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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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handling, adequately through our state mediators and condiliators. New York was a very advanced state in provision for all these things. This provision had been made very largely during the period when Smith was Governor.

At that time the states rights issue was as important in the North as it was in the South. I still am a person who feels that we should never take away from the states their responsibility for a great many of these operations in the social field. There should only be federal action at a point where it is the only way in which there can be cooperation between the states. One of the reasons that we've got social security in the form that it is is that in 1934 or '5 we were still holding to that idea that the states must participate, the states must develop their own programs, and the federal government is merely holding the kitty, so to speak, in order to equalize the costs.

We didn't talk much about states rights. It was just assumed. Everything that we had known of the government under Coolidge and Harding would indicate that the federal government was still moving along in the straight direction of federalism, and that states and what they could do was not taken into much consideration.

The Democratic cry was for a tariff for revenue only, a tariff arrangement intended to stimulate trade between





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