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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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at least impinged upon engineering problems. There was the case of the dry cleaning code, for instance. A person trained in the law would have the whole thing a mystery to him as to why it was important to have a certain kind of wire connecting the tanks to something else. I wanted a man to whom all those things were simple and who would, therefore, read the content of recommendations without having to go look things up, and would have a quick judgment as to whether they were sensible, plausible, practical, and would know how to develop those codes. I also wanted someone who would have the engineer's sense of the techniques of the prevention of accidents in the accident prevention field, which was one of the big fields that we were moving into. I wanted someone who would be able to take the lead in conferences in which engineers from the companies would be present. I wanted somebody of that sort.

I didn't want to lose immediate supervision of the Workmen's Compensation Bureau, because it's very tricky and can easily be diverted into quite inhuman and stodgy patterns by people who would rather have things follow along a beaten path of regulations, never doing anything different in every case than you've done in every other case. It can easily get to be just a wooden thing, as indeed it has become in





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