President Joe Biden will sign a proclamation Monday establishing a national monument in honor of former Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins — a once-registered socialist and key architect of the New Deal.
A March 2024 executive order claimed “women’s history is vastly underrepresented in our National Park System” and mandated action to “strengthen the Federal Government’s recognition of women’s history and the achievements of women and girls from all backgrounds.” As part of this effort, the Biden-Harris administration will now establish a monument to Perkins at the site of her childhood summer home in Maine that will honor her 12 years as former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s secretary of Labor, during which she helped establish a slew of welfare programs, including Social Security and unemployment insurance, according to a White House press release.
Raised by an affluent, Republican family in New England, Perkins joined the Socialist Party while living in Philadelphia between 1907 and 1909, according to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). She later left the party to become a Democrat at the urging of former Democratic New York Gov. Alfred Smith, who appo
Perkins was later promoted to be the New York’s Industrial Commissioner in 1928, and retained the role after FDR was elected governor of New York. When FDR became president in 1933, he selected Perkins to serve as U.S. Secretary of Labor, making her the first ever female cabinet member.
As labor secretary, Perkins helped design and implement Social Security and the public works program, with feminist nonprofit League of Women Voters describing her as the “key architect of the New Deal.”
Perkins was accused of being a communist sympathizer in 1939, with former Democratic Texas Rep. Martin Dies’ House Committee on Un-American Activities charging her with protecting communists after she refused to deport Harry Bridges, the leader of the West Coast longshoremen’s union. Former Republican New Jersey Rep. John Parnell Thomas introduced a motion to impeach her following the finding, but the Committee ultimately concluded the charges were unwarranted.
Another New Deal architect, Harry Hopkins, has also come under suspicion in recent years for espionage after Iskhak Akhmerov, a Soviet special agent operating in the U.S. during World War II, described him as “the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States” during a lecture in Moscow in the 1960s.
Documents declassified in 1995 known as the “Venona Papers” also show Akhmerov described an “Agent 19” who had passed along intelligence on discussions between FDR and Winston Churchill to the Soviets, with Hopkins being the only White House official present who meets the description of the agent’s identity, according to the Washington Times.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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