But they get things done. They perform acts of sacrificial service with the same modest everyday spirit they would display if they were just getting the groceries. They are not thinking about what impressive work they are doing. They just seem delighted by the flawed people around them. They just recognize what needs doing and they do it. They make you feel funnier and smarter when you speak with them. They move through different social classes not even aware, it seems, that they are doing so.
They have not led lives of conflict-free tranquillity, but have struggled toward maturity. These are the people we are looking for. A few years ago I was driving home and heard a program called Command Performance, which was a variety show that went out to the troops during World War II. But the most striking feature of the show was its tone of self-effacement and humility. The Allies had just completed one of the noblest military victories in human history. And yet there was no chest beating.
Nobody was erecting triumphal arches. The actor Burgess Meredith read a passage written by Ernie Pyle, the war correspondent. We did not win it because destiny created us better than all other people. I hope that in victory we are more grateful than proud.
There were rapturous celebrations, certainly. Sailors in San Francisco commandeered cable cars and looted liquor stores. Joy gave way to solemnity and self-doubt. There was also the manner in which the war in the Pacific had ended—with the atomic bomb.
People around the world had just seen the savagery human beings are capable of. Now here was a weapon that could make that savagery apocalyptic.
The people on that broadcast had been part of one of the most historic victories ever known. Their first instinct was to remind themselves they were not morally superior to anyone else. Their collective impulse was to warn themselves against pride and self- glorification. I arrived home before the program was over and listened to that radio show in my driveway for a time. Then I went inside and turned on a football game.
A quarterback threw a short pass to a wide receiver, who was tackled almost immediately for a two-yard gain. He did a self-puffing victory dance, as the camera lingered. This little contrast set off a chain of thoughts in my mind. Little Me In the years following that Command Performance episode, I went back and studied that time and the people who were prominent then.
The research reminded me first of all that none of us should ever wish to go back to the culture of the mid- twentieth century. Most of us would not have had the opportunities we enjoy if we had lived back then.
It was also a more boring culture, with bland food and homogeneous living arrangements. It was an emotionally cold culture. Fathers, in particular, frequently were unable to express their love for their own children. In so many ways, life is better now than it was then.
People in this tradition, I thought, are less likely to feel that every thought, feeling, and achievement should be immediately shared with the world at large. There were no message T-shirts back then, no exclamation points on the typewriter keyboards, no sympathy ribbons for various diseases, no vanity license plates, no bumper stickers with personal or moral declarations.
The social code was embodied in the self-effacing style of actors like Gregory Peck or Gary Cooper, or the character Joe Friday on Dragnet. By the time the Reagan administration rolled around, twelve of his thirty cabinet members published memoirs, almost all of them self- advertising. And Bush would revert to form. No more self- promotion. At that point, 12 percent said yes. Psychologists have a thing called the narcissism test.
Ninety-three percent of young people score higher than the middle score just twenty years ago. By , 51 percent of young people reported that being famous was one of their top personal goals. Trust yourself. Be true to yourself. Movies from Pixar and Disney are constantly telling children how wonderful they are. Chart your own course. You have a responsibility to do great things because you are so great. God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are.
For example, the early Girl Scout handbooks preached an ethic of self- sacrifice and self-effacement. By , as James Davison Hunter has pointed out, the tone was very different. What are you feeling? You were made to leave a mark on this generation…. I was haunted by the quality of humility I heard in those voices.
There was something aesthetically beautiful about the self-effacement the people on that program displayed. Humility is freedom from the need to prove you are superior all the time, but egotism is a ravenous hunger in a small space—self-concerned, competitive, and distinction- hungry.
Humility is infused with lovely emotions like admiration, companionship, and gratitude. This is the way humility leads to wisdom. The people we think are wise have, to some degree, overcome the biases and overconfident tendencies that are infused in our nature. In its most complete meaning, intellectual humility is accurate self-awareness from a distance.
Finally, there is something morally impressive about humility. The people on that Command Performance broadcast were guarding themselves against some of their least attractive tendencies, to be prideful, self-congratulatory, hubristic. When we think about making a difference or leading a life with purpose, we often think of achieving something external—performing some service that will have an impact on the world, creating a successful company, or doing something for the community.
But they also use, alongside that, a different metaphor, which has more to do with the internal life. This is the metaphor of self- confrontation. They are more likely to assume that we are all deeply divided selves, both splendidly endowed and deeply flawed—that we each have certain talents but also certain weaknesses. We will not be as good, internally, as we want to be.
We will fail in some profound way. They start with an acute awareness of the bugs in their own nature. It leads to selfishness, the desire to use other people as means to get things for yourself.
It leads to a capacity to ignore and rationalize your own imperfections and inflate your virtues. As we go through life, most of us are constantly comparing and constantly finding ourselves slightly better than other people— more virtuous, with better judgment, with better taste.
Some perversity in our nature leads us to put lower loves above higher ones. We all love and desire a multitude of things: friendship, family, popularity, country, money, and so on. I suspect we all rank those loves in pretty much the same way.
We all know that the love you feel for your children or parents should be higher than the love you have for money. We all know the love you have for the truth should be higher than the love you have for popularity.
But we often put our loves out of order. If someone tells you something in confidence and then you blab it as good gossip at a dinner party, you are putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship. We do this all the time.
People who are humble about their own nature are moral realists. They are exultant on days when they win some small victory over selfishness and hard- heartedness. They are despondent on days when they let themselves down, when they avoid some charitable task because they were lazy or tired, or fail to attend to a person who wanted to be heard.
His central sin, from which many of his other sins branch out, is a certain hardness of heart. Sometimes he is not fully present for people who are asking his advice or revealing some vulnerability. Sometimes he is more interested in making a good impression than in listening to other people in depth.
Maybe he spent more time at a meeting thinking about how he might seem impressive than about what others were actually saying. Maybe he flattered people too unctuously. Each night, he catalogs the errors. He tallies his recurring core sins and the other mistakes that might have branched off from them. We all have a moral responsibility to be more moral every day, and he will struggle to inch ahead each day in this most important sphere. You have to build it with effort and artistry.
Moral realists sometimes do hard things, like standing firm against evil and imposing intense self-discipline on their desires. But character is built not only through austerity and hardship. It is also built sweetly through love and pleasure.
When you have deep friendships with good people, you copy and then absorb some of their best traits. When you experience great art, you widen your repertoire of emotions. Through devotion to some cause, you elevate your desires and organize your energies.
Moreover, the struggle against the weaknesses in yourself is never a solitary struggle. Individual will, reason, compassion, and character are not strong enough to consistently defeat selfishness, pride, greed, and self-deception.
Everybody needs redemptive assistance from outside—from family, friends, ancestors, rules, traditions, institutions, exemplars, and, for believers, God. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in moral struggle against yourself. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage this struggle well— joyfully and compassionately. But Adam II builds character by winning victories over the weaknesses in himself. The U-Curve The people in this book led diverse lives.
But there is one pattern that recurs: They had to go down to go up. They had to descend into the valley of humility to climb to the heights of character. The road to character often involves moments of moral crisis, confrontation, and recovery. The everyday self-deceptions and illusions of self-mastery were shattered. They had to humble themselves in self- awareness if they had any hope of rising up transformed. Alice had to be small to enter Wonderland. In the valley of humility they learned to quiet the self.
Only by quieting the self could they see the world clearly. Only by quieting the self could they understand other people and accept what they are offering. When they had quieted themselves, they had opened up space for grace to flood in. They found themselves understood and cared for by others in ways they did not imagine beforehand. They found themselves loved in ways they did not deserve.
They turn around and see how much ground they have left behind. They commit themselves to some long obedience and dedicate themselves to some desperate lark that gives life purpose. The experience has reshaped their inner core and given it great coherence, solidity, and weight. Self-respect is not the same as self- confidence or self-esteem. Self-respect is not based on IQ or any of the mental or physical gifts that help get you into a competitive college. It is not comparative.
It is not earned by being better than other people at something. It emerges in one who is morally dependable. Self- respect is produced by inner triumphs, not external ones. I can overcome that. In every life there are huge crucible moments, altering ordeals, that either make you or break you. But this process can also happen in daily, gradual ways. Character is built both through drama and through the everyday.
What was on display in Command Performance was more than just an aesthetic or a style. The more I looked into that period, the more I realized I was looking into a different moral country. I began to see a different view of human nature, a different attitude about what is important in life, a different formula for how to live a life of character and depth.
But we are morally inarticulate. Without it, there is a certain superficiality to modern culture, especially in the moral sphere. The central fallacy of modern life is the belief that accomplishments of the Adam I realm can produce deep satisfaction. Only Adam II can experience deep satisfaction. Adam I aims for happiness, but Adam II knows that happiness is insufficient.
The ultimate joys are moral joys. In the pages ahead, I will try to offer some real-life examples of how this sort of life was lived. There is no seven-point program.
But we can immerse ourselves in the lives of outstanding people and try to understand the wisdom of the way they lived. One of the nice homes was owned by Mrs. Gordon Norrie, a society matron descended from two of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence. On March 25, Mrs. Norrie was just sitting down to tea with a group of friends when they heard a commotion outside.
Perkins spoke in the upper-crust tones befitting her upbringing—like Margaret Dumont in the old Marx Brothers movies or Mrs. The ladies ran out. Perkins lifted up her skirts and sprinted toward it. They had stumbled upon the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, one of the most famous fires in American history. She joined the throng of horrified onlookers on the sidewalk below.
Some saw what they thought were bundles of fabric falling from the windows. They thought the factory owners were saving their best material. They were people, hurling themselves to their death. It was a horrifying spectacle. One woman grandly emptied her purse over the onlookers below and then hurled herself off.
Help is coming. The flames were roasting them from behind. Forty-seven people ended up jumping. One young man tenderly helped a young woman onto the windowsill. Then he held her out, away from the building, like a ballet dancer, and let her drop.
He did the same for a second and a third. Finally, a fourth girl stood on the windowsill; she embraced him and they shared a long kiss. Then he himself was in the air. As he fell, people noticed, as his pants ballooned out, that he wore smart tan shoes. You could see in it that he was a real man. He had done his best. The pile quickly burst into flames. Somebody alerted the factory manager, Samuel Bernstein, who grabbed some nearby buckets of water and dumped them on the fire.
They did little good. They opened the valve, but there was no pressure. As a historian of the fire, David Von Drehle, has argued, Bernstein made a fatal decision in those first three minutes. He could have spent the time fighting the fire or evacuating the nearly five hundred workers. Instead, he battled the exploding fire, to no effect. Many of the women on the eighth floor were taking the time to go to the dressing room to retrieve their coats and belongings. Eventually, the two factory owners up on the tenth floor were alerted to the fire, which had already consumed the eighth floor and was spreading quickly to their own.
One of them, Isaac Harris, gathered a group of workers and figured it was probably suicidal to try to climb down through the fire. Get on the roof! The other owner, Max Blanck, was paralyzed by fear. Most of the workers on the eighth floor were able to get out, but the workers on the ninth floor had little warning until the fire was already upon them.
They ran like terrified schools of fish from one potential exit to another. There were two elevators, but they were slow and overloaded. There was no sprinkler system. There was a fire escape, but it was rickety and blocked. The factory had been designed to force them through a single choke point in order to get out. Some of the doors were locked. As the fire surrounded them, the workers were left to make desperate life-and-death decisions with limited information in a rising atmosphere of fire, smoke, and terror.
Nelson decided to sprint for one of the stairwells. Weiner went to the elevators and saw an elevator car descending the shaft. She hurled herself into space, diving onto the roof. I gave and received. At a moment like that, there is big confusion and you must understand that you cannot see anything…. A crowd of women were pushing between him and the elevators.
He shoved them aside and barreled his way onto the elevator and to safety. The fire department arrived quickly but its ladders could not reach the eighth floor. The water from its hoses could barely reach that high, just enough to give the building exterior a light dousing. Shame The horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire traumatized the city. People were not only furious at the factory owners, but felt some deep responsibility themselves. The picketers were harassed by company guards.
The city looked on indifferently, as it did upon the lives of the poor generally. We were sorry. Mea culpa! We have tried you, good people of the public—and we have found you wanting! We know what these things are today: the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high- powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch fire….
We are trying you now and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us…. Too much blood has been spilled! Up until that point she had lobbied for worker rights and on behalf of the poor, but she had been on a conventional trajectory, toward a conventional marriage, perhaps, and a life of genteel good works.
Moral indignation set her on a different course. Her own desires and her own ego became less central and the cause itself became more central to the structure of her life. The niceties of her class fell away. She became impatient with the way genteel progressives went about serving the poor. Perkins hardened. She threw herself into the rough and tumble of politics. She was willing to take morally hazardous action if it would prevent another catastrophe like the one that befell the women at the Triangle factory.
She was willing to compromise and work with corrupt officials if it would produce results. Summoned Today, commencement speakers tell graduates to follow their passion, to trust their feelings, to reflect and find their purpose in life.
When you are young and just setting out into adulthood, you should, by this way of thinking, sit down and take some time to discover yourself, to define what is really important to you, what your priorities are, what arouses your deepest passions. What do I want from life? What are the things that I truly value, that are not done just to please or impress the people around me? By this way of thinking, life can be organized like a business plan. First you take an inventory of your gifts and passions.
Then you map out a strategy to achieve your purpose, which will help you distinguish those things that move you toward your goals from those things that seem urgent but are really just distractions. If you define a realistic purpose early on and execute your strategy flexibly, you will wind up leading a purposeful life. This is a life determined by a series of individual choices. But Frances Perkins found her purpose in life using a different method, one that was more common in past eras.
You ask a different set of questions: What does life want from me? The important answers are not found inside, they are found outside. This perspective begins not within the autonomous self, but with the concrete circumstances in which you happen to be embedded.
Your job is to figure certain things out: What does this environment need in order to be made whole? What is it that needs repair? His wife, mother, and brother died in the camps. Frankl spent most of his time in camp laying tracks for railway lines. This was not the life he had planned for himself. This was not his passion, or his dream. This is not what he would be doing if he were marching to the beat of his own drummer. But this was the life events had assigned to him.
It had given him an assignment. His moral task was to suffer well, to be worthy of his sufferings. The Nazis tried to dehumanize and insult their victims, and some prisoners went along with this degradation or retreated into their memories of a happier past.
But some prisoners struggled against the insults and fortified their own integrity. One could struggle against the insults by asserting small acts of dignity, not necessarily to change your outer life or even your ultimate fate, but to strengthen the beams and pillars of your inner structure.
He had the chance to share his observations with his fellow prisoners, and, if he survived, he figured he could spend the rest of his life sharing this knowledge with the world beyond. When he had the mental energy, he spoke with groups of prisoners, telling them to take their lives seriously and struggle to preserve their inner hold.
In the darkness after lights out, he told his fellow prisoners that someone was watching them—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or God—who did not want to be disappointed.
These circumstances give us the great chance to justify our gifts. Your ability to discern your vocation depends on the condition of your eyes and ears, whether they are sensitive enough to understand the assignment your context is giving you.
A vocation is not a career. A person choosing a career is looking for something that will provide financial and psychological benefits. A person does not choose a vocation. A vocation is a calling. Their life would be unrecognizable unless they pursued this line of activity. Sometimes they are called by indignation. Frances Perkins witnessed the Triangle fire and was indignant that this tear in the moral fabric of the world could be permitted to last.
Other people are called by an act. Playing is not something she does; a guitarist is who she is. Still other people are called by a Bible verse or a literary passage. A person with a vocation is not devoted to civil rights, or curing a disease, or writing a great novel, or running a humane company because it meets some cost-benefit analysis.
Only force that in the face of obstacles becomes stronger can win. A vocation is not about fulfilling your desires or wants, the way modern economists expect us to do. She molds herself to the task at hand. Grant, O Lord, that I may not break as I strike!
Let me not fall from Thy hand! In the first place, there is the joy they typically take in their own activities. Dorothy L. People who seek to serve the community end up falsifying their work, she wrote, whether the work is writing a novel or baking bread, because they are not single-mindedly focused on the task at hand.
And one sees this in people with a vocation—a certain rapt expression, a hungry desire to perform a dance or run an organization to its utmost perfection. They experience a wonderful certainty of action that banishes weariness from even the hardest days. This horror had been put in front of her.
One ancestor, James Otis, was an incendiary Revolutionary War hero. Howard visited the Perkins home when Frances was fifteen. They gave their daughter a traditional Yankee upbringing: parsimonious, earnest, and brutally honest. In the evenings, Fred Perkins read Greek poetry and recited Greek plays with friends. He began to teach Frances Greek grammar when she was seven or eight. When Frances was ten, her mother took her to a hat shop. The fashionable hats of the day were narrow and tall, with feathers and ribbons.
What she said next reflects a very different sort of child rearing than is common today. While today we tend to tell children how wonderful they are, in those days parents were more likely to confront children with their own limitations and weaknesses. You have a very broad face. Your head is narrower above the temples than it is at the cheekbones. Also, it lops off very suddenly into your chin. Never let yourself get a hat that is narrower than your cheekbones, because it makes you look ridiculous.
Sometimes that toughness devolved into frigidity. But sometimes it was motivated by and intermixed with a fierce love and tenderness.
They worked hard. They did not complain. One evening, Perkins, then a young woman, came downstairs wearing a new party dress. Her father told her that it made her look ladylike.
That would have been a sin. Traditional and stern in their private lives, they believed in communal compassion and government action. They also put tremendous faith in education. For the past years, New England schools have been among the best in the United States. She had a natural facility with words, and in high school she used her glibness to slide by. She then went off to Mount Holyoke College, a member of the class of Today, students live more or less unsupervised in their dorms.
They are given the freedom to conduct their private lives as they see fit. Then, they were placed under restrictions, many of which seem absurd now, that were designed to inculcate deference, modesty, and respect. Freshmen meeting a sophomore on the campus should bow respectfully. No Freshman shall wear a long skirt or hair high on head before the mid- year examinations.
Van Dieman used Latin grammar the way a drill instructor might use forced marches, as an ordeal to cultivate industriousness. She forced Perkins to work, hour upon hour, on precise recitations of the Latin verb tenses.
Nonetheless, her chemistry teacher, Nellie Goldthwaite, hounded her into majoring in chemistry. Goldthwaite urged Perkins to take the hardest courses even if it meant earning mediocre grades.
Perkins took the challenge. Goldthwaite became her faculty adviser. It did not see its role, as modern universities tend to, in purely Adam I cognitive terms. It was not there merely to help students question their assumptions. Instead, it successfully performed the broader role of college: helping teenagers become adults. It inculcated self-control. It helped its students discover new things to love.
Then it told them that the heroes in this struggle are not the self-aggrandizing souls who chase after glory; they are rather the heroes of renunciation, those who accept some arduous calling. It emphasized that performing service is not something you do out of the goodness of your heart but as a debt you are repaying for the gift of life. Then it gave them concrete ways to live this life of steady, heroic service. Perkins also went to college at a time when the social gospel movement was at its most influential.
It is not enough, Rauschenbusch argued, to heal the sinfulness in each individual human heart. There is also suprapersonal sin—evil institutions and social structures that breed oppression and suffering. The real Christian life, they said, is not a solitary life of prayer and repentance. But it achieved this task in an ironic way.
It forced her to confront her natural weaknesses. It pushed her down. Perkins came to Holyoke sweet and glib, diminutive and charming. She tried teaching at an upscale school for girls in Lake Forest, Illinois, but it was uninspiring.
Eventually she also commuted in to Chicago and became involved with Hull House. The idea was to give women a new range of service careers, to link the affluent with the poor, and to re-create the sense of community that had been destroyed by the disruptions of industrialization.
At Hull House, affluent women lived among the poor and working classes, serving as counselors, assistants, and advisers and taking on projects to make their lives better. They offered job training, child care, a savings bank, English lessons, even art classes. Not long ago, I asked the head of a prestigious prep school how her institution teaches its students about character.
She answered by telling me how many hours of community service the students do. That is to say, when I asked her about something internal, she answered by talking about something external. And so it goes. Many people today have deep moral and altruistic yearnings, but, lacking a moral vocabulary, they tend to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions.
How can I serve the greatest number? How can I have impact? The atmosphere at Hull House was quite different. The people who organized the place had a specific theory about how to build character, equally for those serving the poor and for the poor themselves. She was suspicious of its shapelessness, the way compassionate people tended to ooze out sentiment on the poor to no practical effect. She also rejected the self- regarding taint of the emotion, which allowed the rich to feel good about themselves because they were doing community service.
Addams had no tolerance for any pose that might put the server above those being served. As with all successful aid organizations, she wanted her workers to enjoy their work, to love their service. At Hull House, social workers were commanded to make themselves small. They were commanded to check their sympathies and exercise scientific patience as they investigated the true needs of each individual.
The idea was to let the poor determine their own lives rather than becoming dependent upon others. Their ambitions have shrunk. At school, Addams wrote in her memoir, Twenty Years at Hull House, students are taught to be self- sacrificial and self-forgetting, to put the good of society above the good of their ego.
The young women are effectively asked to repress their desire to right wrongs and alleviate suffering. She knew how to navigate the landscape of poverty.
She also had more courage. Her next job was with an organization in Philadelphia founded by a Hull House alumna. Bogus employment agencies were luring immigrant women into boardinghouses, sometimes drugging them and forcing them into prostitution. Kelley was a hero and inspiration to Perkins. She was a deeply emotional and profoundly religious woman, although the expression was often unconventional.
The Triangle Factory fire was the moment when those two processes took a definitive leap. That is to say, they feel that their own reputation and their own identity are at stake when decisions are made.
She went to work in Albany, lobbying the state legislature for worker safety legislation. She left behind the prejudices of her upscale New York social set. She left behind the gentility of progressive politics. She would compromise ruthlessly if it meant making progress. If you want to usher real change, he told her, you have to work with the sleazy legislators and the rough party pols. You have to be practical, subordinate your personal purity to the cause.
In Albany, Perkins also learned how to deal with older men. They know and respect their mothers—99 percent of them do. Up until then, she had dressed in the conventional fashion of the day. But from that point on she began dressing like a mother. She wore somber black dresses with white bow ties at the neck. She despised the nickname, but she found that the method worked.
She suppressed her sexuality, her femininity, and even part of her identity in order to win the confidence of the old men around her. Among other projects, Perkins lobbied furiously for a bill to limit the workweek to 54 hours. She tried to befriend the machine bosses to get them to support the bill. They did their best to deceive and out-maneuver her, but she won support from some of the rank and file. The activists for the bill had spent the previous months insisting that there could be no exemptions.
All industries, especially the canners, had to be covered by the legislation. At the crucial moment, Perkins stood at the edge of the legislative chamber. Her colleagues argued vociferously for rejecting it.
Instead, she took half a loaf. She told legislators her organization would support the bill. You stormed into my heart somehow and I could never let you go.
They did not invite their friends or tell them of the wedding in advance. Perkins and Wilson informed their families, but too late for them to attend. The two witnesses were just people who happened to be in the building at the time. There was no luncheon or tea afterward. To tell the truth, I was reluctant. I was no longer a child but a grown woman. I liked life better in a single harness.
I like him…. I enjoy his friends and company and I might as well marry and get it off my mind. They lived in a gracious townhouse on Washington Square, not far from where Perkins had been drinking tea when the Triangle fire erupted. Perkins continued with her social work. Their home became a center for political activists of the day.
Soon things began to deteriorate. John Mitchel was voted out of office. Wilson had an affair with a society lady, which caused a furor and then was never mentioned again. The boy died shortly after birth. Perkins was consumed by grief, but that, too, was never mentioned again.
She also had a daughter, Susanna, named after the wife of the second governor of the Plymouth Colony. He seems to have been manic-depressive. From on there were never anything but very short periods of reasonably comfortable accommodations to life. Perkins was sometimes afraid to be alone with him, because he was prone to violent rages and was much stronger than she was.
He would spend significant parts of the next several decades in asylums and institutional care, where Perkins would visit him on weekends. When he was home he was unable to handle any responsibility. This attitude was partly a product of her Yankee upbringing. But she was also reticent as a matter of philosophy and conviction. There is a general struggle between two philosophic dispositions, what the social critic Rochelle Gurstein calls the party of reticence and the party of exposure.
The party of exposure believes that anything secret is suspect and that life works better when everything is brought out into the open and discussed. Perkins was definitely a member of the party of reticence. Damage is done when people bring intimate things before mere acquaintances or total strangers.
Precious emotions are lifted out of the context of trust and intimacy and trampled. Though she was a believer in government when it came to serving the poor and protecting the weak, she had a strong aversion to government when it trampled the right to privacy. There was a cost to this philosophy. She was not superbly introspective. She did not excel at intimacy. It is hard to know what would have happened if her husband had not spent so much time in mental institutions, but it is likely that her public vocation would have crowded out her energy and capacity for private intimacy nonetheless.
She was built for the public campaign. She did not receive love well, or give it, or display vulnerability. Frances exerted iron control over herself and expected it in her daughter. Throughout her life, Susanna suffered severe bouts of depression. Susanna married a man who conducted a flagrant affair. By the s, she was something of a hippie, twenty years before the term existed. She became involved with various countercultural groups. She developed a fixation on the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi.
Perkins once invited Susanna to a society event and begged her to dress appropriately. Susanna chose a flamboyant green dress and wore her hair piled wildly atop her head, with garish flowers adorning her hair and neck.
Even at age seventy-seven, Frances turned over her rent- controlled apartment in New York so that Susanna would have a place to live. Every virtue can come with its own accompanying vice. The virtue of reticence can yield the vice of aloofness. Perkins was not emotionally vulnerable to those close to her. Her public vocation never completely compensated for her private solitude. He was loyal, approachable, voluble and a man with the common touch.
Smith also gave Perkins her first big break in government. There is no boasting in any of her reminiscences that this was a brave and even reckless thing to do. To her, this was simply a job that needed doing. But for Perkins it was simply a way to avoid the first person pronoun. It was a way to suggest that any proper person would of course be duty-bound to do what she had done under the circumstances. He did not impress her.
She found him shallow and a bit arrogant. He had a habit of throwing his head back as he spoke. Later, when he was president, that gesture suggested confidence and buoyant optimism. But when he was young, Perkins just thought it made him look supercilious.
When he returned, she felt he had changed. His hands, supporting his weight on the podium, never stopped trembling. Perkins realized that after the speech, someone would have to cover his awkward movements as he lurched down from the stand.
She gestured to a woman behind her, and as he concluded, they hurried up to Roosevelt, nominally to congratulate him, but actually to shield his movements with their skirts. Perkins admired the way Roosevelt gratefully and humbly accepted help. On the day he offered her the job, she told him that she would give him a day to reconsider, to consult with others.
She had a judicial temperament and a strong sense in all situations of what was fair. She was always open to new ideas and yet the moral purpose of the law, the welfare of mankind, was never overlooked.
Again, she resisted. When rumors of her potential nomination circulated during the transition, Perkins wrote FDR a letter saying that she hoped they were untrue. If she were to join the cabinet, FDR would have to commit to a broad array of social insurance policies: massive unemployment relief, a giant public works program, minimum wage laws, a Social Security program for old age insurance, and the abolition of child labor. She confirmed she would. Perkins was one of only two top aides to stay with Roosevelt for his entire term as president.
She became one of the tireless champions of the New Deal. She was central to the creation of the Social Security system. She sponsored federal legislation on child labor and unemployment insurance.
Perkins excelled at reading Franklin Roosevelt. After he died, Perkins wrote a biographical work, The Roosevelt I Knew, which remains one of the most astute character sketches ever written about the man. One may courageously take the step that seems right today because it can be modified tomorrow if it does not work well.
He took a step and adjusted, a step and adjusted. Gradually a big change would emerge. The prophets of Israel would have called him an instrument of the Lord. The prophets of today could only explain his type of mind in terms of psychology, about which they know so pitiably little.
Before her meeting with the president she would prepare a one-page memo outlining the concrete options before him. They would go over her outline and Roosevelt would state his preference. Are you sure? Do you want items number two and three? You understand that this is what we do and this is who is opposed? Then she would ask him a third time, asking him whether he explicitly remembered his decision and understood the opposition he would face. Is it still okay? She was not popular with many of the men in the cabinet.
For one thing, she had a tendency to go on at meetings. She was certainly not popular with the press. Her sense of privacy and her fierce desire to protect her husband prevented her from hanging around with reporters or ever letting down her guard. The reporters, in turn, were unsympathetic.
As the years went by, she became exhausted by the job. Her reputation waned. Twice she sent Roosevelt a letter of resignation and twice he rejected it. Not now! You are all right. The case revolved around an Australian longshoreman named Harry Bridges who led a general strike in San Francisco. When the Soviet Union fell and the files were opened, it turned out they were right. Bridges was a Communist agent, known by the code name Rossi.
Deportation hearings, operated by the Labor Department, dragged on. In , more evidence against Bridges surfaced, and in , the department began proceedings to deport him. Perkins bore the brunt of their criticism. Why was the labor secretary shielding a subversive?
One congressman accused her of being a Russian Jew and a Communist herself. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey introduced impeachment charges against her. The press coverage was brutal. Franklin Roosevelt was given a chance to rise to her defense, but, wary of soiling his own reputation by association, he just let her hang out there.
Most of her allies in Congress remained silent, too. The New York Times wrote an ambiguous editorial. The common sentiment was that she was in fact a Communist, and nobody wanted to get in the line of fire of those who were persecuting her.
It was left to the Tammany Hall pols to remain reliably steadfast beside her. Her description of that period is awkwardly phrased but revealing. We disintegrate if we do these things. If she relaxed the hold she had on herself, then all might fall apart. Bookmark This Page. Login: Password Register Remember Password. Mere Christianity by C. Lewis's forceful and accessible doctrine of Christian belief. First… The Screwtape Letters by C. The Screwtape Letters by C. Lewis A masterpiece of satire, this classic has entertained and enlightened readers the world over with….
Borg Of the many recent books on the historical Jesus, none has explored what the latest biblical…. Oracle's Moon Thea Harrison. Wrath Laurann Dohner. Carry the One Carol Anshaw.
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