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to John Brophy, who described to me for two hours how you mine coal--not today but the way it used to be done.

Yes, exactly. Even today, you still have to have a good miner go in. Coal mining is the one thing that they haven't yet found out how to do by automation.

They have these machines now.

Oh, they have these machines, but it takes human beings to guide those machines. They are operated by a man. They take the load off the man--they take the load of the hard work--but the decisions as to when to do this, and how far to push that, are made by a human being who's a good miner, you know--what is popularly called a “good miner.”

At any rate, I thought hard and I began to see that the President would probably be in a pickle if he didn't move, and he might have to do it, and what in the devil would we do? And I got a kind of a brainstorm, sitting alone in my office. I just wondered, you know, if the Government could take them over in a legal sense and give some signal that it was taking over, I wondered if the purists wouldn't let the miners go back to work and mine the coal for the Government, not for the operators. The operators might make a profit, but they would not be the bosses. I just wondered if that was possible. I thought about it and I said, “Gosh, it's a good