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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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he can't sign anything until he calls the executive council.

So when I urged him to send them back to work, he said, “The miners are not under my direction. I have not told them to leave the mines.” Indeed he hadn't. He hadn't called a strike. There was no strike. They just didn't work. That was their own idea individually. So he couldn't order them back to work. He couldn't do anything without calling the executive council.

I pointed out how disastrous, how terrible, it would be both for him and for the miners from the point of view of the public if they weren't going back to work right away. So he said, “Well, Madam Secretary, I will do something.” Then he decided to call a fifteen day truce, fifteen days to wait and see if you could work out an agreement. He said, “The miners do not work without an agreement.” That's a basic policy. He's taught that to them, until now they know that if there isn't an agreement, they don't work. So there would be a fifteen day truce until he saw if he could work it out with Ickes.

I did not tell him that the President was going on the at and I really don't think he knew it. He knew he was going on the air, but he didn't know that he was going to ask the miners to go back to work. He thought that the President was going to announce that the government was taking over the mines and that the Secretary of the Interior was in charge. Whether he was Just shrewd and thought, “I'd





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