Winter War by Eric Rauchway

Author:Eric Rauchway
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

THE POSTELECTION ACCUMULATION OF RELIABLE rumors about who would serve in Roosevelt’s cabinet helped to persuade people that he would fulfill his promises about furthering the cause of social justice. Almost immediately upon Roosevelt’s victory, Dewson began orchestrating a letter-writing campaign to get Roosevelt to name Frances Perkins as his secretary of labor. Dewson started it herself, writing to Roosevelt as he headed to Warm Springs for Thanksgiving. She told the governor that she had just sent Eleanor “a report on how we helped separate Hoover from his WOMAN’S VOTE.” Then she told him he should appoint Perkins to head the Labor Department. “The desirability of it is on everyone’s lips.” Wise men in the press such as Walter Lippmann “all hoped you’d appoint her.” So too did “those interested in immigrants.” Economists “would be greatly pleased.” The Consumers League, the League of Women Voters, and the American Association of University Women were “on tiptoe” in the hope of Perkins becoming the first woman cabinet member. Think, Dewson wrote, of “the huzzah you’ll receive.” Organized labor would surely object, of course; union leaders thought the secretary of labor ought to be one of them. Daniel Tobin of the Teamsters, who had campaigned hard for Roosevelt, wanted the job. But, Dewson said, Roosevelt should consider that “labor’s problems are those of the unorganized men and women who form the great bulk of industrial workers. The A.F. of L. neither represents them nor remembers them. They are ‘forgotten men’ all right.”30

Then, Dewson got other people to back her up. As with the campaign to get Roosevelt elected, she understood that the key to getting Perkins appointed was to craft simple talking points and get them repeated in all parts of the country. For about a month after the election, “at intervals I had suggested to different persons scattered over the country whose names had been given to me by Miss Perkins that they write Roosevelt letters of a certain tenor.” Some turned her down; others expressed hesitation, wondering if they should really put pressure on a president-elect. But many obliged, writing Roosevelt and sending Dewson copies of their letters. They recommended Perkins both for her woman’s understanding of home life and for her professional experience of industrial conditions in New York State (of which, as they sometimes said, they knew they did not need to remind Roosevelt). They wrote to Cordell Hull and to Daniel Roper, prominent Democratic politicians whom they knew to be close to Roosevelt. Dewson prevailed on Frankfurter to talk personally to Roosevelt during a visit to Warm Springs, and Frankfurter cleared his argument with Dewson before taking it to the governor. Hull, too, wrote to say he would bring the case for Perkins before Roosevelt. Some of the letter-writers had firsthand experience of Perkins, and could attest to her extraordinary mastery of industrial issues. Others felt largely as Dewson did; one told her, “Oh, I know—and gosh, this is confidential—that you and I would rather have some real

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