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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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the Labor Department. The one thing they were afraid of was that this thing was going to get too far out from the Labor Department. They were Labor Department people.

There was strife between my people and Hillman's, but if I may say so, and I don't want to be derogatory about this, the people Hillman brought in were largely labor politicians. They couldn't compete with Aryness Joy and Ford Hinrichs because they weren't operating on that level. Aryness Joy is a wonderful economist and statistician, very famous. She's now (1954) number two man in the Bureau of Labor Statistics and is a very able all around person. She came to us from the Federal Reserve Bank and is a first-class thinker. It was the same way with everybody. Miss Lenroot would go over on child labor matters, but she had a program all in mind.

On the whole our professional people in the Department of Labor were willing to give away less than the labor people would have been willing to give away. They were less willing to let down standards, less willing to let children work without supervision and that kind of thing. The emotions of the labor people who came in were stirred by the idea that it was national defense and a patriotic idea, and they didn't know how to draw a line, how to say, “So far and no further.





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