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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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didn't speak the kind of an accent that's cultivated.

She spoke very good English, careful English. She spoke as an educated woman speaks English.

She had a great sense of literature and a great love of literature, and I don't have a doubt that she introduced John L. Lewis to Shakespeare and to the other works of literature which he was so apt to quote, and which he truly loved. Oh yes: No one could quote poetry and speak poetry and not love it, you know. It means something to you.

You don't memorize it otherwise. It entered deeply into his soul.

Of course, that's partly the Welsh soul. I once explained John L. Lewis to some Englishmen, when I was in England, who were questioning me about him. There were both Labor people and others. I said to them, “well, I don't know how else to say it--he's a Welshman.”

“Ah: we understand,” they said.

That is, the Welsh are a mixture of poetry and fiery personality and weakest of action, sometimes--romantic and yet almost unreliable. They're not trusted, you know, in England--the welsh aren't. You say, “Who could ever have taken this chair?”

“We've got Welsh people working here, you know. There are Welsh people here.”

And that old rhyme about “Taffy was a Welshman,





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