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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Inspecting Division as to what measures to take with regard to these factories where they found bad conditions; that more than two years had gone by since this was a matter of law and they had not held one hearing and they had not taken any action to adopt a code with regard to factories of the very type that the Diamond Candy Factory was; that therefore they were culpable for this accident and so forth and so on.

I think I signed first on a petition to the Governor to remove them all. A lot of other people signed too, but I signed first, because I was the spearhead on that kind of thing. The Governor was Whitman then. It was pretty strong language I realized after I knew that I was going to be a member of this same body. It expressed an extreme view which I afterwards, of course, in my own administrative experience would have modified.

Yet, I thought then, and I still think, that during those two years they had been asleep. While they ought to have been instructing the factory inspectors, putting the pressure on factory inspectors to do the right thing and to take the initiative, and ought to have issued some rules and regulations, they hadn't done anything. They had been acting as a quasi-judicial body, letting things come up to them one way or another. They had had kind of an Executive





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