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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Part:         Session:         Page of 912

Interviewer:

So, now we have two Secretaries of Labor?

Perkins:

Well, I functioned until the next day, that was all.

Interviewer:

There's a legal matter here, isn't there?

Perkins:

Don't mind the legal matter. My resignation was to take effect on July 1, and that was that. I naturally wasn't going to make any point of it, and there were no important papers to be signed. I signed all the papers that were signed, however, and Dan Tracy stuck to his desk down there, and he saw that they were signed, and he didn't give way. We stayed there until the bitter end, and we signed the papers.

However--and this was very peculiar--he came down. It was Saturday. It must have been a Saturday. He came down to the Department that morning, later on in the middle of the day, and he came strutting in to the Secretary's office. He walked right through the outer office. He hadn't given us word that he was coming. You know, I'd have been on the sidewalk to meet him. No word that he was coming, no information that he was expected, no connection with anybody in the Department--no word to anybody. He just walked in, came up in the elevator, walked down the hall into the outer office where my secretarial staff were. They rose to their feet to





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