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I told him this idea of Felix Frankfurter's which he had revealed to me and to Mary Dewson several weeks earlier. We'd consulted him unofficially. We had all along consulted him about problems in the Consumers' League. We said, “What can be done? The federal powers are so strange and the constitutional rights of the federal government are so limited. What can be done to peg wages so that they won't fall below a living standard?”

The only thing that Felix came up with was this, and it was very ingenious. He said, and I repeated this to Roosevelt, “The government of the United States has the right to contract for any amount of goods. They buy goods all the time. They buy supplies of all sorts in very large amounts. In some industries the government is the largest single purchaser. It's a very huge purchaser. It's very widely distributed. Not only does it buy paper, pen and stationery supplies, but it buys steel for battleships, engines, machinery, clothing, uniforms, sheets and pillow cases for its institutions, foods in great quantities. It's a very well distributed list of purchases. The government has the right to set up any specifications which the purchasing agent thinks wise, set up any specification that it wishes to set up for the articles that it's going to buy. It says how many threads there must be per inch