Heather Cox Richardson
speaker
7,649 appearances
90 recordings
10 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 3d ago
Heather Cox Richardson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 89 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 26.
Appearances
Her own husband suffered from bipolar disorder, making her the family's primary support.
She understood that Americans had always supported each other while
As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine, surrounded by a supportive community.
In college at Mount Holyoke, she majored in chemistry and physics, but after a professor required students to tour a factory to observe working conditions, Perkins became committed to improving the lives of those trapped in industrial jobs.
After college, Perkins became a social worker, and in nineteen ten earned a master's degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University.
She became the head of the New York Office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for the workers who made the products they were buying.
The next year, in nineteen eleven, she witnessed a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in which one hundred forty six workers, mostly women and girls, died.
They were trapped in the building when the fire broke out because the factory owner had ordered the doors to the stairwells and exits locked to make sure no one slipped outside for a break.
Unable to escape the smoke and flames, the workers, some of them on fire, leaped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the building, dying on the pavement.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire proved to Perkins that voluntary organizations would never be enough to improve workers' lives.
She turned toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization.
She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns, and who exercised a form of social welfare for their workers, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter, and that wives and children had a support network if a husband and father died.
In that system, the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive.
The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression convinced Perkins that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people.
She came to believe that, as she said, the people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.
Perkins met FDR through her Tammany connections, and when he asked her to be a Secretary of Labor, she told him that she wanted the federal government to provide unemployment insurance, health insurance, and old age insurance.
She later recalled, I remember he looked so startled, and he said, Well, do you think it can be done?
Creating federal unemployment insurance became her primary concern.
Congressmen had little interest in passing such legislation, claiming that unemployment insurance and federal aid to dependent families would undermine a man's willingness to work.
But Perkins recognized that the Depression had added pressure to the idea of social insurance by emphasizing the needs of older Americans.
Showing 2581–2600 of 7,649 · page 130 of 383
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