Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 731

authority and knew that it didn't go beyond faith and morals.

A few months later, within that same year, Mrs. Florence Kelley, who was the Executive Director of the National Consumers' League - a very emotional, very able woman to whom I owe a great deal and who was very strong, dynamic, but emotional and full of inner conflicts herself - became irritated because of the fact that this child labor amendment which was before the Assembly or Senate had not made more progress. She became deeply irate about it that wires were being pulled, things were being done, it was being choked, it was being killed. She said to me, “I want to talk to the Governor.”

I said, “All right. I'll arrange it.”

I asked him to see her. She was as near a bigoted Protestant as I ever met for an intelligent person, well educated, well grounded in philosophy, who shouldn't have been anti anything. Her whole social approach to the human race was philosophically that all men are brothers, love each other and so forth and so on. But she had an inherited grind in her, I suppose by the name Kelley - her father had been a judge in Pennsylvania, was a Quaker and they were of North of Ireland extraction - and some way or other the Orangemen philosophy had crept into her mind. She was





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help