Leadership Quote by Frances Perkins

A glacier is an inspired choice of terror: not the cinematic instant catastrophe, but the kind that arrives quietly, relentlessly, and with crushing certainty. Frances Perkins frames depression as a force of nature to expose a human failure of imagination. The menace is “slow,” which is exactly why it wins. People tolerate early warning signs because the day-to-day feels survivable, even normal. By the time the scale is undeniable, the damage is structural.

Perkins’s real target isn’t just the economic downturn; it’s the absence of civic machinery equal to it. “No one had any measure of its progress” reads like an indictment of a government and financial system flying blind, lacking the data, tools, and institutional habits to name what was happening in real time. The next clause sharpens the critique: “no one had any plan for stopping it.” That’s not fatalism; it’s a description of a political culture that treated hardship as private misfortune rather than a public emergency.

Then comes the bleak punch line: “Everyone tried to get out of its way.” The phrase captures a pre-New Deal reflex: self-preservation over coordination, evasion over intervention. It also hints at complicity. You don’t “get out of the way” of a glacier by helping your neighbor or shoring up the town; you retreat, leaving others to be buried.

Coming from Perkins, the first female U.S. Secretary of Labor and an architect of New Deal reforms, the metaphor doubles as a justification. When threats move with glacial patience, decisive policy can’t. The subtext is a warning to future leaders: waiting feels prudent right up until it becomes the disaster.