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as a foreign country, as I always had until I came there. I've begun now (1952) to think of it again as a foreign country. It didn't have any significance. I was the Industrial Commissioner of the State of New York, and Washington was a foreign country. I was making a visit of state, so to speak. I was glad to encourage the girls in their ideas of things.

It wasn't for another week that it dawned on me that there was something stirring and that this visit of mine to Washington to speak to Grace Abbott's conference was definitely a plan, probably by Mary Dewson, to get me into the public eye at the Washington level, to get me to meet a number of the Washington newspaper correspondents, and to get me to meet some of the Senators who were likely to be interested and concerned in the kind of thing I had done in the State of New York.

Then very soon there began to be somebody in the Times saying, “It is predicted,” or “It is said,” or, “There are those who believe that Frances Perkins will be in the President's Cabinet as Secretary of Labor.” Somebody came rushing in to me in my department with that and I said, “Well, they're speculating and they think that's the case because I'm Industrial Commissioner under him. They think that's fine.”