Newcastle’s legislative delegation and municipal government came to the defense of former U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, a former resident of Newcastle, this week.
Senator David Trahan (R-Waldoboro) and Rep. Jon McKane (R-Newcastle), in an April 22 letter, called on Gov. Paul LePage to “reconsider changing the name of the Perkins Conference Room at the Maine Dept. of Labor.”
LePage has expressed a desire to re-name eight rooms in the building. LePage has said the room names – like the mural he ordered removed last month – present a perception of bias in favor of workers, a perception at odds with his pro-business agenda.
Trahan and McKane’s letter speaks of Perkins’ deep roots in Newcastle and seeks to clarify the record as to Perkins’ politics.
Despite beliefs to the contrary, labor unions “bitterly opposed” Perkins’ nomination, the legislators wrote.
Perkins “reached out to [the unions], however, just as she reached out to the captains of industry,” they wrote. “She saw them all as important in the goal of getting more people back to work in the midst of the Great Depression.”
Perkins’ “importance to the nation is shown by the fact that the immense federal Dept. of Labor building is officially named the Frances Perkins Building,” Trahan and McKane wrote. “It is fitting that her connection to Newcastle and to Maine would likewise be remembered in our own Dept. of Labor.”
On April 25, the Newcastle Board of Selectmen, at the behest of Rev. Dr. Stephen White and representatives of the Frances Perkins Center, including Perkins’ grandson, Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall, passed a similar resolution.
According to the resolution, “the citizens of Newcastle… respectfully request the state government… to pay tribute to the memory of Frances Perkins and to reinstate the honored place that she appropriately holds.”
The resolution doesn’t specifically address the mural, upon which Perkins appears, or the conference room.
Instead, the document celebrates Perkins’ accomplishments as the “longest serving Secretary of Labor and the first woman to be a U.S. Cabinet secretary.”
Perkins, “by her tireless efforts in helping establish such basic provisions as unemployment insurance, minimum wage legislation, child labor laws and Social Security, has immeasurably improved and secured the lives of untold millions of American citizens over the past 75 years.”
The resolution, like the letter, talks of Perkins’ connection to Newcastle and the homestead she, “cherished as a place of refuge and renewal and from which she gathered the energy to return to her work.”
White, the former rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, read the resolution at the April 25 meeting. “Frances Perkins was a deeply spiritual person who worshipped at Newcastle’s St. Andrew’s Church and has been recognized by the Episcopal Church as one of the ‘extraordinary, even heroic servants of God’ and one most worthy of being remembered and emulated and who was given her own Feast Day, May 13.”
The selectmen passed the resolution, 4-0.
