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However, the ashes of the Defense Mediation Board were not cold when we set up the War Labor Board. We started rebuilding as soon as the board collapsed. I remember saying to one of the employer men over the telephone, “If you let this thing go, all you have is another board. We'll give it another name, but we will have to have the same instrumentality. If you don't want to go on the board, then somebody else will, because there will always be people, perhaps not as sensible as you are” - this was to George H. Mead of Ohio - “who will serve. There will have to be a board. Now what do you suggest. What's going to happen? There are too many strikes, aren't there? There's too much stoppage of work. There's too much delay in the program. So we have to have some kind of an instrumentality before which grievances can be aired.”

What this board did, and what having a board like this does, is give a face-saving excuse to end the stoppage of work. That was one of the reasons it was set up. It was also set up, as I say, in part so that there would not then be a great battle in the Congress over the repeal of the Wagner Labor Relations Act. That would have been perhaps the most disturbing thing to industrial peace and to the orderly procedure of increasing the labor force and getting ahead with the manufacturing and distribution necessary for the supply of the Allies. I'm thinking of the way we thought before