Excerpt from:

Two Views of American Labor

by Frances Perkins and J. Paul St. Sure, 1965.

“I would first like to deal with questions that people ask me over and over again. What was the New Deal anyhow? Was it a political
plot? Was it just a name for a period in history? Was it a revolution? To all of these questions I answer “No.” It was something quite different. It was very real but it certainly was not a plot. It wasn’t even a plan. It wasn’t a platform put through by a
faction of the Democratic Party, and certainly it wasn’t the plan or program of the Democratic Party as a whole. If you had seen the Democrats assembled at their convention in 1932, you would have known they had no such thoughts in mind. No, it wasn’t any
of these things. It was, I think, basically an attitude. An attitude toward government, toward the people, toward labor. It was an attitude that found voice in expressions like “the people are what matter to government,” and ” a government should aim to give
all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.” 

.Download the full report from the Online Archives of California here.