(slow music) - [Narrator] In the fall of 1932, the grand democratic experiment was failing, as America was in free fall through the Great Depression and there were more people leaving the country than arriving.

Then, in November, the American people petitioned Franklin Delano Roosevelt to reorient the role of government by invoking the constitutional promise to promote the general welfare.

His presidency would transform America, but he didn't do it alone.

Only a dozen years after women gained the right to vote, Roosevelt nominated the first woman to serve in a presidential Cabinet.

Together they would weave a social safety net that would bring about a profound change in the way that Americans lived their lives.

- There is no contribution that a Cabinet member has made, in the history of this country, that has had the lasting kind of effect, on all of us and the way we live, than what Frances Perkins did.

(calm music) (dramatic music) - [Frances] The accident happened on a Saturday in 1911, the great Triangle Fire in New York City.

I happened to have been visiting a friend in Washington Square, and we rushed over where we could see this building, which was ablaze.

And the people began to jump.

The men were trying to put up a net to catch people, but the weight of the bodies was so great, and the speed at which they were traveling, they broke through the net.

They hit the sidewalk.

- [Narrator] They came to America in search of a better life, a new birth.

Instead they found unspeakable horror and an early grave.

They came from Italy, eastern Europe, and Russia, Catholics and Jews, huddled in the deep recesses of steamships, sick and confused.

They came with the hope, the promise, of unprecedented industrial growth.

Instead many found themselves trapped in the endless web of a grueling workplace.

These new immigrants brought a new language and a new God, and the old immigrants, who now called themselves the real Americans, accused them of stealing their jobs and bringing disease and crime to overcrowded urban slums.

- [Frances] A cruel inhuman look at poor people.

They want to come to America because they think they can make a living in America, not because they have any subversive or other political views.

- [Narrator] This new abundance of human capital, along with major advances in communications, transportation, and technology, created lives of luxury for the nation's first millionaires, but the expanding corporate factory system pushed many workers to their limit with its unregulated and unguarded machinery, leaving them crippled and penniless.

- [George] Their bodies worn out, in poverty, in misery.

Many of them shipped to what we knew as the poor farm.

- [Narrator] The aged could lose their personal property, the right to vote, the right to move, and sometimes forced to wear a large P on their clothing to announce their status.

- Warehouses of death, where most of the elderly went to live, and to die.

- [Narrator] As the working poor struggled, the women and children were among the most vulnerable, often required to work sunup to sundown and bring work home.

- [Frances] The children working in the mills and the mines.

Poor and broken spirited.

They were being abused, losing their mental development, losing their courage, and they grew pale and thin and looked worn and worn out.

- [Narrator] As the 19th century came to a close, there was little hope for a child imprisoned by a cold and insular workplace, and denied the education to imagine a better life.

In the 1870s, a different kind of migration transported Frederick and Susan Perkins from rural Maine to the city of Boston.

And in 1882, they moved to nearby Worcester, where the world of their two year old daughter Fanny Coralie began to turn on the middle class street where she lived.

Fanny was precocious, articulate but often shy, with an unusual sensitivity to the pain of others.

As his stationary store flourished on Main Street, her father spoke of equality while her mother made food baskets for the needy.

But as church-going congregationalists, they believed the problems of the poor resulted from drink or indolence, self-made and an affront to scripture.

Fanny Perkins was raised at a comfortable distance from the problems of industrial growth, spending summers with her widowed grandmother at the ancestral home of the Perkins family on the Damariscotta River near the village of Newcastle, Maine, a stone's throw from the north Atlantic.

Since before the revolution, the Perkins family farmed and made bricks from the red clay, and shipped them up and down the coast from Boston's back bay to Nova Scotia, and built a home of their own.

Here, Fanny heard long tales of her colorful ancestors and the war of independence, infusing her with a revolutionary spirit, which would inform her life, work, and identity.

And even as she traveled the world, this was her home, and her heart would always lead her back to the banks of the Damariscotta.

In the fall of 1898, after graduating from high school, Fanny Perkins traveled 50 miles west to the village of South Hadley and Mount Holyoke College.

- [Frances] When I was a girl, there were very few institutions that would accept women.

That women weren't thought of as just naturally entitled to an education.

Women did not have the mentality.

It was convenient to have them read and write, but it was absolutely unnecessary.

- [Narrator] Mount Holyoke began as a seminary and retained a missionary spirit, but Fanny was also introduced to new ideas about religion, science, and evolution that conflicted with her parents' scripture-based understanding of the world.

Meanwhile, far from the remote campus, the problems of the Industrial Revolution had spawned dozens of social reform organizations.

And after a class trip to a local factory, Fanny was inspired by a lecture from Florence Kelley, who, as the founder of the consumers league, stood at the forefront of the reform movement.

- And she emerged, on the day of her commencement, very aware that there were these large industrial forces at work that were causing people into these very poor areas and into these dead end lives.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] In the late summer after graduation, Fanny retreated to Maine, where she contemplated her future on long walks through the woods and in a rowboat under the afternoon sun.

Reading the words of the reformers and muckrakers, she began a literary discovery of urban poverty, arousing her deepest instincts to help.

But in the fall of 1902, a young woman had few options.

- The thing about Perkins was that even after she graduated from college, she didn't do what most young women of her age and status might have done.

She had a kind of commitment to doing good in the world.

- [Narrator] After returning to Worcester, Fanny bided her time with temporary teaching assignments until the autumn of 1904, when she traveled 1,000 miles west to Lake Forest, Illinois, to teach science at Ferry Hall Academy, an upper class girls school where parents were assured that their daughters would not become intellectuals.

Now, away from her parents, Fanny changed her name to Frances and became an Episcopalian, a faith that would shape her life.

In Lake Forest, Frances also met the wealthy families of the meatpacking industry, who had fled Chicago and the polluted world of those who worked in their stockyards.

And after reading Upton Sinclair's expose of the slaughterhouses, Perkins heard the voice of another reformer.

- [Theodore] As a people, we cannot afford to let any group of citizens, or individual citizens, live or labor under conditions which are injurious to the common welfare.

Industry therefore must submit to such public regulation as will make it a means of life and health, not of death or inefficiency.

- [Narrator] Theodore Roosevelt became a champion to thousands of young activists, who moved into old buildings in the slums known as settlement houses, intended to bridge the gulf between rich and poor.

And Perkins soon found her way to Chicago's Hull House settlement, where she witnessed a new urban poverty, beyond individual failure and beyond the word of scripture.

- [Frances] I began to recognize, people who were poor and desperate, what it was they were up against.

- [Narrator] While Theodore Roosevelt had ignited her spirit of social justice, it was Hull House founder Jane Addams and a remarkable group of volunteers who brought Perkins to the front lines of poverty.

- Hull House was one of those first settlements started in America.

And all during the years, a great many boys and girls and men and women have come to Hull House, sometimes at the rate of 10,000 people a week.

They had lectures, and they had classes, and they had parties, and all sorts of things there, day after day.

And see what they can do to help people get a little more out of life.

- The early settlement leaders were really interested in changing the conditions of municipalities, sanitation, all kinds of ways in which immigrants and poor people lived.

And Frances Perkins got involved.

It's the network of women who she met in that moment in her life, that's how she was influenced.

- [Narrator] By her mid-20s, Perkins wanted to leave teaching to help the poor.

But social work was volunteer work, and unlike many of the others, she was not independently wealthy.

Then in the spring of 1907, she accepted a paid position with a new organization called the Philadelphia Research and Protective Association.

Perkins arrived in Philadelphia with little money, old clothes, and no place to live, along with an alarming number of European immigrant and black girls from the south, who were easily lured in to prostitution by 10 cent lodging houses and fake employment offices, leaving them trapped in a life of disease and poverty.

Working alone, exploring the deepest confines of an unfamiliar city, Frances was to investigate and help protect the lives of young women who lived there, entering uncharted and often dangerous waters without a compass.

- And that was, you know, just very brave what she was doing.

She was posing as a potential victim to get inside to find out where it was happening.

And she was threatening the pimps in very direct ways, and sometimes they threatened her back.

- [Narrator] After investigating 165 employment agencies and 100 boarding houses, Perkins published a public report that pressured city officials to run regular police patrols at docks and train stations and to write a new ordinance requiring stricter licensing of lodging houses and employment offices.

- So she was going into the eye of the dragon, defining the role of government to help people, in ways they couldn't help themselves.

She was fearless.

- [Narrator] In Philadelphia, Perkins had learned how to use public pressure to create change.

But she was only treating the symptoms of poverty and she longed to better understand the affliction.

After attending classes at the University of Pennsylvania, she was awarded a research scholarship to Columbia University in New York City.

And by the time she arrived in Manhattan in June 1909, eight million people had come through nearby Ellis Island.

And the focus of her graduate research would be to survey conditions in a squalid district of corruption and poverty known as Hell's Kitchen.

After living for a short time in the area, Frances soon settled in Greenwich Village.

In Hell's Kitchen, she found the heart and soul of a city stained by the human condition.

In the village, she became inspired by the restorative power of its intellect, attending lectures and concerts, dining with philosophers, radicals, reformers, writers, and artists.

It was here at an afternoon tea party where she met a young man named Roosevelt.

And on a sunny Sunday afternoon, she would picnic with her friend Sinclair Lewis.

And for a brief time, she joined the street corner soapbox campaign of the suffragettes.

- [Frances] I recall the assertion that women ought to vote.

This of course was a considerable shock to a large part of the population, they thought it against the laws of God and man.

Women did not have the mentality to make these decisions.

Oh well, my dear, don't bother your pretty little head about that.

This was the way men talked to women about women's suffrage.

- [Narrator] In her spare time, Perkins explored the city, but she spent her days researching the lives of the working poor.

She began to gain a reputation and when she became the General Secretary of the New York City Consumers League, she found herself at the center of the US social justice movement.

And nearly a decade before she could vote, she traveled north to Albany to lobby the New York state legislature, entering the shadowy world of Tammany Hall, the political machine born and bred in the neighborhoods of New York City.

- Tammany Hall was largely viewed as corrupt, and what's lost is how much good government it actually achieved.

These were the elected representatives who were concerned with the very same people she was concerned with.

Yes, there were some rascals involved, a lot of rascals involved.

But these were the same people who got some really good things done that weren't going to get done without them.

- [Narrator] On her first day at the capitol, Frances met an up and coming young politician by the name of Alfred E. Smith, who would have a profound effect on her life and work.

After the Triangle Factory fire in 1911, Perkins worked with the legislature to create the New York State Factory Investigating Commission.

And on the recommendation of Theodore Roosevelt, she was named chief factory investigator.

The commission inspired a series of workplace safety regulations that would become standard throughout the world.

- [Frances] If you can't get it by agitation, then enforce them to do it by making a law.

- Frances knew you have to be idealistic, but you also have to be pragmatic if you want to get the job done.

That pragmatism really served her well, I think.

- [Narrator] And while the commission convinced Perkins of the power of law, the fire had confirmed her vocation.

- And so the fire asked her a question.

Here's this great social problem, this outrage, and Frances Perkins, you are in a position to do something about it.

You're summoned to do it.

- [Narrator] In September of 1913, Frances married a handsome well-educated man from Chicago named Paul Wilson.

And shortly after the birth of their daughter Susannah, Paul began to exhibit erratic behavior and dramatic mood swings.

Confused by a little understood disorder that would become known as manic depression, Paul began to mismanage money, losing all of their savings to risky investments, and Frances would now have to balance motherhood with the responsibility for the family's finances.

Meanwhile, New York became one of the first states to grant women the right to vote, and in 1918, after Perkins campaigned for him, Al Smith became governor, appointing her as the first woman on the New York State Industrial Commission.

It was a seminal moment in the merging of the reform movement and politics.

- [Frances] I said to him, "But governor, "how did you ever think, "what made you think of appointing me?"

Well, he said, "I've seen you up here, "and you don't talk all around the subject "the way most women do."

He spared me saying "You have a man's mind," but I only have a good mind, sir.

- [Narrator] For the next four years, Smith and Perkins would promote and expand the work of the Factory Investigating Commission.

And after three more terms as governor, Smith became the presidential candidate at the Democratic Convention in Houston, in June of 1928.

And as he listened to the convention from a hotel room in Albany, Perkins was in Newcastle, where an elderly neighbor filled the air with a loudspeaker that he had purchased for his radio.

And at a distance through the trees, Frances heard a young Franklin Roosevelt nominate Al Smith for president.

- [Franklin] We offer one who has the will to win, who not only deserves success, but commands it.

Victory is his habit.

The happy warrior, Alfred E. Smith.

(audience applauds) - [Narrator] In November, Smith lost in a landslide to Herbert Hoover, defeated in large part by sometimes violent opposition to his Catholicism from those who believed that America should be white and Protestant.

- [Frances] There's more of that in the body politic of the USA than we usually think.

It's deeply ingrained in people.

It comes out of jealousy, and envy, and inability to get the world by your own efforts.

- [Narrator] Before the election, Smith had convinced Roosevelt to run to replace him as governor, and on the same day that Smith lost the presidential election, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected governor of the state of New York.

- [Franklin] I offer to you that a common desire to serve our state shall unite us in a common friendship.

You and I-- - [Narrator] Soon after he took office, Roosevelt appointed Perkins as the first woman State Industrial Commissioner.

She would oversee 1,800 employees and over 70,000 manufacturers, as one of the most powerful figures in New York State.

- And that decision was a remarkable decision, because it meant that she was supervising a major bureau.

And for a woman to be in a supervisory capacity over men and decisions that they would make was quite astonishing.

- [Frances] He took office in 1929.

In October, all of a sudden, the stock market began to sink.

And by the next day, we were in the midst of a very serious collapse of the economy.

And then you began to get true economic and social effects.

I at that time lived in an apartment house near Central Park.

And we would have dinner at night, with the realization that there were people there who didn't have anything to eat.

It got to be the practice in our family to take whatever was left and put it in a little box, and walk over to Central Park.

You could offer them a little something to eat that night.

In the early morning, when I used to come into the city, to take an early train out to Albany, the garbage cans had been placed out on the sidewalk the night before, and I saw respectable looking old women pawing over this to take out what was edible.

You can't stand that sight.

Terrible poverty.

- Societal insecurity could not have been higher.

And there was a general sense in the depression that we have to do something, we have to do something.

- [Narrator] Building on her reform work with Smith, Roosevelt and Perkins began to develop an innovative response to the depression, including unemployment insurance and the nation's first jobless relief program.

- Labor legislation must keep step with changing developments in industrial life and with forward steps in social welfare.

I recommend to you the following program.

First, the inclusion, within the coverage of the workmen's compensation law, of all diseases arising from occupational tasks.

Secondly, a genuine eight-hour day and 48-hour week.

Thirdly, the establishment for women and children of an advisory minimum or fair wage law.

That the labor of human beings is not a commodity or an article of commerce.

- [Narrator] With the well-publicized success of the New York program and Roosevelt's landslide reelection as governor, he soon became the 1932 Democratic candidate to challenge President Herbert Hoover.

- We're told by the opposition that we must have a change, that we must have a new deal, the proposal to alter the whole foundations of our national life.

- The President began this campaign with the same attitude, that all was well with the United States, and that there was no depression.

- This campaign is more than a contest between two men.

It is more than a contest between two parties.

It is a contest between two philosophies of government.

- [Frances] I am going to give the people of this country a new deal.

It's a card playing term, and everybody understands it.

You're going to deal out some new cards, and I don't think he, even then, had the remotest idea of what his program was going to be.

But the newspaper men noticed it, and tore their newspapers to pieces, and emblazoned them in the great headline, "Roosevelt Promises New Deal."

And this was where the New Deal really began.

- [Man] On election night, President Hoover is buried beneath a surge of votes for Franklin Roosevelt.

The change is made, the die is cast.

- [Narrator] With millions starving, homeless, out of work, and out of time, the beleaguered American people had made a clear choice to turn to the federal government for help but it would still be four months until inauguration.

And Roosevelt's bright promise of change quickly dissolved into a dark cold winter.

Then, in early February, the president-elect called Perkins to his New York City home.

She had heard the rumors and she knew that if she became Secretary of Labor, she could fulfill the promise of a generation of activists and help change the role of government.

But her home was New York, where her daughter was in school, and her husband was now hospitalized with a stigmatized illness.

The thought of moving to Washington, a city fueled by publicity, would threaten her family's privacy and horrified her.

If asked to serve, she decided to accept, but only on her own terms.

- [Frances] Before I said yes, I thought he ought to know.

If I am going to be there, I want to get something done.

And when I got there, I read him my list.

First, relief, essential.

Some form of unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, a shortened work week, old age insurance.

Deliberate action at the center of government.

That the constitution could be stretched to promote the general welfare.

Yes, yes, yes, you can do it, but the blood be on your own head.

- [Narrator] A desperate American people had given Roosevelt the permission to do what needed to be done, and he had now given Perkins that same permission.

- It is by definition an experiment.

No bigger social experiment had ever occurred in our government than what Frances Perkins was proposing across the board.

- The people of the United States have not failed.

In their need, they have registered a mandate, that they want direct vigorous action.

They have asked for-- - [Frances] The banks had closed on the very morning of the day in which Roosevelt was inaugurated as President.

People from all over the country had managed to get there, one way or another, their own bank back home was closed.

They didn't know where they were going to get the money to pay their hotel bill, to buy their ticket home.

On that afternoon, we received the notice that we must come to the White House at five o'clock, prepared to be sworn in, and leave all else behind us.

- On my left is the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Woodin.

Beyond him, the Attorney General, Mr. Cummings.

Then the Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Swanson.

Beyond him, the Secretary of Agriculture, Mr. Wallace.

And on the end of the line, Miss Perkins, the Secretary of Labor.

- [Narrator] In the midst of a national emergency, Roosevelt had appointed Perkins without hearings and over the protest of labor leaders, who were furious that he had not only forsaken their ranks, but also nominated a woman.

- Women often come into power through the accountability route.

Women are expected to know more.

Because people had a distrust that you could actually govern as a women.

Does she really know enough to do this job?

Is she really tough enough to do this job?

So you are constantly being tested.

(train whistling) - [Man] Now every train to Washington brings its cargo of experts to join the great assault on the depression.

Economists, sociologists, statisticians, agronomists, idealists, world savers.

Each with a surefire system to save the country.

- [Frances] The whole world appeared to have come to Washington and the excitement was terrific.

I found on my desk, the day I took office, over 2,000 plans for rescuing the country from its economic collapse.

- [Narrator] But the old administration was deeply entrenched and in no hurry to leave.

- We Republicans weren't too dismayed.

We thought that he would be in for four years and then that we'd be back again in power.

But like the man who came to dinner.

- [Narrator] Perkins inherited a corrupt labor department that had become a platform to shakedown and harass foreign workers, who were arrested, denied lawyers, and held without charges.

After putting an end to the corruption, she issued a memo to employees to treat aliens in a manner worthy of the dignity and professed humanity of the United States.

At her first Cabinet meeting, Perkins spoke briefly of her number one concern.

- [Frances] Every state, practically, has exhausted its reserves.

The federal government must appropriate a very large sum of money to feed the hungry.

- [Narrator] But Roosevelt wanted to talk about an idea of his own.

With a lifelong love of trees, he would send unemployed men out to reforest the land ravaged by depression.

- [Frances] Oh have you seen, by the way, have you seen that film, "The Plow that Broke the Plains"?

No, I haven't, and I wanted to talk about my subject, but he wanted to talk about his.

- [Narrator] After Perkins' first appearance as Labor Secretary, Congress appropriated $500 million for immediate relief, posing a problem for those against federal government handouts.

- [Frances] The situation was so desperate that even the most profound states-righters were really grabbing for it sometimes, in a rather disgustingly selfish way.

- [Narrator] Funds were also approved to introduce Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps to the nation.

- [Frances] How wonderful it would be to have groups of these men take a train to go to the woods.

I remember listening to it with some horror, as I began to picture the unemployed men I knew, who would wonder what in the world to do with an ax, if there was an ax.

- [Narrator] After Roosevelt put a reluctant Perkins in charge, it was decided that the CCC should be confined to young healthy men from families on relief.

And that the US Army is the only organization that has the structure and supplies that were needed.

- So she gets together with all the key parts of the government, and they mobilize it as if it were an Army camp.

They use the tents, the clothing.

That program is going by April.

♪ Been six months away from home in CCC ♪ - [Narrator] By mid-summer of 1933, there were 1,300 camps, creating 800 state parks, and planting over two billion trees.

By the end of the year, 600,000 men had sent $60 million home to their families.

When the New Deal started, Roosevelt and Perkins were able to enjoy a rare moment of political unity, made possible only by crisis.

- We're for Roosevelt.

We think the country is for Roosevelt.

And until we find that the country is not satisfied, we are going to back him up, just as though we all were Democrats.

- [Narrator] But as opposition to New Deal social programs grew, Perkins became an easy target.

Labeled a socialist, she was criticized for her appearance, and endured lies about her name and birthplace, and even death threats.

And since arriving in Washington, Perkins had little time to find a permanent home, leaving her unprepared for the social obligations of the capital.

Then a wealthy widowed friend, Mary Harriman Rumsey, asked her to share a townhouse in nearby Georgetown.

Mary attended to the details of the house, leaving Frances to focus on her work.

In return, Frances provided Mary with access to the politicians, writers, and artists of the New Deal.

And as Frances struggled to provide for her daughter and her husband in New York, the two women created a warm and comfortable refuge from her complex personal life.

And the general public, and even members of her own staff, had no idea where she lived or who she lived with.

(booming) From her first day in office, Perkins had pushed Roosevelt for a large public works program to create jobs.

But he was more concerned about groups in Washington who were developing their own recovery ideas away from the administration and he instructed Perkins to investigate.

- [Frances] Well, I said "Mr. President, "I'm not a member of that group, "and I'm not invited to their meetings.

"Why don't you take a hand in it?"

"No, I'd rather you go look into it first, "and if it's alright, I'll tell them I backed you."

This was the type of thing Roosevelt was often doing.

You know, "If you get away with it, I'll be your sponsor.

"If you don't get away with it, I never heard of you."

- [Chris] She had gotten to know Roosevelt pretty well by this time, and she knew he was devious at times, with even the people closest to him.

She had some real reservations about Franklin Roosevelt.

- [Narrator] After Perkins' investigation, the various recovery ideas were merged into a single proposal, including her plan for public works.

But she soon discovered that budget director Lewis Douglas had talked Roosevelt into taking it out.

- [Frances] Roosevelt could take other people's advice, with an inadequate understanding of what it was they were advising him.

- [Narrator] Refusing to give up, Perkins arranged a last minute meeting before the bill went public and convinced the President to put public works back in.

- She would go in and she would outline what she was asking him to do.

And she'd then ask him to repeat.

And then she would repeat it again, and if it was important enough, she would ask him to write it down.

She said it also works with 10 year old boys.

- [Narrator] On June 16th, 1933, the merged proposal became the National Industrial Recovery Act, a voluntary agreement between government, business, and labor to boost the economy by regulating hours, wages, and competition.

Known simply as the NRA, the bill also included over $3 billion to fund Perkins' public works program.

Passage of the NRA was followed by a massive publicity campaign, creating a new spirit of hope and cooperation and spreading the message that America was on the road to recovery.

♪ From the plains to the hills ♪ From the mine to the mills ♪ The road is open again - The Department of Labor was never so well equipped to protect the interests of the wage earners, and never before so well informed.

- [Narrator] After only a few months in office, Perkins' relationship with labor leaders began to improve.

- She decided to get in the arena.

Standing next to people that she didn't always agree with, for the betterment of her country.

In order to make a democracy function, you have to have people that are willing to work in the middle.

So she would stand her ground, but she would also try to find common ground.

- [Narrator] And during often difficult labor negotiations, Perkins never lost sight of the rank and file.

- We have in operation a plan for the prompt settlement of industrial disputes.

- [Narrator] And when the NRA added section 7A, which for the first time sanctioned the workers' right to organize, she went on the road to promote it.

- I am exceedingly happy at being in San Francisco to address the meeting of the American Federation of Labor.

The opportunity of collective bargaining is established.

The act providing that employees should have the right to organize and bargain collectively, Section 7A in the National Recovery Administration.

As to what ought to be the American policy with regard to the rights of labor.

- [Narrator] The right to organize finally gave workers a new voice for their discontent.

But as Roosevelt spoke of a new era of peace and prosperity, strikes broke out across the country.

- Fellow workers, we want peace and prosperity in this country here.

That's what we're fighting for and that's what we're going to have.

(audience cheers) (dramatic music) - [Narrator] While there had been a great nationwide enthusiasm for the NRA, it was based on a voluntary agreement without legal remedy, and it soon fell into disarray.

Finally, in the spring of 1935, the Supreme Court found much of the NRA unconstitutional, while leaving the public works program intact.

For Frances Perkins, the NRA had been a trial run, and she continued to believe in its principles.

- The 40-hour week is merely a device, a measuring stick set up in the effort to shorten hours to such an extent that more people will be employed.

You can take on as many people as you want to and you can keep your whole plant going 24 hours a day, seven days in the week.

- [Narrator] And even as the NRA ended, she had bills drafted for a federal minimum wage and maximum hours, and put them in her desk drawer for another day.

(calm music) As Perkins mastered behind the scenes political skills, she was quick to avoid news conferences and questions about her personal life.

On one occasion, when reporters blocked her entrance to a hotel, she told them that actress Greta Garbo was staying on the third floor.

The entry soon cleared and she walked freely into the lobby.

- [David] She had a lifelong distrust of people in my profession.

And my profession was not kind to her as a result.

- [Narrator] When it became too much, she would retreat to Newcastle, a sanctuary from the press and publicity.

- What's going on inside is so delicate and so complicated, that if you spill your guts without the intimacy of trust, without a history with this person, then you're trampling soft grass.

And you're destroying what's delicate and intricate inside.

You know, what's private is precious.

And you don't turn it into a bumper sticker.

- [Narrator] As Perkins campaigned for shorter hours for workers, she herself was working 15 hour days, through lunch and late into the evening.

And even the youngest of her staff found her energy exhausting.

- She was able to keep all these balls in the air.

She had fantastic energy.

And I think it's not only a blessing, but it's a curse.

So, she needed these little breaks to recharge her battery.

And she recharged them in Maine.

- [Narrator] Frances got little sleep and after arriving in Newcastle, she would collapse and sometimes stay in bed for two weeks while her daughter brought her trays of food.

- [David] She was built for the practical world.

And yet she was also built for the inner world.

And she cared about having an inner constancy and an inner integrity to herself.

So she was not scattered.

She was a woman of vocation, of service.

She was not a woman of selfishness.

She was not a woman of decadence.

She was not a woman of scandal, or dishonesty.

And so the outward expression built the inner core.

- [Narrator] When Frances finally got up and out of bed, the energy returned, and everyone agreed that she needed to get back to work.

Frances Perkins arrived in Washington with a plan to transform the gospel of social reform into the rule of law.

Instead her first year was overwhelmed by a massive rescue effort.

But by 1934, she wanted to introduce the New York State unemployment program to the national stage.

- All of our people.

I have advocated this particular type of legislation for over 15 years, and I am certain.

- [Narrator] But the nation's attention had instead been turned to the severe effect of the depression on the aged.

- Old people were almost uniformly impoverished.

When you stopped working, you didn't have any income coming in.

People had no savings.

So old people had to find a child to live with if they could, or some kind of a home that would take them in.

It was, it guaranteed a sort of horrible final act for most Americans' lives.

- [Narrator] Roosevelt was under great pressure to help, and at this crucial moment, Perkins warned him that if they did not forward a combined old age and unemployment bill now, it may be decades, if ever, that the opportunity would come again.

- [Frances] It was then June 1934.

It was hot.

The weather had become unbearably hot in Washington.

Congress wanted to adjourn.

- [Narrator] Besieged by dozens of flawed old age schemes, Congress needed to act before leaving the heat of Washington for the summer, giving Roosevelt and Perkins little time to present a bill of their own.

- [Frances] I got a bright idea in the night.

Appoint a Cabinet committee to bring in a plan for Congress in next year.

- [Narrator] Roosevelt liked the idea because he could control the process and send Congress home with the promise of a combined old age and unemployment bill when they returned in January of 1935.

He immediately issued an executive order to create a Cabinet committee.

The committee would include Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, Attorney General Cummings, Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, and Federal Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins.

Roosevelt then insisted that the committee be chaired by Labor Secretary Frances Perkins.

But since Congress had left town quickly without an appropriation, she would now have six months and no money to do what it had taken European countries decades to do.

Then her friend Hopkins gave her $125,000 of federal relief money, earmarked to hire unemployed workers, and Social Security began as a public relief project.

After adding volunteers and people from other departments, Perkins created a force of over 150 people, including a technical board and advisory council.

- It was necessary to have a lot of people involved.

And in government, once a lot of people are involved, it is unlikely to occur.

Because you just get this Tower of Babel mess of information flowing back and forth, of argument flowing back and forth.

Without Frances Perkins overseeing it, this idea never would have even made it into legislative language.

- [Narrator] Roosevelt envisioned a grand cradle-to-grave Social Security system that would deliver payments through the US Postal Service, but he insisted that it require no government money to run.

- He was absolutely committed to making sure that Social Security would be self-supporting in perpetuity.

- FDR's big worry was he didn't want the dole.

The classic welfare state, people getting money for nothing.

- [Narrator] The committee faced dozens of decisions.

Who would contribute to the program?

Who would be eligible?

How much money would be allotted, and how would it be funded?

But Perkins' most pressing problem was how to make it constitutional.

Then, at a private social gathering, Justice Harlan Stone whispered a word of advice.

- [Frances] The taxing power, my dear.

The taxing power of the United States, you can do anything under it.

I went back to my committee and I never told them how I got my great information.

As far as they knew, I went out into the wilderness and had a vision.

- So she went back to the drawing boards and produced a program that was exactly what FDR thought it could be.

People made contributions to the program.

They would be committed to the program.

And then the program would be politically invulnerable.

- He really liked that this had its own tax source, its own revenue source, as he put it, so that no damn politician could ever take it away from you, because you have contributed to it.

- He was quite right about that.

- [Narrator] But satisfying the president wouldn't be enough.

Perkins would also have to convince a skeptical public.

- This program of Social Security is being developed by a committee of which I have the honor to be chairman.

It includes provisions for unemployment insurance, and for old age pensions, or old age insurance.

For the paying of regular and steady and fair income to the people who may be laid off, through no fault of their own, in the next depression.

- [Narrator] As the committee slowly moved forward, summer turned to fall, and Perkins alerted Roosevelt that they were stalled over a single issue that could derail the entire process.

Should these be federal or federal-state programs?

- [Frances] We came really up to the date when the report had to go in.

And I then asked them to come to my house and we have to settle it tonight.

Well, we locked the door, and I laid out a couple of bottles of something or other.

- [Narrator] Working late into the night, the committee had a bill ready by 2:00 a.m. Out of the chaos of economic disaster, they had achieved a legislative miracle in only six months.

But for Frances Perkins, this triumphant moment became bittersweet, when her friend Mary Rumsey died in a riding accident.

And she now suffered alone with the loss of a close friend, her home, and a way of life.

But there was little time to grieve, as she now needed to help shepherd the controversial bill through Congress.

And while Democrats controlled both houses, they were already under great pressure to act on a wildly popular relief plan by a doctor named Francis Townsend, who would guarantee $200 per month to every citizen over 60.

- The Social Security plan of the administration is wholly unfair, inadequate, and unjust.

But the Townsend plan would immediately restore prosperity.

(audience applauds) - The opposition to Social Security came from the left as well as from the right.

But as President Lincoln has said, "Public sentiment is everything."

- [Narrator] The Townsend plan was deeply flawed and doomed to fail, posing a threat to this historic opportunity.

But with 25 million signatures in support, Perkins would have to help change public sentiment, while facing negative press, distrust, and even ridicule.

(calm music) - [Man] America's Town Meeting of the Air.

- [Man] Yes, oh yes, town meeting tonight, should we plan for Social Security?

Madam Secretary, the life insurance statistics show that the average man dies at the age of 60, but you would give the pension at the age of 65.

(audience laughs) - [Narrator] Perkins also faced another fight in Congress, where she was attacked, called unqualified, and publicly accused of socialism.

- [Frances] This was a conspiracy to take over the government, and they thought I was subversive.

- [Narrator] As the bills inched their way through the House and Senate, a group of Republicans tried to strike old age insurance and some Democrats wavered.

And after countless setbacks, the two bills were passed and sent on to a conference committee to reconcile.

But with the congressional session coming to an end, the committee became hopelessly deadlocked, and the future of Social Security hung in the balance.

- [Man] The vote has been taken.

- [Narrator] Finally, after a month of wrangling, a compromise was reached.

And on August 14th, 1935, after surviving a seven-month battle of detail, delays, and opposition, the economic security bill became the Social Security Act, which would improve life for generations of working Americans.

- We shall see unemployment insurance, old age pensions, security for our children, and the extension of public health services, perhaps the most important piece of legislation on behalf of wage earners in the United States, than anything in the history of this country has produced.

- I thank publicly, as I have so often thanked privately, the first woman who has ever sat in the Cabinet of the United States.

Miss Frances Perkins, who so greatly helped me, making Social Security legislation possible.

This Social Security measure.

- Into this enormous, churning, seemingly endless insecure society, they introduce the notion of a secure society, Social Security.

I do not believe that the Social Security Act would have made it into law without Frances Perkins.

- In the moment in time in which she was operating, she was just an unusual figure.

Unusually committed, unusually brave, alone in a world full of men.

- Frances Perkins paved the way, made it easier for the rest of us.

She was an icon.

She's a model, who fought at a time when it took great courage to make that fight.

- She inherited part of a tradition of service, she was its caretaker for a little while, and she passed it on to another generation.

- Our lives are still being guided and sheltered and improved 70 or 80 years after they've left office.

- [Alice] What Frances Perkins tried to do was to speak to a level of discontent, a level of unhappiness, a level of misery.

- Poverty is tough, misery is difficult, pain and suffering are hard, but nothing equals the loss of self esteem in a person's life, and Frances Perkins changed that.

(calm music) - [Narrator] During her 12 years as Labor Secretary, Frances Perkins worked tirelessly to shorten the workload for others.

She crusaded for the poor and homeless, even as her own home was broken by disease and separation.

Yet she was able to help weave the torn fabric of a failing democracy into a new design for government, and Americans continue to live and work under the enduring legacy of Frances Perkins.

- I have spent most of my adult life in the service of the people of my country.

Working to improve their living and laboring standard.

I have done what I could in my time to make this great country of ours a little nearer to our conception of the city of God.

♪ As we go marching, marching ♪ In the beauty of the day ♪ A million darkened kitchens ♪ A thousand mill lofts gray ♪ Are touched with all the radiance ♪ ♪ That a sudden sun discloses ♪ For the people hear us singing ♪ ♪ Bread and roses, bread and roses ♪ ♪ As we go marching, marching ♪ As we go marching, marching, marching ♪ ♪ As we go marching, marching, marching ♪ ♪ As we go marching, marching, marching ♪ ♪ As we go marching, marching, marching ♪ ♪ We go marching, marching, marching ♪ ♪ As we go marching, marching, marching ♪ ♪ We go marching, marching, marching ♪ ♪ As we go marching, marching, marching ♪ (dramatic music)