is probable that Francis Perkins was queer. She had
that hallmark historically close friendships with a few women, like
one at a time where she lived with a woman
(30:28):
for decades and then later after that woman died, she
moved in with a different woman. Right. There's no direct
evidence of her having a sexual relationship with any women,
but there likely wouldn't be. And it's one of the
sort of interesting quirks of queer history where like when
you look at like historically close friends that like you're like, oh, well,
(30:50):
they're lesbians. Sometimes that's true, and sometimes that just doesn't
map to our modern conceptions of queerness, right, because like, hmm,
she absolutely had a close and intimate sexual or not
relationship with these women, and you know, it was probably
the most important relationship in her life besides the relationship
with her daughter, and like what it looked like, we
(31:13):
don't know. She was a very private person despite as
she like got more and more higher up in the
government and stuff, and she also burned all of her
personal correspondence.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
So okay, all right, well maybe there's some saucy things
in there and she just I don't want she had
to protect herself. Yeah, that's the thing. About you know,
queer history and speculations of whether or not people engaged
in any manner of like queer romance or sexuality or
anything like that. Is that you know, most people do
(31:47):
sex in private, and and it leaves not that much
evidence behind. So yeah, there is, there's a lot of speculation.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Especially gay sex.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
Yeah, there's no pregnancies to show for it, so yeah, Yeah,
that's the tricky thing about confirming suspicions like that.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Yeah, And like she's sometimes considered a queer icon. I
think it's fair. Yeah, you know, but we can't like
confirm nor deny. Sure, and she kept her personal life
out of the press as much as possible, and I
don't mind respecting her on that here. Okay, to be clear,
if I had all the saucy details, i'd be telling
(32:29):
you I have tose yeah, But instead, what I'll tell
you about is that the flail our sponsor the flail
there's several different versions of it. There's the one that's
sort of you know, a ball and chain, right with
spikes attached to a short handle, And these are fairly
effective at getting past someone who has a shield or
other armor, right, because it goes over it you know,
(32:51):
these are not necessarily particularly historically accurate weapons. They were
sometimes only used in jousting. But the flail, as a
peasant weapon, was a big two handed stick with a
small length of rope and then another piece of wood,
and this was used in agricultural work, and so these
(33:12):
became what peasant uprisings preferred to bring down mounted knights.
M okay, and you too can bring down mounted knights
by buying medieval weaponry from our sponsor, the village Blacksmith.
Here's other ads, just in case. Other ads are part
of it too, and we're back, Sophie. Which of those
(33:43):
weapons did you find most appealing?
Speaker 1 (33:46):
I mean, I'm always going to go for an axe.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Yeah, it's classic, gets the work done.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
Yeah right.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
So Perkins continued on her career, and soon she was
appointed to New York's Industrial Commission, which put her into
negotiations with labor unions. If all liberals were like Perkins,
the world would be such a better place. She was
working on this like negotiation with a bunch of miners
when it came out in court. I think in court
that the miners were planning on blowing up their bosses
(34:17):
with dynamite, and like destroying their workplace. Hell, yeah, I
know that would have gotten them onto this show. And
she is like the representative of the government here, right,
and she's like negotiating, and she manages to convince the
court to not put them on trial for conspiracy by
dredging up inflammatory letters from the employers that kind of
(34:40):
made it be like, yeah, well, I don't know, it's
like would have been fine.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
You know, they were gonna get what's coming to them.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Yeah, And so she saves all these miners from a
conspiracy trial.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Franklin Roosevelt became Governor of New York in nineteen twenty nine,
and he appointed her Industrial Commissioner for New York State,
and this makes her the first woman in the governor's
cabinet in New York. As historian Rebecca Graham put it,
Perkins managed the largest and likely the most progressive state
level labor department in the nation. Together, they established a
(35:15):
State Committee for the Stabilization of Industry, which spearheaded jobs
programs to curtail unemployment in New York between nineteen twenty
nine and nineteen thirty two. And obviously, the Great Depression
hits in nineteen twenty nine, Right, Yeah, and so everyone
is like, oh, us having jobs again would be kind
(35:36):
of cool. We don't like starving to death. What if
we had someone who could do that for the country,
Like that guy's doing it in New York. Can he
do it for the whole country? And so in nineteen
thirty two, FDR won the presidential election by like an
overwhelming degree. It is the fourth least close election in
US history, with the other two like I think number
(35:59):
one and too or George Washington. Well makes sense, Yeah,
he was sort of grandfathered in practically. Yeah, an FDR
ends up going on to become the US's longest serving president,
and he's like, I learned a lot of bad stuff
about him during this episode, right, but a lot of
(36:19):
his good stuff comes from Francis Perkins, you know.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Okay, so the credit that he usually gets for doing
good stuff is probably actually credit that is owed to her.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah, right, And which is funny because she wrote one
of the first books on him, and she gives him
credit for all of her own ideas. Oh man, because
she's so like, I'm just doing this for the public.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Yeah. Well she's humble, I guess.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
And so there's like times that historians have had to
go back and debunk her own claims in which she's
claiming to not take credit for a bunch of stuff, huh.
And part of that is because she's so humble, right,
But part of it is she is a woman politician
in a place where you are not supposed to be
a woman politician, right, And so people are constantly attacking
(37:08):
her and constantly deriding her, and like she has to
play the political game of like, oh, this isn't my idea,
and like.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
I'm a silly woman with a small woman brain. I
didn't come up with any of this.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Yeah, And she like can't seem arrogant or her career
will be over, you know. And so FDR becomes president
and he immediately turns around's like, hey, you are my
secretary of labor in New York. Do you want to
be my secretary of labor in the federal government even
though that's never been done? And she's like, no, I don't,
(37:47):
and she turns him down. She's fifty two years old,
she's got sixteen year old daughter, her husband's in an institution,
and she just doesn't want the attention. I also, and
this is like subtext, this is like my inference, and
I'm not the world's expert on this person, right, I
think she might be a little bit too radical. I
think she might be like, the fuck is the government's
(38:08):
not gonna be able to do any of this shit,
like the federal government. You know, she might be cynical,
and that might be my own like reading into it.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
I don't know sure.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
But then FDR gohoest tour and says what will it take?
And she's like, fine, I will do it if you,
and she writes this pie in a sky list. She's like,
I want minimum wage laws, I want unemployment insurance, I
want public works projects, I want general economic relief across
the entire country.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Hmmm.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
She describes the new.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
Deal mm hmm, thinking that like, oh this, he's never
going to go for it. And the way that like
if there's a job that I don't really want to do,
all like jack up my rate, right, be like what's
the most expensive I would be willing to do this
for thinking that no one's going to pay for it,
and I'm like this is my rate, and then people
will be like okay, and I'm like fuck now I
(38:59):
have to do this. Yeah, but I've been getting the.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Money for which explains your first three husbands.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
Yeah right right, yeah, yeah, precisely. But it's still no pool.
I still don't have a swimming pool. So I have
to keep going.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Keep trying. Yeah, And so he looks at this list
and he's like, yeah, okay, I'll back you in that.
So she agrees and she's sworn in and she's the
first Madam Secretary and it like literally people are like, well,
we don't know what to call you, and like someone
who's like really versed in that book, Robert's Rules of Order,
was like, I think Madam Secretary. And so she becomes
(39:34):
Madame Secretary.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
Most of what's been written about her, which is worth
talking about, but is not what I'm going to focus on,
is her work fighting for the New Deal in the
nineteen thirties. She was instrumental to the Social Security Act
of nineteen thirty five. She drafted the Fair Labor Standards Act,
which is what banned child labor in the United States,
setting up the minimum wage and cementing what thousands of
(39:57):
workers have been fighting for for like one hundred years
at this point, the forty hour work week. And I like,
I want to give her credit but I also want
to give credit to all the people who have been
fighting and dying for one hundred years to get to
this point. But like, absolutely a lot of this is
the wildest progressive in government, being like all right, we're
(40:19):
doing this, you know. So if you enjoy the Weekend,
thank Francis Perkins as well as all the labor people.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
You mean, pop R and B star the Weekend. That
was her, She just coverd the Weekend.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Wow, yeah, totally, which I totally know.
Speaker 4 (40:35):
It is from the famously worst show on television.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
The Idol of the Weekend.
Speaker 3 (40:43):
Yeah, oh man, a lot of time.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
But more important to our story, the crux of our story.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
What do you mean.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Is I don't know any TV show that could I
even know some TV shows I watch TV. I they
live under a and I don't remember actors' names. But
I watched a television I watched Over the Garden Wall
the other.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
Wow, oh my gosh, the animated show.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Right, yeah, it's so good. It was so good. I
have like two episodes left, but I'm like so into
it just to you wait, it's probably what I'm gonna
do after after we finished recording. Nice. So the Department
of Labor that she's now in charge of, oversaw both
the Immigration Services and the Naturalization Services, which are two
separate things in the United States. At that point. The
(41:32):
Department of Labor was reasonably new when she took over.
It was formed in nineteen thirteen, and the first heads
of the department had very explicitly anti immigrant labor stances.
Did you know that Herbert Hoover, the Quaker president of
the nineteen twenties, deported up to two million people to Mexico,
(41:54):
about half of whom were probably US citizens.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
I did not know that.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
No, either. It's not talked about much. It's pretty fucked up.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
I also didn't know he was a Quaker. Is that
what you said?
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Yeah? No, I think no one knows he's a Quaker,
which honestly, he doesn't deserve it, because he's a fucking
racist who deported two million.
Speaker 3 (42:11):
Right. Quakers are pretty cool, right.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
He basically just was like, Oh, all of the economic depression,
it's probably Mexican's faults, and then like just like deported
a ton of people, including US citizens.
Speaker 3 (42:25):
Well fuck him.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
Then.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Yeah, Anyway, immigration law in the US, so the heads
of the department before her had all been explicitly anti immigrant,
and it was weirdly worked out for her, like you
know how, like right now, especially when Trump looked like
he was likely to the next president. Whenever Biden would
do something to like bring power to the president, everyone
(42:48):
would be like, what the fuck are you doing. You're
gonna have a fucking Trump's gonna be after you. Why
would you put more power into his hands? Yeah, all
of these, like previous Department of Labor people who ran
immigration were all super right wing and assumed that everyone
else would forever be super right wing because both political
parties were entirely anti immigrant at this point, right right,
(43:08):
So they gave a lot of discretionary power to the
head of the Department of Labor.
Speaker 3 (43:16):
Assuming that they would be anti immigrant.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Yeah, okay, Immigration law in the US, this is going
to shock you, has always been racist as shit. What
I know, from the very first we can show up
and kill everyone we want pilgrims to the also, let's
own a lot of black people, folks. To the first
federal immigration law, which is called the Chinese Exclusion Act
(43:39):
of eighteen eighty two. Right, just you know, racist, which
is also particularly interesting because they had Chinese labor had
just built the railroads, like right, just crossed the fucking
continent with railroads, and then we were like, all right,
they built that for us. Fuck them.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
Now.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
By nineteen twenty five we had a border patrol. And
the general attitude of xenophobic Americans has been from the
start basically white Protestants are good and everyone else is
somewhere in a hierarchy of bad. And one of the
types of people that WASPS really really didn't like was Jews.
But anti immigration laws didn't start specifically with Jews, because
there wasn't a lot of Jewish immigration in the US
(44:18):
until like the Pograms in Russia and Eastern Europe like
really started kicking in in the eighteen eighties or so.
After banning Chinese people in eighteen eighty two, the eighteen
ninety one Immigration Act banned polygamists. I want to know
more about that. I want to know who the polygamists
were who were coming into the country. Yeah, because the
only polygamists I can think of are were from the US.
(44:41):
They live in Utah. Yeah, I don't know anyway.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
Ooh, I'm intrigued.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
I know. So the eighteen ninety one Immigration Act band polygamists.
People with contagious diseases, people with quote moral turpitude, and anyone.
Speaker 4 (44:54):
Who might that's intentionally vague.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Yeah, absolutely, and anyone who might need welfare. Like one
of the main things that they talk about all the
time is to like not become a public ward. Then
the next law the anarchists can claim because it was
a law specifically nineteen oh three law specifically bans anarchists.
To be fair, an anarchists had just shot at US
(45:19):
President's of death. The Immigration Act of nineteen seventeen banned
poor people, sick people, and disabled people.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Adding ableism to the mix.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
I see, yeah, because they're basically like, well, we only
want people who make our country stronger on both a
like racial level and a like labor and economy level.
Has nothing to do with morality or making sure that
people can live or anything like that.
Speaker 3 (45:45):
Right in the US has never been about that.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
No, which is why it's so interesting when there's people
like Perkins who are part of the US government who
are about that. But then there's a lot of things
that they can and can't do because of who like
when they try and play these games, it gets really interesting.
And then in nineteen twenty four, the US passed like
probably the worst of all of these. The Immigration Act
(46:09):
of nineteen twenty four is sometimes called the National Origins Act,
and it set up quotas about how many people can
come from what countries. And you will be shocked to
know that those quotas were based on how white the
people were. All of this is happening during peak like
race science eugenics times, when it is considered established science
(46:32):
that Italians are prone to crimes of personal violence and
Jews are driven by profit and greed and are physically weak.
This is science for forty years until it is repealed
in nineteen sixty five, only a certain number of people
per country could come to the US. I'm going to
talk at the end about why refugees from Palestine can't
(46:54):
get to the US. But we'll talk about at the end.
If you're from the UK, people from the UK can
come Germany and Ireland. Those are like second best Eastern Europe,
not looking so great anywhere else in the world, Like,
I don't know what the fuck you're thinking. Sixty five
thousand people a year could come from the UK, thirty
three hundred from Sweden. Most countries in the world, from
(47:16):
like Japan to China to Iceland, India to Australia, to
Palestine to Nepall and all of those one hundred people
a year.
Speaker 3 (47:25):
Whoa so much for a melting pot?
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, yeah, not really. And the quotas themselves were you know, racist,
not just in terms of national origin, but they also
divided the world into seven different racial categories. And this
system was used for massive deportations. This is the system
by which Herbert Hoover deported somewhere between three hundred thousand
(47:49):
and two million people to Mexico, forty to sixty percent
of whom were United States citizens. I mean, it really
just sounds like it's just now hundred years ago. The
KKK and quote unquote cowboys patrolled the borders and like
would round people up, and they were like raiding weddings
and they were raiding like social centers and anywhere that
(48:11):
they thought that migrant labor might be. You know, Hitler
himself complimented the quota system of the US.
Speaker 3 (48:20):
Yanks, and that's how you know it's the worst thing.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
Yep. Ever, her yep, so Perkins is now in charge
of labor and therefore of the immigration services. She does
a number of things right off the bat First, she
combined immigration services and naturalization services into the i INS,
which is of course now the precursor to the modern
ICE Immigration Customs Enforcement, which is under the Department of
(48:46):
Homeland Security, but for her it was under Labor and
she shifted its focus from deportations to helping immigrants feel
welcome and get their feet on the ground underneath them.
She didn't have total control. She couldn't get rid of
these quota systems. For example, right Congress controlled the quotas,
and then like US, consuls in different countries controlled who
could apply, like who got visas?
Speaker 3 (49:08):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
But what she did manage to do was be like, whoops,
we ran out of money and we have to lay
off the following fifty three people, who were all the
most xenophobic people in the agency.
Speaker 3 (49:19):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
She brought social workers to Ellis Island and improve the
conditions in the waiting rooms there. She tried to ban
arresting immigrants without warrants, but this policy only lasted for
a few years before massive pushback from Congress and interest
groups reversed it. She appointed a Scottish immigrant to the
position of Commissioner of Immigration, and his whole idea was like, well,
(49:42):
we're going to do stuff until they find out that
we're not allowed to do this stuff.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (49:47):
Yes, And she desegregated the Department of Labor because one
of the fun things is that the federal government was
actually desegregated, like shortly after the Civil War or whatever, right,
and then it was resegregated because we live in a
racist hellhole and progress is not linear, and every time
we advance causes through great effort, if we let down
our guard at all, things slip back into horrible fascist
(50:09):
hell whole. Yes, so that's what she did, and she
did an awful lot more, and specifically she did a
lot of work getting people away from the Nazis. But
that's not what we're going to talk about now, because
what we're going to talk about now is one we're
gonna make fun of everyone for having to wait till
Wednesday in order to hear the rest of the story.
Speaker 4 (50:27):
Hah haha, losers.
Speaker 2 (50:29):
Yeah, and we're going to talk about how people can
watch and listen to your podcast, including the ones that
aren't jokes, like sitting in on the couch with Kaitlin Dorante.
Speaker 3 (50:40):
Yes, So if you want to consume that you can
follow me on Instagram at Caitlin Dorante and watch my stories,
which periodically. I used to do it a lot more,
but now most of my stories is me sharing things
about Palestine and Congo and Sudan and things of that nature.
(51:05):
But every once in a while I'll be like, hey,
it's another episode of sitting on my couch with Caitlin,
and it's usually to promote screenwriting classes that I'm offering.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
I've heard you have a master's degree in screenwriting.
Speaker 3 (51:19):
Well, again, I would never mention it, but I do
use it to teach screenwriting classes and I have a
whole cluster of them coming up in September, So if
you're interested in that, you can go to my website
Kaitlindronte dot com slash classes, and I have like an
intro class, so that's suitable for beginners or you know,
(51:41):
people who want a refresher, and then I also offer
workshopping classes, so if you already have a little bit
of a background and you're currently working on something that
you want to workshop and get feedback on, you can
take that class. So that's what I've got, and then
I also, of course the Bechdel Cast with my co
(52:03):
host Jamie Loftus, and we talk about movies through an
intersectional seminus lens. So that's all the places you can
find me.
Speaker 2 (52:12):
Yay. You can find me by going to your bookstore
or library and being like, do you have The Sapling
Cage And they'll be like, it's not September twenty fourth,
how could we have it? It's not out yet, And
then you can say, well, I really want it when
it does come out, and then they'll say, oh, we know,
because everyone wants it. Hopefully it'll go like that. But
(52:32):
if it doesn't go like that, it's still worth doing
because I have a book called The Sapling Cage that
someone asked me for a three sentence pitch of it,
and I gave them a three word pitch in which
that's a transwitch ya hell yes, And that comes out
on September twenty fourth. Sophia You Got Anything.
Speaker 1 (52:49):
Behind the Bastards is now on YouTube. You can look
at our phases if you so desire. That's YouTube dot
com slash at Behind the Bastards and Closing Media has
a brand new weekly show hosted by Molly Conger called
Weird Little Guys.
Speaker 4 (53:03):
Check it out if you dare.
Speaker 2 (53:05):
Hell yeah, all right, we'll see you all on Wednesday.
Speaker 3 (53:08):
Oh babe.
Speaker 1 (53:15):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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