Women and Rhetoric between the Wars

4. A Rhetor’s Apprenticeship: Reading Frances Perkins’s Rhetorical Autobiography

63 X 4 I said to myself, “That’s the way to get things done. So behave, so dress, and so comport yourself that you remind them subconsciously of their mothers.”—Frances Perkins in an interview, c. 1951 A Rhetor’s Apprenticeship: Reading Frances Perkins’s Rhetorical Autobiography Janet Zepernick Frances Perkins (1880–1965), secretary of labor from 1933 to 1945 and the first woman cabinet member, has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, given her pivotal role in the Roosevelt administration and her status as chief architect of the heart of New Deal legislation: Social Security. Recently, that has begun to change, as work by public administration scholars DeLysa Burnier and Meredith Newman, as well as biographers Kirstin Downey, Emily Keller, Penny Colman, and Naomi Pasachoff, has begun to draw back the veil of historical neglect and (as Burnier argues) active marginalization that effectively obscured Perkins’s monumental accomplishments. One of the important contributions of recent scholarship has been to demonstrate convincingly that Perkins’s own estimation of her role as a member of Roosevelt’s inner circle was in no way exaggerated. The very fact that such outside corroboration seems necessary is a powerful illustration of the ease with which women’s past accomplishments have been rendered invisible for future generations. Nevertheless, recent vindication of Perkins as a reliable chronicler of her own life opens up a fascinating area of research in the form of Perkins’s insightful and thoughtfully rendered account of her rhetorical education and the successful application of the principles she learned and espoused. Janet Zepernick 64 The essential starting point for any study of Perkins as rhetorical theorist is her 1946 political memoir of the Roosevelt administration, The Roosevelt I Knew, and the posthumous Al Smith, Hero of the Cities : A Political Portrait Drawing on the Papers of Frances Perkins. In form, The Roosevelt I Knew is an insider’s account of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, with particular emphasis on the period from his campaign for governor of New York in 1928 to the end of his first term in the White House in 1937. In texture, it has the lively, personal style and immediacy of memoir; and the voice, the rhetorical lens, and the interpretative, analytical approach all create a strong sense of Perkins’s presence. Although its nominal focus is Roosevelt, the political man, read across the grain, it forms a sort of rhetorical literacy narrative or autobiography of Perkins herself, in which she frames her own continuing political education as a sequence of discrete moments—events, conversations, and observations—that emerge as reference points in her recollection of Roosevelt’s administrative style and the larger interactional context within which the work of the New Deal administration occurred. In that sense, The Roosevelt I Knew is a work of political exegesis that takes the invention and implementation of the New Deal as its text and reads it as a series of lessons in rhetorical practice. The work that became Al Smith: Hero of the Cities was begun in a similar vein. With the working title “The Al Smith I Knew” (Martin 486), it was intended as a political biography of the New York governor (1919–20 and 1923–28) whose career in politics was closely intertwined with Perkins’s career in social reform. Although Perkins herself was unable to complete the manuscript, her presence is very evident, and it is in many ways the companion volume to The Roosevelt I Knew. Together, I argue, the two works form what I call Perkins’s autobiographical rhetorical theory: a first-person, narrative textbook on the micro-rhetoric of “the great game of politics” (Roosevelt I Knew 137) as it is played out in any loosely regulated, hierarchical organization, including the bureaucratic governance of a representative democracy but also including the departmental structure of higher education and many large corporations. The result is what we might expect to see if, say, Plato wrote about a character called Plato who was the student of a teacher named Socrates. It is an engaging series of pedagogical vignettes, like the Phaedrus in its affectionate and intimate depiction of its characters, and like Cicero’s De Oratore in its detailed depiction of rhetorical best practices for a very specific and narrowly defined scene. Like Cicero, Perkins herself was both a theorist and expert A Rhetor’s Apprenticeship 65 practitioner of the rhetorical principles her treatise...