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use “unreasonable” in the popular way. It was a quite unlogical, rather than illogical, and not very reasoned, attitude. That is, after all, the way a great deal of work is done. A great deal happens in this country as the result of a kind of an emotional upsurge. A bright idea emerges. People pursue it and they come out all right. They tend to think that that idea was a good idea. It might have been a very poor idea, maybe illogical and unreasonable, but they got away with it.
In the case of the War Labor Board you saw that in an acute way. The more I saw the board operate, the more I felt that the tripartite type of board would never be suitable for functioning in government on any kind of a permanent basis. It brought about too many tensions and too many finagling kind of adjustments.
I would have suggested instead a board of public members, a board of appeals of public members, with the right for all hands to be heard before it. Now, George Mead, who is a steel manufacturer in Cincinnati, Ohio, is an awfully nice good man. He happens to have a great many personal talents that I admire very much, and is a nice, specific person. But there's nothing about his experience that makes him an all-wise judge as to just how much wage increase the shipyard workers should have in Quincy, Mass., or what wage differentials there should be between the boot and shoe workers of Auburn and the boot and shoe workers of Brockton. Theoretically there
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