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which was also desperately needed, was drawn into the factories. I seem to remember that Wickard talked to me about this being a problem. He emphasized that to me. We made no effort to draw them in. That wasn't necessary. It happened naturally. For instance an enormous plant was put up in Maryland and that covered an area where the only occupation had been farm labor. All you had to do was put the factory up and put out a sign, “Help Wanted,” and they came. Nobody was recruiting them. The farmers couldn't compete with the wages industry offered.
To this day I wouldn't know how to plan another war, in order to keep people on the farms in sufficient numbers. And yet, there was always this jealousy in small communities as well as big, this belief that people on the farms got out of going to war, just because their father, cousin, or uncle said theywere a farm laborer and essential to the operation of his farms. I never have known the extent to which that was true. I know of certain individual cases of people that I happen to know who hadn't been a farm laborer the year before. They had been intending to do something else, but they didn't want to go to war so they went to work on uncle's farm. On the other hand, many of the people who did do that originally, thinking to get out of the draft, eventually of course were picked up.
Of course, there was also a great deal of deferment of industrial workers, because of what was regarded as necessity.
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