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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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felt that something should be said to the people about it. You had to let the people know that they were to blame, or so some people thought.

Hatton Summers went to the Department of Justice to see Homer Cummings about the retirement bill and to urge the Attorney General's strong support of it. I don't know whether he had heard rumors that something else was afoot, or whether the conferences he had had with the President, If he had any, on the bill were not enthusiastic, but I know, partly through Harold Stephens and partly through Sumners himself, that he went to the Attorney General. I don't know Sumners well, but he was very good to me. He was a very pompous person and you couldn't know him well, out he did tell me this. I'm not sure whether it was in '36 or '37, but he told me himself that he had been to the Attorney General and had tried to get the Attorney General's support of this bill, but he wasn't enthusiastic about it. Stephens told me that on the occasion of his going to the Attorney General Sumners had come in to see him after he had seen the Attorney General, and in great disappointment. He had begged Stephens to undertake to talk to the Attorney General about it, to say that the retirement bill would solve the entire





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