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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Pearl Harbor, say a week before Pearl Harbor, when we were thinking about the re-creation of the Defense Mediation Board. It was not thought that any such bill as the bill repealing the Wagner Labor Relations Act would pass in Congress. But it was, of course, clearly seen that to have it come up for active argument, debate, dispute, committee hearings, would accentuate these differences that had already brought forward the protest and the collapse of the Defense Mediation Board. The growing differences and antagonisms of the AF of L and the CIO would have merely been transferred from the legislative halls, where they appeared as witnesses, back to the various factories and mills where they worked as one more grievance, one more excuse for trouble. This was before Pearl Harbor, before we had any thought of applying the war sanctions, or when they couldn't be thought of. You had to think of how to keep the peace without the sanctions, which might be evoked, but which, of course, never were completely.

So even in the days when the Defense Mediation Board broke up, not more than two or three weeks before Pearl Harbor, my memory is of telephone conversations, and personal conversations, with these people saying, “No matter what you do another board will be created, will be set up. It has to be. There's no other way to handle this situation. If it breaks up, it isn't fatal. We'll have another one. We'll





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