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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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is also plausible. He's a very intelligent person, very intelligent. He could analyze a situation, and he was very quick, very industrious, you know. He could see all around a situation and see through it, make suggestions as to what to do, and so forth, that were very useful. I can see that they would be. He was an educated man operating in that group who could write a brief, write a memorandum, write a statement--you know. Do it quickly and do it effectively. That was all useful. I can see why they were sort of tied to him. But I still think it was a considerable hazard to them.

Of course, there were a lot of people in the C.I.O. at that time that we didn't know were Communists, because we didn't know what the word meant at that time, or didn't know exactly what the line was, but we knew them to be “fancy” people. Just notional. They had ideas. You crop up with them anywhere. You find them organizing out in DesMoines, Iowa, you know, in a butcher plant. Here's a very wild man, his heart bleeding for labor for all it's worth, and you said, “My goodness, where'd he get his education?”

It was that sort of thing that would crop up every now and then. There were a lot of them in the C.I.O., and they were undoubtedly organizing for C.I.O. That was, I think, the great use that Lewis and Murray had for them, as organizers, And they are splendid organizers. They're passionate organizers, you see. They take any amount of trouble. They spend any





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