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them to work at once studying every decision that had ever been made on any of the subjects that we would like to have regulated on a federal basis.
Of course, I asked Wyzanski, as one of his first chores, to set up in his own office a study of the whole question from the legal point of view - that is, a study of the varied decisions, the varied jurisdictions, to see if we could find any line of difference between them upon which we might build, looking forward. Wyzanski was also consulting learned lawyers who were not in the government, as well as learned lawyers in other divisions of the government, looking for some kind of a loophole.
Wyzanski was very much attracted to the idea which we had been working on before we came to Washington - when I say “we,” I mean the President and myself - of agreements between the states, or between as many of them as you could persuade to come into such an agreement, with regard to minimum wages, maximum hours, prohibition of child labor, and so forth. We had had a preliminary conference and had a theoretical, though not a legal, agreement on the subject. That was one of the hopes of Wyzanski. He put a lot of time is on that and wrote a very elaborate memorandum on that, which, I think, was published in one of the law journals. It
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