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President at that time had heard reverberations of it or not, I don't know. I had. I was not by any means an expert on it, nor was I a deep student of it, but I had heard about this purchasing power and I could see that it was true, that the purchasing power of the people made a market for the manufactured goods of that country. If the purchasing power collapsed or descended too low, there would be no market. You would therefore have fewer goods produced, fewer people working in the factories, fewer people receiving wages, and therefore a constantly sinking purchasing power.

I laid that out, as well as I could, to him, and he said, “Yeah, that's interesting. Surely, anyhow, we ought to peg wages at a living level.” He was, at that time, more familiar with the old ideas of Father John Ryan about a living wage as a basic moral concept. It was upon John Ryan's idea that we in the State of New York and other states had moved forward for state minimum wage laws. Roosevelt was familiar with those arguments. He had not been familiar with, nor had I long been familiar with, the idea that the support of these held up wages, was your basic market for the manufactured and distributing goods. But he responded to that and said, “Okay, that'll be all right.” We would do what we could on that.

I said, “There may be other things and perhaps we should do more.”