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not a very wise long term procedure, but an absolutely necessary short term emergency procedure when people were hungry.

Minimum wages and maximum hours I thought of, and I never recommended them to Roosevelt in any other way except as basic, permanent pegs in our industrial life which would brace up the wage structure now and make some money, going into wages, to spend, preventing over-long hours which resulted in the same thing as a low wage because they reduced the money in the economy to spend. I thought of those as emergency, but also as permanent props, which would avoid such disasters. It was like putting a beam under a falling floor. The falling floor was this depression. We were not ignorant of the fact that such depressions had taken place before and that they had been characteristic of industrial life for a couple of hundred years. Some of the depressions were easily spotted and located in time. I believed, and I still believe, that the putting in of a minimum wage law to prevent the fall of wages below a level that made it possible for something to be spent in the open market, and the putting of a ceiling over hours, although it was a patchwork job and done in an emergency period, would help the emergency and would also offer a permanent stability and safety to the whole structure.