Rebecca Brenner Graham. Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts To Aid Refugees From Nazi Germany. Kensington Books, 2025. 368 pp. Hardcover $29.00.
As I write this book review, the United States is in a migrant crisis. It is not the imaginary one that President-elect Trump and his Republican Party cronies evoked throughout the recent election cycle, of U.S. decline due to “open borders” and “migrant crime.” Instead, immigrants, both legal and undocumented, and their allies, deeply fear the GOP’s campaign promise of “mass deportation” and speculate about how, and how much, it will be carried out starting on January 20, 2025.
Frances Perkins (1880-1965), the first female Cabinet member, also faced a migrant crisis when she was confirmed as Secretary of Labor in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)’s first administration. FDR took office in 1933, the same year that Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. During the 1930s, Jews in Germany tried to immigrate to the United States in the tens of thousands. Yet, in Perkins’s time, as today, the U.S. immigration system was restrictionist, meaning that it was designed to keep out most immigrants. Perkins, as historian Rebecca Brenner Graham reveals in her illuminating new biography, Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts To Aid Refugees From Nazi Germany, was a woman molded by her Protestant religiosity, work in settlement houses, and identity as a member of the Progressive movement.1 Thus, she tirelessly and creatively undertook to admit immigrants, even taking on her governmental colleagues in the U.S. State Department. As a result, “Perkins contributed to saving the lives of tens of thousands of refugees from Nazism.”(Graham, p. 4)
Graham’s Dear Miss Perkins aims both to bring further to light the story of the “relatively unknown” Perkins and to situate her and her work in the broader story of mid-twentieth-century American restrictionist immigration policy, “capitalism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and more.”(p. 5) All these forces, Graham convincingly argues, interfered significantly with Perkins’s aims to bring German Jewish refugees—even children—to the United States. She was accused of being a communist and traitor; Congress even attempted in 1939 to impeach her.2 Yet, Perkins succeeded in bringing in immigrants. How? She made demands of FDR before she would accept the Cabinet position (p. 24); adjusted staffing in her own Labor Department, which then contained the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) (pp. 74-7); put sand in the gears of the State Department’s efforts to block immigration (p. 68); worked with outside pro-immigrant organizations; and otherwise maneuvered within a Washington that consistently underestimated her.
Dear Miss Perkins commences with three chapters that lay out the background for Perkins’s career. The daughter of a New England small-business owner, Perkins graduated from Mount Holyoke College and then moved in 1904 to Chicago to work in the settlement house movement. During the Progressive Era (1890-1920), settlement houses were institutions founded in cities by social reformers to aid the large influx of immigrants. There, she decided, “social justice would be my vocation.”3 After Chicago, she went for similar work to New York, where, in 1911, she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which killed 146 young immigrant women, mostly Jewish and Italian, due to the greed and negligence of the factory owners. Perkins worked on the committee formed to revise fire codes and was later hired by the New York State government, first under Governor Al Smith and later under Governor Roosevelt. Within time, she became known as an expert labor negotiator and effective administrator, so FDR chose her in response to his supporters’ urging that he appoint the first woman Cabinet Secretary. During this time, she also married a handsome, profligate, mentally ill man, Paul Wilson, and had a daughter, Susanna Perkins Wilson, who too would struggle with mental illness. Graham skillfully weaves the story of Perkins’s difficult personal life into the larger account of her political career.
Former Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt at the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, March 1961, Kheel Center, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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The other two background chapters detail, first, the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany, to emphasize why Jews felt the need to immigrate, and, second, the nature and sources of the concurrent restrictionist U.S. policies hostile to admitting these, or any, immigrants: “White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism remained the State Department’s norm. Institutional bigotry rather than individual or personal prejudices shaped refugees’ fates.”(p. 70) Several clear charts and timelines help the reader understand the relevant context.
The central section of the book, seven chapters long, chronicles Perkins’s work as Labor Secretary, including the turf battles between Labor and State, shaped by Congressional legislation and court decisions, regarding the granting of visas to refugees from Nazi Germany. Graham deftly reconstructs Perkins’s relationships with American Jewish activists and organizations, particularly German-Jewish Children’s Aid (GJCA), led by Cecilia Razovsky, and its child-refugee program: “As the superstar of efforts to aid child refugees, Razovsky could not have played her role without Perkins backstage.”4 Despite the titanic efforts arrayed against her and the failure of multiple bills that would have allowed thousands of Jews into the country, Perkins secured visas for at least 597 German-Jewish children during her tenure.(p. 110)
Frances Perkins and group on steps of White House in 1939, Harris & Ewing, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Graham’s extensive original research shines in this section, as she drew on a rich trove of thousands of letters to Secretary Perkins, now kept in the National Archives. The book’s title comes from the salutations of the letters Perkins received: “‘Dear Miss Perkins,’ wrote hundreds, perhaps thousands of individuals between 1938 and 1940 … from the mixture of acquaintances and loved ones of people trapped in Nazi-occupied territory, Frances Perkins must have received multiple [letters] every week.”(p. 133) Chapter seven contains a series of case studies of adult would-be refugees and Perkins’s answers to pleas on their behalf. Each case study presents a detailed, fascinating miniature portrait of the person—sometimes well-known, like the playwright Bertolt Brecht, more often not—with an explanation of Perkins’s response.(pp. 152-5) One of Perkins’s more creative and successful tactics was the extension of soon-to-expire visitor visas for those already in the country. For as long as the INS was within the Labor Department, Perkins declined to participate in the past practice of using it to conduct raids against such visitors.(p. 155)
Dear Miss Perkins concludes with three chapters on the historical memory of the 1930s: how Perkins was not remembered, and then, much later, especially after 2016, was—and how her story of being forgotten and then remembered ties into evolving U.S. historical memory of other events, particularly the country’s immigration history and its intervention (or lack thereof) in the Holocaust. Graham does well to remind the reader of how this country’s frequent whitewashing of its past sins manifested in those cases. Yet, those interested in diving deeper into Perkins within the context of Jewish Studies will want to consult the extensive specialist literature available on the subject, some of which Graham cites.5
This thought-provoking, long-overdue work reflects the feeling of loss at Trump’s victory in 2016 and the failure of the United States to elect the first woman President. That sentiment resonates in early 2025, as this country’s voters again have elected Trump over a more qualified woman. It was no surprise to this author that, while scrolling social media on December 16, 2024, she saw a post from President Biden’s account announcing the designation of the Frances Perkins Homestead in Maine as a National Monument. Indeed, there is a crucial lesson for our times in Perkins’s career: even within an uncaring government bureaucracy, one person could make a difference, not only in what she was able to accomplish but also in what she was able to thwart. As we, in a different but perhaps rhyming way, head into dark times, I am reminded of historian Timothy Snyder’s 2017 book, On Tyranny and its first, often-quoted directive, “Do not comply in advance.”6 Frances Perkins would have agreed whole-heartedly.
- In 2019, Graham published a piece on Perkins in Contingent—“No Refuge”
- In early January 1939, Perkins was the subject of an impeachment attempt on the grounds that she had mishandled the case of an Australian immigrant, Harry Bridges, the leader of a successful Longshoreman strike in 1934. As Secretary of the Labor Department, which contained the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) at that time, Perkins could have deported Bridges, whom Republicans considered a Communist and subversive, but she declined because she did not think, after an investigation she led, that there were grounds for deportation. Representative J. Parnell Thomas (R-NJ) introduced a resolution to impeach Perkins on the grounds that she had committed treason. It failed but showed Perkins the power of backlash. Graham, Dear Miss Perkins, 110-15.
- Graham, 12; citing Frances Perkins’s biography of FDR, The Roosevelt I Knew, originally published 1946 (Penguin Classics, 2011), 10.
- Graham, 88. Perkins is not the only woman whom Graham seeks to rescue from relative obscurity: “Key players in the GJCA’s refugee program epitomized the claim of Pamela Nadell, a foremost historian of American Jewish women, that “those who excoriate American Jews for their failure to rescue Europe’s Jews ignore what American women did accomplish” (94, citing Pamela S. Nadell, American Jewish Women: a History from Colonial Times until Today [New York: Norton, 2019]), 207.
- On antisemitism, readers may consult Deborah Lipstadt’s extensive body of work, of which Graham cites Antisemitism Here and Now (New York: Schocken, 2019); on Christian supremacy in the United States after World War II, see Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic, 2015); on Holocaust memory in America, see Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). The work is a controversial but defining text. For a somewhat different perspective on the shaping of Holocaust memory, see Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015); and Barry Trachtenberg, The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). All of these books but Mintz’s were cited by Graham.
- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Random House, 2017).
