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large area of stability, and the controls, while they didn't work perfectly, worked. They worked after a fashion, and it really was amazing that the cost of living went up so little.

Then there were occasional adjustments of wages based on the cost of living, you remember, in the cases before the War Labor Board. The War Labor Board was, of course, a wartime agency which I think had a great deal of responsibility for the emergence of some of the more radical demands of labor. The insistence upon bringing everybody in under a wage determination, for instance, came under the determinations of the War Labor Board. The idea of making a universal wage--what did they call it, “nationwide wage finding”--when it-was only necessary to make a wage finding for the company that was then petitioning. But they went out of their way to make it nationwide. Well, it was neater, they felt. I think it threw the economy out of gear in many places, and always have thought they made a mistake on that.

But there were a number of quite doctrinaire people on that War Labor Board, before they got through. We appointed a good set of labor people originally, but then they kept adding to their numbers, you see--politically. There was a lot of political wire-pulling. The labor people would want somebody else on, and the employers would want somebody else on. They would say to the others, “Do you have any objections to this