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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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different jobs in the factory. That was always being broached every time there was a strike. These strikes were usually just for more pay, and some other things. The workers behaved very badly. They didn't do things politely, and so forth, but they didn't know how to.

In June 1941 Hitler attacked Russia. That was, of course, a surprise. Everything had been rigged the other way. I seem to remember that there were a group of people in Washington who had never fully accepted the idea that this agreement between the Russians and the Germans was valid and enduring, who always had their fingers crossed with regard to whether the Russian-German agreement, which Ribbentrop negotiated, would really hold. I'm pretty sure that Henry Stimson was among those who felt that it was always doubtful. I think Hull was too. I recall Hull saying at an earlier date, “The agreement is strong enough so that at least we have to accept it. We can't play as though we were sure that it's going to break up. It's a strong enough agreement so that we must accept it as reality.”

Of course, it had been originally played up by the newspapers and by all our own people as a perfidy all the way around. But I'm very sure that Hull, Stimson and a number of others thought that it would never endure throughout the war. With that I would more or less have agreed, but without any basis for it whatever, except my acute memory of the





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