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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Well, Hillman broke loose - not in the press, but it was an enraged individual that we had to deal with. Dan Tracy had been lent to Hillman to keep the peace. He came rushing over to me with the news about Hillman. That was the occasion on which Tracy said that he never knew that I had a temper, that I could get angry. But I was just furious. Hillman was doing what he had no business doing. He was exceeding any authority. It wasn't that it was my authority, or the Defense Mediation Board's authority. It was that he was making promises that he had no right to make. You shouldn't handle a great business, or a great government situation like that. But that's really neither here nor there.

In the end I suppose I interceded and we had the case in a ain. The Defense Mediation Board made some kind of a hocus-pocus adjustment. They had to give in, not Hillman. Most of them didn't know that he had intervened. Will Davis knew it, but I think hardly anyone else knew. “Some error in reporting” was the way we put it.

Hillman did sometimes lay down the law to unions. For instance, in the Bendix works we had a lot of strikes that were absolutely inexcusable, and which I now think to have been engineered by pepple who were next door to saboteurs. We thought so then, but had no evidence of it. It was a very bad situation. Hillman there certainly did





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