Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

Hello and welcome and Happy New Year.

Happy New Year Mrs. Graham.

This will be part two of our coverage of Francis Perkins.

When we last left Francis, was that dramatic enough?

She had been trained by her family to help others, trained by both Mount Holyo College and Columbia University

to research, to think critically and to form practical solutions for any problem that she might encounter.

And she had been trained by life and work in settlement houses and in the nonprofit organizations for a career in social work.

She knew her job, her job was to investigate, agitate and legislate.

She's 31 years old, living in New York City, working as a social worker.

She's just recently witnessed the tragedy of the Triangle Shirt Waste Company fire and it is set a path for the rest of her life.

So it is time for her to take her anger at what has just happened and also her extensive knowledge of both workplace safety and employee protections and put it to work.

Due to the interference or shall we say influence rather of New York Assemblyman Al Smith, who she had worked with before, she was nominated to be a part of an organization called the Factory Investigating Commission.

They were to find out what are the scope of the problems and then what laws could we propose that would fix the underlying crisis.

So they focused on things like workmen's comp, safety, sanitation, workmen's hours, wages and also hazardous materials.

Anyone who's seen, for example, the radium girls know that often people were forced or encouraged to work with hazardous materials with no protective gear.

So they were focused on counteracting those sort of things.

The Americans, though, went one further. She arranged factory tours for legislators and other men of power and explained to them in human terms based on facts and their own eyes, what the conditions were that everyone was attempting to fix.

The jungle had just come out about five years before and if you haven't read it, brace yourself. The author had wanted it to be about workmen's conditions and workers' rights, but it was the mistreatment of the customer's food that caused people to freak out first.

I mean, freaked out. You never saw the like of how fast that food and drug act got passed after the jungle came out.

So Francis decided that she was going to use sort of that same technique.

Francis is wily and smart and she brings them to a candy factory.

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