Contrary to popular belief, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, was not Jewish. 

Raised Congregationalist, she found her religious identity in the Episcopal church. She coped with stress by recentering at an Episcopalian retreat center. She advised a friend experiencing a breakup to wash her face every day and go to church every week for a year. Her motivation and rhetoric often centered Christian moralism. 

Yet her political opponents spun a conspiracy theory and circulated a rumor that Perkins was secretly Jewish. The false claim tells us as much about antisemitism and Jewishness in the 1930s US as it does about Perkins, if not more.   

For the earliest settlers in the American colonies, Protestant Christianity was the norm, and Perkins’ ancestors were no exception. Her forebears included Revolutionary War activist James Otis, early American writer Mercy Otis Warren, and military commander Oliver Otis Howard. 

Born in Boston in 1880, and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, Perkins graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1902. Perkins’ oft-quoted letter to her classmates from a year after graduation reminisced, “Take my advice and go back when you can. It’s grand and if you use your imaginations, you’ll believe that 1902 girls are under every cap and gown, and you won’t be lonely.” But directly below that quotation on the page, Perkins described her substitute teaching gig: “About half of my school were Jews and the remainder, a third were Irish, so you see there was room for fun. There is a Baron Hirsch colony of Russian Jews in Colchester, and the Jews were the brightest and most interesting people in school.” Aside from the model minority-myth-verging-on-antisemitic-trope, what’s clear from the letter is that Jewish communities were “other” to Perkins. 

Perkins moved to Chicago in 1904. She changed her first name from Fanny to Frances for sophistication and joined the Episcopal church for spiritual fulfillment. She also worked with immigrant communities, including Jewish populations, helping to provide basic necessities like food and shelter, but also ensuring access to education, entertainment, and a sense of community.

Following a brief stint in Philadelphia, Perkins moved to New York, where she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire from across the street in 1911. The Triangle Shirtwaist workers were predominantly immigrants, many of them Jewish. It was Saturday, their Sabbath, when they died at work. 

Witnessing the traumatic fire was a catalyst for Perkins’ career in labor activism and social justice. “It was as though we had all done something wrong,” she later recalled, describing the Triangle fire as the birth of the New Deal because it inspired collective action and structural change to curtail individual tragedies. But first, Perkins immersed herself in communities of people in need. In New York, she worked for Governor Al Smith, and then Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed her to be the first woman cabinet secretary when he became president in 1933. As I explain in my new book, Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany, Perkins was an early supporter of German-Jewish refugees that year by advocating for their resettlement and aid. She was also a key architect of the New Deal, a radical array of legislative and executive initiatives that transformed the federal government’s role in the economy and society. It provoked powerful backlash. 

Being the first woman in a cabinet position made Perkins vulnerable. Her progressive policy initiatives made her a target. Many opponents of the New Deal were eager to use any bigotry within reach. Antisemitism was one tool at their disposal. 

A timeless tool of bigotry, antisemitism has always been full of contradictions. From an antisemitic perspective, Jews might be both pathetically weak and disproportionately powerful. They might be both capitalists and Communists. While many Nazis blamed Jewish Germans for capitalist greed, some anti-New Dealers equated Jewishness with Communism. 

In 1934, capitalist xenophobes wanted the Labor Secretary, at the helm of the Immigration Naturalization Service, to deport Harry Bridges, a (non-Jewish) Communist immigrant from Australia who spearheaded the successful Longshore Strike on the Pacific Coast. In 1935, the National Labor Relations “Wagner” Act legalized strikes and unions. Backlash against the Wagner Act doubled down on blaming Perkins for the actions of Harry Bridges. Though perhaps an unlikely focal point, the Bridges case decimated Perkins' political capital, decreasing her ability and power to support immigrants and refugees in need.

“Greetings to the red paint,” one piece of hate mail addressed Perkins, implying that she was a Communist. “Hitler would know what to do with you,” a more sinister letter threatened. Around this time, in the mid-1930s, rumors arose that Perkins was secretly Jewish. This way, her adversaries could implement more of their bigotry toolkit.   

Antisemitic conspiracy theorists claimed that the Secretary of Labor was secretly a Russian immigrant named Mathilda Watsky. Their evidence? Perkins’ husband was named Paul Wilson. So, the conspirators found another man named Paul Wilson who married Mathilda Watsky, a Jewish immigrant from Russia. They even sought out court records to bolster their false claim. 

Perkins rarely responded to criticism. Yet the rumors became so widespread that she carefully penned a letter to a friend and privately invited her to publicize it. In the letter, Perkins explained that her parents were both descended from early American settlers and were all Protestant. She provided detailed genealogical information. (Curiously, she also claimed in the letter to have been born in 1882, which was false, but the rest of the information was accurate). 

But Perkins' letter did not dispel rumors that she was Jewish. In January 1939, political opponents in Congress introduced a resolution to impeach her. She endured hours of testimony. Her own remarks showed her characteristic blend of policy detail and Christian moralism, urging, “I have done what I could in time to make this great country of ours a little nearer our conception of the City of God.” Although she was not impeached—because there were no grounds to do so—Perkins’ political capital never recovered from the ordeal. The president even transferred the Immigration Naturalization Service from the Labor Department to the Justice Department in 1940. The transfer reflected a combination of backlash against Perkins' progressive immigration policy and broader government reorganization by FDR in anticipation of wartime.

Unlike the Jewish activists and lawmakers with whom she collaborated, a rise in antisemitism would not affect her personal religious practice, or her ability to speak her conscience in public. Being a woman limited how she could act and what she could say in public, but her religion did not, because she was a Christian American, part of the religious majority. “If I were a Jew, I would make no secret of it,” Perkins wrote, “On the contrary I would be proud to acknowledge it.” But that’s a counterfactual, an identity in an alternate universe.

Perkins circulated the letter clarifying her Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage because even if it was not a superpower strong enough to save her from being a woman in public, her heritage was not a vulnerability. On the contrary, she seemed to think that it would be somehow protective. That’s a privilege that religious minorities in Protestant Christian America have never had. At the same time, even after she clarified her identity, rumors that she was Jewish persisted and affected her political capital, reflecting the strength of antisemitism in American society.

Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was never Jewish. She was raised in one Protestant denomination and left it for another, in which she found meaning and motivation. Perkins’ religiosity even motivated her to try to do good and right for people in need, including Jewish refugees. She did not question whether her faith was relevant to running the country because she was not a religious minority. But she took a trip through imagined Jewishness, in which she learned about antisemitism and bigotry.