Federal officials are scheduled to visit the Frances Perkins Homestead in Newcastle on Thursday afternoon following requests to designate the property as a national monument.
The Washington Post reported last week that President Joe Biden is planning to sign an executive order declaring the homestead as a national monument, although U.S. Department of Interior officials haven’t confirmed that publicly.
Though the homestead has been open to the public for years and was named a National Historic Landmark in 2014, the monument designation would mean the family homestead of the pioneering worker-rights advocate will gain a national spotlight.
In advance of the visit from Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Shannon Estenoz, here are five important things to know about Perkins.
She was the first woman cabinet secretary in U.S. history.
Perkins was the first-ever woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, serving as U.S. secretary of labor for all three of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s terms. She and Roosevelt maintained a friendship for decades before he named her to his cabinet in 1933. It also made her the first-ever woman in the line of presidential succession.
Some said she was the architect of the New Deal.
During her 12 years as U.S. secretary of labor, Perkins was instrumental in crafting much of the legislation that was part of Roosevelt’s New Deal — though journalists and scholars said at the time that it was “not so much the Roosevelt New Deal, as … the Perkins New Deal.”
Some of that legislation includes the creation of the Social Security Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Great Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, the latter of which helped build infrastructure in national parks around the country, including at Acadia National Park. She fought for minimum wage, a 40-hour work week and the abolition of child labor, all of which were enacted through the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Among the only items on her agenda that she did not accomplish was enacting universal health care.
Her roots in Maine go back generations.
Perkins was born and raised in Massachusetts, but both her parents grew up in Maine, with her mother coming from Bethel and her father growing up at what is now the Frances Perkins Homestead in Newcastle. Despite this, Perkins considered Newcastle her home, according to contemporary sources, and spent most summers there as a child, as well as in her later years.
The homestead itself was first built by Perkins’ family in the 1750s, on land along the Damariscotta River. There, the Perkins family operated a brickyard for more than a century, until after the Civil War, when Frances Perkins’ father moved his family to Boston. Members of the Perkins family lived there throughout four centuries, including Frances Perkins’ grandson, Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall, who lived at the homestead for a number of years before founding the Frances Perkins Center in 2009, the organization that currently operates the homestead.
She was inspired to action by a disastrous fire.
Though Perkins was already active in labor causes at the time, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City in 1911 galvanized her to dedicate her life to it. The fire killed 146 garment workers, most of whom were immigrant women in their teens and early 20s, who were trapped inside the building because the doors were locked so they could not leave work. Perkins was instrumental in getting the state of New York to pass a 54-hour work week, helped pass statewide fire safety laws that were replicated nationwide and enacted other new labor regulations.
Former Maine Gov. Paul LePage removed public references to her.
Nearly 50 years after Perkins’ 1965 death, she made Maine headlines when then-Gov. Paul LePage in 2011 had a mural depicting Perkins removed from the Maine Department of Labor headquarters, as well as a conference room named for her. A LePage spokesperson claimed they had received an “anonymous fax” saying that the mural was reminiscent of “communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.” The mural is now on display at the Maine State Museum in Augusta.
