Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Q&A with Rebecca Brenner Graham

 


 

 

Rebecca Brenner Graham is the author of the new book Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany. Perkins (1880-1965) was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of labor. Graham is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Dear Miss Perkins?

A: I originally began researching Frances Perkins’s refugee policy for my undergraduate thesis, which began in summer 2014. I was inspired by my internship supervisor Kirstin Downey’s book
The Woman Behind the New Deal, and she told me about the existence of a series of letters to Perkins on the topic of German-Jewish refugees.

 

Kirstin introduced me to the process of archival research at the U.S. National Archives. My senior thesis journey began teaching me how to do research and to write historically. I continued learning throughout graduate school while researching a different topic for my Ph.D.

 

After defending my dissertation in August 2021, I was wandering around Barnes & Noble, flipping through a book related to the Perkins’s refugee policy topic. I realized that I cared enough that I wanted to return to it.

 

My undergraduate thesis had left questions lingering about charge bonds, child refugees, and the Alaska settlement plan. As a newly minted Ph.D., I wanted to find out what Perkins could do for refugees and to understand why she couldn’t do more.

 

Q: The scholar Rebecca Erbelding said of the book, “Rebecca Brenner Graham’s expansive and modern telling reminds us that there are historical figures to whom we can—and should—look for inspiration as we continue to face some of the same xenophobic, racist, antisemitic dynamics as Perkins did in the 1930s.” What do you think of that description, and what do you hope readers take away from the book?

A: Frances Perkins is the most inspiring to me when she empathizes with the pain and circumstances of someone she has never met and will likely never meet.

 

For example, in chapter seven of my book, Perkins learned that the Langer family died by suicide in Chicago because they feared deportation to Nazi Germany. “I can well imagine what strain they must have been under before they arrived here and that they had not opportunity to overcome it,” she wrote to a congressman representing Chicago.

 

I hope that readers take away both the power of an individual’s compassionate approach and the unforgiving weight of the odds stacked against compassion, built into structures and institutions.

 

Ultimately, Perkins believed in bringing her morals to government so that federal structures could entrench a more compassionate approach into the economy and society. The power of an individual is limited without structures to support them.


Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: I researched Dear Miss Perkins through a combination of archival research, reading primary and secondary sources, and especially for the last few chapters, talking to people.

 

Archivally, I conducted research at the U.S. National Archives, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Mount Holyoke College Archives & Special Collections, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, as well as extensive consultations with reference specialists from other sites.

 

One of many realizations that I did not know going into it was the central role of the Children’s Bureau within the Department of Labor to facilitate child refugee policy. The central role of the Children’s Bureau under Katherine Lenroot’s leadership within Frances Perkins’s Department of Labor was abundantly clear from records at the U.S. National Archives.

 

A favorite part of research for me, however, was talking to people. For example, when researching the last few chapters on the popular memory of topics in my book, I asked various people in my life where they first heard of ideas and topics, and then I’d go to those sources.

 

Q: What would you say are some of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about Frances Perkins?

A: In 1965, Frances Perkins’s obituary quoted a misogynist who’d once called her “a colorless woman who talked as if she swallowed a press release.” Popular misconceptions about Perkins contradict each other: cold yet emotional, combative yet reserved, radical yet traditional. Her experience of gender in the workplace might fit in with the famous Barbie movie monologue of summer 2023.

 

Still, Perkins was a deeply feeling person who did not have the luxury of expressing herself without considering how she’d be perceived politically. She was a doer and a hard worker who faced down challenges and obstacles in her way, but she came across as reserved by shying away from attention.

 

In Perkins’s experience, undue attention on her as an individual distracted everyone from where she wanted their focus to be, whichever important cause she was championing in that moment.  

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m excited for my Dear Miss Perkins book tour, which will take me to Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Delaware, Maryland, D.C., Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Michigan, and more.

 

I also recently started a new job at Brown University, coordinating a university-wide initiative to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence. At Brown, I’ll be teaching a first-year seminar on popular memory of the American Revolution and writing my second book on the same topic.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: My highest hope for Dear Miss Perkins is that a reader will have a more engaging and interesting day by carrying it around and reading it. That’s what nonfiction books gave me. While the historical realities in the book are sobering, few things comfort me more than falling into a good read. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

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