Batteryman vs. The New Deal: The Life of Fred C. Perkins

Abstract

The Great Depression and the New Deal remain enormously popular subjects for economists and historians. Scholars across multiple disciplines continue to devote significant resources to understanding the economic collapse that began in 1929 and the social and political consequences of the subsequent decade. Despite this remarkable scholarly achievement, curiously little research has been advanced to highlight the victims of the New Deal’s overreach. While more recent revisionist accounts of the New Deal attempt to address the negative aspects of the New Deal in broad strokes, these histories do little more than repeat a handful of anecdotal stories without any depth into the victims themselves. This three-part paper seeks to address the inadequacy of these accounts by detailing the life story of one of the New Deal’s most prominent opponents. Fred C. Perkins ran a small battery manufacturing business in York, Pennsylvania. Fred’s initial specialty was maintaining farm lighting plant batteries to provide electrical service to rural areas before widespread electrification. His story became newsworthy when he was arrested and spent 18 days in jail on a warrant for violating the minimum wage provisions of the National Recovery Administration (NRA). Perkins’s story reached the pages of major city newspapers, and he was ultimately vindicated when the Supreme Court found the NRA unconstitutional in 1935. That much of the Perkins story is repeated in many accounts of the New Deal and the NRA. This three-part paper seeks to move beyond the 15 minutes of fame to understand the life experience and legacy of Fred C. Perkins. In Part I, I explore Perkins’s early life, including his education at Cornell, his early jobs, and his family life from birth until 1933. It is not until the later part of this period that we begin to see the development of a political and economic philosophy that lays the groundwork for his opposition to the NRA and the New Deal as a whole. At the same time, Fred established his family in York County, Pennsylvania, where he would live and work for the rest of his life. In the shop behind his home in West York, Fred established the business that would be central to his story. Part II focuses exclusively on Perkins’s initial dispute with the NRA, the subsequent court case, and his eventual vindication. In Part III, I address Fred C. Perkins’s other lesser-known fights against New Deal legislation, his growing voice in Republican political circles, and the legacy of his life and business in York County by the time of his death in 1957. While Fred changed jobs and moved around quite a bit early in his life, this three-part paper is essentially a local history of Fred’s life in York. Although Fred was not from York County, his story influenced the community’s people and culture. The life of batteryman Fred C. Perkins became part of what defines York County.