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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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that people believed her, and yet when they left they said, “Could she possibly be talking through her hat? Can it be so? It's impossible that such a thing could happen. The Germans aren't that kind of people.”

So nobody believed her. She had a hard row to make anybody believe that there was any danger there. I think that Roosevelt was in the same pickle as everybody else. He felt it was too bad the Germans were having such trouble, but it would pass.

However, I think that as his knowledge of what Hitler was really doing grew he certainly was paying more and more attention to that. I know he was paying more and more attention to what was happening in Spain. He was very interested in the Franco movement. Roosevelt had been a student or naval warfare and he thought of Spain in terms of the Meditereanean. He thought of it as a man interested in naval history, naval operations and would think about it. He was very concerned about it.

So I think his mind was attracted more and more to foreign affairs than it had been earlier, but Roosevelt was not without interest and concern in that field earlier. One of his first public works was a battleship. I've got one of my little handwritten notes on that that I wrote that day. He was building a battleship in time of great depression.





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