Shaper of the New Deal

As the nation debates once again proposals to guarantee health insurance for everyone, a new biography of Frances Perkins reminds us of just how long the argument has been going on. In 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt offered Perkins the job of secretary of labor, she proposed an agenda that was to become the backbone of the New Deal: unemployment insurance, hours and wages legislation, abolition of child labor, social security, and national health insurance. Famously, all but the latter were to be won and even more. Now, even as the American labor movement leads the uphill battle for some form of public health insurance, it is fighting for its own life. The Magna Carta of labor—the Wagner Act of 1935 that Perkins did not particularly support—has run its course, and the unions want a successor law to clear the field for them.