Charles W. 'Chuck' Bryant

Yeah, and we want to thank HowStuffWorks. That's where part of this research came from and some other places. But notably, and I want to shout this out because this is a library intern at the FDR Library who wrote a paper called Honoring the Achievements of FDR Secretary of Labor, Jessica Brightman.

This is really good stuff, and she's a library intern, and we want to shout her out. Yeah, she did great. Or she was at the time. I imagine she's moved on from that internship.

So Frances Perkins was born Fanny Coralai Perkins in Boston in 1880, but her relatives and her ancestors came from Maine. And it's kind of funny here at the beginning of this How Stuff Works thing, it says, she so undersung that even residents of her hometown of Damaris, Scotta, Maine didn't seem familiar with her legacy. I think that says more about Maine.

She lived here, great, good for her.

So is this like an Adidas Puma thing?

Yeah.

Which one was that? Depeche Mode. Depeche Mode? I can't. Oh, baby. Hey, that's Emily's jam. I mean, she probably has that...

tattooed on her body somewhere uh and in fact we're both doing that none of my business we're both doing that that uh silly and i never do these things on facebook but i have time now the top 10 most influential albums and uh i was like which one are you gonna pick new order or depeche mode for her because that's a that's a tough one well i mean can't she's got 10 to choose from right yeah but i think for her those two are so inextricably tied that it was one or the other

And she went with Depeche Mode because they were first and thus probably more influential.

Which they were.

Well, who can blame her because we'll see later on about her. It's no accident that she's lost a history in many ways.

But what she was also was highly educated. She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1902 where she majored in chemistry and physics even though she made her name in economics, which means she was a very well-rounded human and had a very large brain.

Yeah, big time. This is post-college. She went to Philly. and she became general secretary of the Philadelphia Research and Protective Association.

Well, she was in charge of investigating – employment agencies that were fake and that preyed on women, immigrant women specifically. And she had to sort of deal with the dregs of society in that job and did so very successfully and then decided she wanted to keep her education going.

So while she was in Philly, she went to the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania because that's super easy and light learning. And then after that, She went to Columbia where she earned a M.A. in social economics in 1910.

That's right. And after Columbia, after she got that master's, for two years she served as executive secretary of the Consumers League of New York. And this is where she really – felt her life calling to improve wages, improve working conditions, because this was 1910 through 1912, and things weren't great in factories at the time.

We could do a podcast on – I don't know what the focus would be necessarily – Because we've done labor unions, but— Just labor conditions would be eye-opening.

Yeah.

Yeah, she wouldn't stand around and wait for the statue to be built in her honor.

Should we take a break? Yes. All right. We're going to take a break and talk about a pretty devastating fire in New York City that changed the course of her life right after this.