The Pen That Created Frances Perkins National Monument

On December 16, 2024, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. used this pen to sign the presidential proclamation establishing Frances Perkins National Monument in Newcastle, Maine. The ceremony took place in the U.S. Department of Labor; the department Perkins led from 1933 to 1945.

The photograph accompanying the pen shows Biden handing it to Frances Perkins’s grandson, Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall, with Coggeshall’s husband, Christopher Rice, standing nearby. The pen is now preserved in the Frances Perkins Center Collection.

There is a long presidential tradition behind saving a pen like this. Presidents have often used multiple pens when signing important legislation, writing only a few letters or a portion of their signature with each one. The pens can then be presented as keepsakes to legislators, officials, family members, advocates or others closely connected with the measure being signed. In other cases, a single pen used for a particularly significant signature is preserved as a historical artifact.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was among the presidents associated with the practice, and Lyndon B. Johnson became especially famous for it. Johnson sometimes used dozens of pens during major signing ceremonies so that they could be distributed to people who had helped bring the legislation about. Pens used to sign landmark measures such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Medicare legislation in 1965 were subsequently preserved by recipients and museums.

The pen therefore becomes more than a writing instrument. Its importance comes from the moment at which it was used. Much like a signed document, it becomes physical evidence of a governmental act—the object that was in the president’s hand when a piece of history became official.

That makes this pen especially appropriate for the Frances Perkins story. Perkins spent much of her career turning ideas about social justice and worker protections into government policy. More than ninety years after she entered Roosevelt’s cabinet, another president used this pen to put his signature on a document ensuring that her own story and Maine home would become part of the National Park System.