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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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of alertness to see whether labor was going to act like a responsible person.

Of course, again there was this terrible intellectual confusion of animism which comes in. People say labor and think of a person who is subject to all the mental and moral reactions that any other person is, whereas, as a matter of fact, it's just a collection of people, amorphous, irregular, and not having any soul, not having any corporate moral life, which the individual subject to all the reactions that the average American is. So there was a good deal of irritation everytime there would be a stoppage of work, and there were always accusations over at the War Production Board.

However, on the whole I think that the War Production Board got to taking it pretty easy. Don Nelson, when he came in, was a very calm fellow. I don't know whether he was a good person in the War Production Board, or not. He certainly was a good person to work with. He always seemed to know what he wanted. He was able to state his problem very clearly and quickly, pleasantly. He never seemed to be all screwed up, which, of course, was not the case with everybody around Washington.

Take a person like Frank Knox, or Ralph Bard, inthe navy, if something was going wrong in a company that was making supplies for the navy, it was put up to them by the people in charge of their supply service. It was brought in





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