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what I think we did was not to turn over the pattern of American life, or turn it around even. What we did was to correct certain obvious defects, and we didn't correct anything except those that were obvious. It was obvious to me, and it became obvious to others in the Roosevelt group, that there were certain defects in our life that were correctable, though not removable necessarily. You could just correct them. You didn't have to tear the house down in order to correct them. It's just as though when you have a leaky pipe, you mend the pipe. You don't pull out the plumbing. It was in that spirit that it was approached.

I don't speak at this moment for those who may have been preparing and selling the NRA to him, because that was another group of people. They may have had a larger area of planning that I knew about on that night in February 1933. But I had in mind and the people with whom I had talked, who were my natural advisers, the correction of certain situations which we believed to be correctable by quite minor means. That is, you could abolish child labor in the United States. It was possible to do it. They hadn't been able to do it before only because the legislative processes hadn't been right and the courts, perhaps, hadn't been right. But there must be ways to do it. There certainly were ways of doing public works for the relief of unemployment -