create new deal legislation including social security, unemployment insurance and the minimum wage. the author spoke at the ninth annual book festival which is library of congress hosted on the national mall. >> this is very interesting and personally meaningful to me because the genesis of my entire book, which is the woman behind the new deal. it's the life of francis perkins -- i'll explain to you how that happened. and much of the research was done at library of congress which is sponsoring today's events. it's a wonderful institution. the beautiful buildings, there's such important research materials there. and it's all available free. these public access libraries are really one of the things that make our nation great. and i'm very grateful to the library of congress for being here and for continuing to give us such wonderful material. now, this is a self-selecting crowd. i know some of you already know who francis perkins is. but a lot of people don't. so let's start by asking this question, how many of you know who francis perkins is? oh, yes, this is great. good, good, good. how about this? how many of you know someone on social security? please raise your hand. how much of you know someone who is receiving unemployment insurance or who has ever received unemployment compensation? okay. francis perkins' work. how many of you know someone who is working a 40-hour-a week, generally more or less. francis perkins' work. how many of you know a 12-year-old who quit going to school so she can work full time in a factory? francis perkins' work. her act made it possible to keep kids in school longer instead of in mills and factories. let me start by telling you a little bit -- it's noisy here. let me tell you a little bit. i want to read a little bit of the prologue from my book so you know a little bit more about the breadth of francis perkins accomplishments. on a chilly february night in 1933, a woman waited to meet with her employer at his residence on east 65th street in new york city. she clutched a scrap of paper with hastily written notes. finally ushered into his study, the woman brushed aside her nervousness and spoke confidently. they bantered causally for a while as was their style. then she turned serious. her dark eyes holding his gaze. he wanted her to take an assignment, but she had decided she wouldn't accept it unless he allowed her to do it her own way. she held up the piece of paper in her hand and motioned for her to continue. she ticked off the items, a 40-hour workweek, a minimum wage, workers' compensation, unemployment compensation, a federal law banning child labor, direct federal aid for unemployment relief, social security, a revitalized public employment service and health insurance. she watched his eyes to make sure he was paying attention and understood the implications of each demand. she braced for his response knowing that he often chose political expaid yenty over idealism and was capable of callousness, even cruelty. the scope of her list was breathtaking. she was proposing a fundamental and radical restructuring of american society with enactment of historic social welfare and labor laws. she would have to overcome opposition from courts, business, labor unions, conservatives. nothing like this has ever been done before in the united states, she said, you know that, don't you? the man sat across from her in his wheelchair amid the clutter of boxes, soon he would head to washington, d.c., to be sworn in as the 32nd president of the united states. he would inherit the worst economic crisis in the nation's history. an era of rampant speculation had come to an end. the stock market had collapsed, banks were shutting down, stripping people of their lifetime savings. about a third of workers were unemployed, wages were falling, hundreds of thousands were homeless, real estate prices had plummeted and millions of homeowners faced foreclosure. his choice of labor secretary would be one of his most important early decisions. his nominee must understand economic employment issues but be equally effective as a coalition builder. he was a handsome man and he studied the plain woman before him. no one was more qualified for the job. she knew as much about labor law as anyone in the country. he had known her for more than 20 years, the last four in albany where she had worked by his side. he trusted her and he knew she would never betray him. none of the items i just mentioned were part of fdr's campaign platform in 1932. nevertheless, he told francis perkins, he would back her. and she agreed to accept the job. that night in bed she actually cried, cried in deep sobs because she knew it was going such a difficult job. she would open herself to constant scrutiny, harsh judgment and public criticism. yet she knew she must accept the offer. as her grandmother told her, whenever a door opened to you, you had no choice but to walk through it. francis perkins would become the nation's first female secretary of labor. now, we know what happened after that. the social security act passed in 1935, gave us unemployment insurance, social security, and our welfare system known as aid to dependent children, designed to help the children of parents -- of mothers left to raise their children alone. the fair labor standards act passed in 1938 set that 40-hour workweek. it set a minimum wage. it put the ban on child labor. other things she did, fha insurance, she was the primary booster of the civilian conservation corps, the largest single supporter of the wpa. truly this was a really remarkable woman. now, it's a little interesting and unusual that i came to write this book. i came from a staunchly republican family. i actually came from a family of roosevelt haters. but when i came to washington, d.c., in 1988, as a young business reporter, one of the first things i did as i set out to learn my way around the town was to sign up for a trolley bus tour of the city. one of the first things i noticed was the francis perkins department of labor. as those of you who live in washington know, there's very few washington named after women. i noticed it and i filed it away and wondered who was francis perkins? i had never even heard of her. as we around this day, we got around by the washington monument and the tour bus driver said in his -- along with his regular patter, what american woman had the worst childbirth experience? francis perkins. she spent 12 years in labor. [ laughter ] that's the first time i ever remember hearing francis perkins' name spoken aloud. i laughed by the rest of you, but it also kind of irritated. and after that, i kept her name in my mind and i kept listening for her. i spent 20 years at "the washington post" and over the years i realized how often i heard her name. often like a distant whisper. when we talked about social security, francis perkins, when we talked about age discrimination, francis perkins, when we talked about the fair labor standards act and making revisions to it, we talked about francis perkins. when we talked about the labor movement, we were talking about francis perkins. this was all her handiwork. quite an extraordinary record of achievement. i spent 20 years at "the washington post." i went all over the country for "the washington post." it was a wonderful life education going to visit places and learn new things. and as i traveled around the country writing business stories, i began to realize how little i knew about the history of the working people of america. it's something that really isn't taught. in the late 1990s, i wrote a series of articles on sexual harassment. and i heard a lot of chilling stories about places where there had been an imbalance of power, where people were able to use their power to force people to do things they didn't want to do. there were people who were trapped in a cycle of abuse and a lot of times the stories were really very bad stories, it's really much more akin to criminal activity than most of us have realized. and i heard all of these stories all around the country and i began to suffer myself what psychologists call secondary stress. and i got afraid to fly. i started afraid to fly. i started to feel like authority figures couldn't be counted onto do the right thing if there were a problem. i suppose part of the issue for me is i had both the good luck and the bad luck to sit by the post-fabulous aviation reporter don philips and he was writing about every plane crash that happened in america. so every day i was afraid to fly i was hearing him talk about every air accident that happened and just how the people onboard had died. so i started to travel to places by train whenever i could get away with it. i took a long trip out west to do a story on the national parks and on the way i read tony lucas' book "big trouble" which is about the great labor battles a hundred years ago and i was shocked to realize these were pitched battles, almost like warfare out on the west frontier between workers and employers. and i realized how little i knew about that. so i began looking for a vehicle to write about the epic struggle of the workingman in america to get a better life. i came back to "the post" and i started to write a column called on the job where people could write about their problems at work. and one day a man wrote me and said at the end of the day we're locked into our offices where they count the money and the cash register. do you think that's unsafe? yes, it is. evp a rat has an escape hole he told me. so i decided to write a column on workplace fire safety. and i did a bit of research on the fire and i heard a young social worker named francis perkins had actually witnessed the triangle fire and when she'd seen had so horrified or 146 people died that day, many leaping to their deaths from a building in lower manhattan, it was a sweatshop. from that experience francis perkins was so motivated to make changes that she drafted the laws that became our national fire safety act. you might say eureka. at that point i felt this is a woman who has a fabulous story. it has to be told. this aspect, labor history is something that is not told very much at all in america. and by telling the story of francis perkins life, i saw an opportunity to do it. today in the various tents you'll hear a lot about political history, military history, civil rights history. except for me today you'll hear very little about labor history, and high book has tried to rectify that. i got a contract to write the book. i began doing the research when i got a fellowship at harvard university. and at harvard at that time there was not a single professor of labor history. at this point now there's only one major newspaper that employs a full time labor reporter. that's "the new york times," and it's steven greenhouse. and he has a lonely job. now, many people advocate heartily for free trade today, but there aren't a lot of people speaking up for the offense of the working people in america. and in fact that's what francis perkins devoted her life to do, talk about the life of working people and find ways to solve those problems, ways that could also keep america's businesses strong and prosps. now if she was standing here today i can almost assuredly tell you what do you think she'd be talking about? she'd be talking about jobs today, how to generate jobs and how to bring good paying jobs back to america. she'd be talking about smart employers who are finding ways to grow their work forces, economic policies that bring good paying jobs back to america. and she'd be talking about ways to strengthen the labor movement today so that workers could protect their pensions, their right to a 40-hour workweek and their right to health insurance that actually works when it's supposed to. now, the labor movement, the working people of america, they're the backbone of america. and they're much of the source of our country's economic prosperity. but nobody talks about them very much at all, almost nobody at all. and that's alarming especially when we face an economic crisis as we do today. this is a matter of particular interest to me because i spent a lifetime studying the american economy, and the unemployment rate is really becoming a very serious problem for the united states. we need to get people employed with jobs that earn enough money to give them financial security and allow them to buy the things they need. food and housing and health care. i think if francis perkins was here today, and i think i have the right to say it, i spent nine years studying her life, i think she'd say we feed to pay a lot more attention again to the workingman. and i'm open for questions. >> i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how frances perkins in an era where there were essentially no women in high political positions was able to navigate with the other political players in washington. >> that's right. could everyone hear the question? okay, it's a really good question and i think that's part of what fascinated me is she essentially had to invent the role of a woman in high public office. she had to figure out how she was going to dress, how she was going to talk, even what she was going to call herself. now, in some ways this caused her some embarrassment because early on when she started someone said she should be called madam secretary. now, she sort of went along with it but she didn't realize after that she'd to be called the madam, which made her very embarrassed. she was quite the victorian and she never liked that, but she did find herself in the position of inventing everything about herself. she tried to be careful how she spoke. she tried to speak as men do. she tried to keep her sentences short and to the point. and she tried to make sure that the men never felt like she was stealing the limelight from them. now, this was very important that she always let fdr shine, and that was part of the secret of her success. but, in fact, every single day of her life she had to they think about those gender issues and how exactly things were going to play out. it was very difficult. in fact, she did find washington to be just as frightening of a place as she'd feared. >> could you expand a little more on the relationship between frances perkins and fdr? >> frances perkins was i believe fdr's closest friend. it's funny because a lot of other men played poker with him, helped him a lot. these men were all devoted friends. but across the years frances perkins first met fdr in 1910. she had already known him 22 years. and he kept her by his side for the entire length of his presidency, the 12 years in labor that i mentioned earlier. the whole time of his presidency. in fact, she tried to resign repeatedly. she really hated life in washington, found it very difficult. but he could never let her go. and in fact, when she tried to resign in 1944 she was exhausted, she wanted to go home to new york. he actually reached his arms up to her, put his arms around her and said, please don't go, frances, how can you be so selfish? and she stayed. >> were there any initiatives, progressive initiatives that fdr pushed back on or didn't fully implement? >> right. that's a really good question and in fact the debate is raging right now in washington as we speak. frances perkins had presented fdr with a list of about ten items that i mentioned at the beginning when i was reading the prologue. i know it's difficult to hear me, but she had presented him a list of about ten items. the only one she didn't accomplish was national health insurance. in fact, the american medical association told roosevelt and francese perkins they would kill social security to prevent what they called socialized medicine from taking root in america. what we ended up with was a health insurance system that happened, that grew accidently. it was a reaction to the wage and price controls in world war ii. companies were not allowed to raise wages but they really wanted to attract workers. they began to offer health insurance. so we ended up with a health insurance system targeted to the strong and healthy, not to the sick and jobless. the program frances perkins would have wanted looks more like medicaid, a program targeted to people who don't have money to pay for health care. she was never able to get that accomplished. fdr abandoned national health insurance to get social security enacted. every two or three years she'd bring it up again and each time someone would tell her, no, no, too much of a hot potato. and her very last communications with fdr was please don't forget national health insurance. >> thank you so much for your work on her. i'm just deeply grateful to you for having done that. as a feminist just a minor suggestion. i'm sensitive to the workingman, and would invite you to say working men and women. but that aside i wonder if you could talk a bit what in her childhood could havefore told this deep sympathy to the working people and those who are kind of left out. >> right. frances perkins was a very dwout, christian. she was episcopalian and had enormously deep empathy for the human condition. she was interested in the plight of immigrants. she was interested in the plight of workers. she often said she felt peoples pain. she became fascinated in the american economy. she studied business. she was very interested in businessmen and how they -- businessmen and women, at that time primarily businessmen and how they conducted business. she was fascinated to see the role workers played in making the business prosperous. she had an enormous number of interests over the years. she was a very big suffrage activist, and so she was very strong advocate for womens rights. she was a birth control supporter, too. but she chose the one particular issue which was worker rights. she made that her lifetime cause, and that seemed to have all gelled for her after seeing the horror of the triangle fire. >> relations with the organized labor, the unions and that -- >> yes, fascinating relationship with frances perkins and organized labor. they were mad as hell when she was made secretary of labor. a lot of the men who were the heads of the labor unions had hoped to be labor secretary themselves. so they were personally resentful, and they were also resentful that a social worker was the one who'd be leading the department of labor. over time, though, they say she was their most stalwart supporter and the things she did enabled the labor movement to grow dramatically in the next 20 years. now we know that fdr and frances perkins didn't pull the united states out of the great depression. the capitalist system eventually recovered after the big employment push of world war ii. but -- but the labor movement was the huge beneficiary of this growth. with labor laws -- protective labor laws in place, we had an enormous growth of the middle class in america. and the country became the prosperous place that it was in the '50s and '60s, and that's been the base of our country's great global wealth. >> good morning. you mentioned she was a strong supporter of the wpa, and i'm wondering if she had friendships with lewis hein and dorothy elaine, photographers. >> frances perkins was less involved with the wpa. she looked for the funding that allowed those programs to happen. she was the reason any of those things actually happened. and in fact she has a wonderful story when she went to the white house and battled fdr to keep those programs in place, the money for all the various programs. and in fact david taylor will be speaking after me. he'll be talking about the author's program that was part of the new deal at that time. and frances perkins was the biggest single advocate of that. >> hi. i just have a question. >> her top priority. >> her top priority was enacting social security and that was her biggest single source of pride in her entire life. she felt it was a program that would last forever, and in fact there's 50 million people on social security today. >> could you comment on her relationship to eleanor roosevelt? >> frances perkins and eleanor roosevelt had a very complicated relationship. they both shared the affection of franklin roosevelt in different ways. eleanor was enormously valuable -- frances perkins was the one who came up with the ideas and enacted the legislation. franklin roosevelt was the one who had the political savvy and popularity to make things happen. and eleanor was the one who could popularize these ideas. the two women were friends. they loved each other as allies and often fierce rivals and often jealous of each other. at the end of their lives, though, there's a wonderful picture of the two women at the 50th anniversary of the triangle shirtways fire. and you can see the affection they had for one another despite whatever tiffs they had over the years. >> do you think that the book brings any new research to the history of that period? >> i'd say the things i learned in my research were probably news to most people is really what a huge role frances perkins played in all aspects of the new deal. she'd sort of gotten erased out of new deal history. you'll now see whole new deal history books including some taught in colleges that mention her three or four times, five times. that's extraordinary. i also found out teddy roosevelt was the person who actually first picked her to head the committee on safety after the fire. so that meant her first important contact was teddy roosevelt not franklin roosevelt, and i thought that was a really cool find at the library of congress. [ applause ] >> weeknights this month we're featuring american history tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span 3. the uso or united service organizations, marked its 80th anniversary last month. the fron profit organization provides entertainment and other services to u.s. military personnel. tonight texas christian university professor karen dixon talks about the women who volunteered to entertain american service members during wartime. watch tonight beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern and enjoy american history tv every weekend on c-span 3. >> american history tv on c-span 3, exploring the people and even that tell the story every weekend. saturday 2:00 p.m. eastern university of georgia professor john morrow and 6:00 p.m. eastern brad stone from the national museum of civil war medicine looks at the role animals served in the civil war from transporting supplies to acting as regimental mascots. on sunday at 2:00 p.m. eastern the life and legacy of sojourner truth, an enslaved woman who self-emancipated in 1826 and spoke out on abolition and womens rights. and 8:00 p.m. on the presidency, a look at the personal and political partnership between franklin and eleanor roosevelt through home movies, which give a behind the scenes look at the couple. exploring the american story. watch american history tv this weekend on c-span 3. up next on american history tv, jeanne theoharis talks about her book. the author argues that mrs. parks is often only remembered for her bus arrest in montgomery, alabama. but her involvement in the civil rights movement was far more extensive. she's a political science professor at brooklyn college at the city of university of new york. the rosa parks museum of montgomery, alabama hosted this event in 2013. it's just over an hour. >> good evening. director of troy university rosa parks museum. on behalf of the chancellor, the faculty, student body, i welcome you to our campus. i want to ask you a question -- very glad you're here. how were you politicized? i want you to think