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other name, but it would have been an instrumentality through which there could be a settlement of such disputes as were not easily settled by the ordinary methods of conciliation, and under which there could be a certain amount of authority to make a decision that would stick. Whether we were in war, or whether we were not in war, being the “arsenal of democracy” was putting an intense strain upon our whole industrial life. If you were going to make regular shipments to the English, the French, and so on, you couldn't be tolerating interruptions by unsettled strikes and by the disagreements that were then upsetting our industrial life.

So to invent the War Labor Board was not difficult and we did it practically over the telephone. The War Labor Board was built on the ashes of the Defense Mediation Board, and the ashes were still pretty hot. The membership was not identical, but it did overlap and there were a considerable number of the same people on both boards. I don't remember who the casualties were, and they weren't exactly casualties. They weren't people who were left off for any particular reason, except that they didn't want to go on with it, or that they hadn't been very regular in attendance, or couldn't take cases, or couldn't give much time or work to it. Will Davis was the head of the first and of the second boards.

There were those who felt at the time that the Defense Mediation Board had attempted to do too much, and that that was one of the things that led it into trouble. However,