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

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 654

that we do not have parliamentary government in the United States and that the Cabinet has no status whatever and no standing whatever. It is not responsible to anybody but the President, and that only individually. Individual Cabinet officers are responsible to the President. They are not responsible to each other or to anything else. I knew pretty well that it was all hooey acting as though the Cabinet of the United States had the same position, function and authority that the Cabinet of the U.K. has - or Great Britain, as they called it then.

The idea of moving to Washington horrified me. I had a pleasant home in New York and I liked it. I had been through an awful lot of struggle and trouble. I had just gotten to a position where I thought my life was manageable. My husband was ill in a hospital. I was near him in New York so that I could go to see him regularly and provide easily for his occasional expeditions out of the hospital, and so forth. My daughter was growing up. She was about thirteen or fourteen. She was in a good school where she had grown up, was doing well, where the teachers were interested in her, where the other girls were her friends, where their fathers and mothers were acquaintances of mine. It was a nice, happy, secure little group. All was well





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