It is a remarkable fact, as FRANCES PERKINS points out, that two ranking members of the Harvard faculty should now be engaged on extended studies of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Miss Perkins, who was Secretary of Labor from 1933 until 1945, is here concerned with THE COMING OF THE NEW DEAL, the second of a four-volume project by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published by Houghton Mifflin.
FRANCES PERKINS and Harold L. Ickes sat side by side through the twelve years of F.D.R.’s Cabinet, and she is admirably qualified to appraise his Secret Diary, the first volume of which Simon & Schuster have just published. A Bostonian, Miss Perkins took her A.B. at Mount Holyoke in 1902, made a name for herself as Industrial Commissioner for New York State from 1929 to 1933, and served as Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, the first American woman to hold a Cabinet post.