Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany

This outstanding, inspiring new narrative of the first woman to serve in a president’s cabinet, reveals the full, never-before-told story of her role in saving Jewish refugees during the Nazi regime.

She was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, the longest-serving labor secretary, and an architect of the New Deal. Yet beyond these celebrated accomplishments there is another dimension to Frances Perkins’s story. Without fanfare, and despite powerful opposition, Perkins helped save the lives of countless Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.“

Immigration problems usually have to be decided in a few days. They involve human lives. There can be no delaying,” Perkins wrote in her memoir, The Roosevelt I Knew. In March 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Perkins was appointed Secretary of Labor by FDR. As Hitler rose to power, thousands of German-Jewish refugees and their loved ones reached out to the INS—then part of the Labor Department—applying for immigration to the United States, writing letters that began “Dear Miss Perkins . . .”Perkins’s early experiences working in Chicago’s famed Hull House, and as a firsthand witness to the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire, shaped her determination to advocate for immigrants and refugees. As Secretary of Labor, she wrestled widespread antisemitism and isolationism, finding creative ways to work around quotas and restrictive immigration laws. Diligent, resilient, empathetic, yet steadfast, she persisted on behalf of the desperate when others refused to act.

Based on extensive research, including thousands of letters housed in the National Archives, Dear Miss Perkins adds a new dimension to an already extraordinary life story, revealing at last how one woman tried to steer the nation to a better, more righteous course.

Rebecca Brenner Graham is author of Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Kensington, 2025). Rebecca is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University. Previously, she taught at the Madeira School and American University. She has a PhD in history and MA in public history from American University and a BA in history and philosophy from Mount Holyoke College. In 2023, she was awarded a Cokie Roberts Fellowship from the National Archives Foundation and a Rubenstein Center Research Fellowship from the White House Historical Association. Her writing has been published in The Washington Post, Time, Slate, Ms., the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

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