Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 731

was a leap of desperation. There wasn't any other way to do it. He got up on the platform in a second demanding to be heard. He was heard, of course. I forget now whether it was a nomination or an objection that he wanted to interpose. At any rate, it was a very important matter and it showed that he was in control of the situation. He wasn't going to be pushed down.

Curiously that very insistence of his gained him a lot of respect in that convention. An immediate following sort of sprang up for him. He was somebody.

I think it's impossible to say whether these changes would have continued and he would have turned into the kind of person he did even without his paralysis. I think that his political life had a great developing influence upon him. He once told me that he learned more about life in the United States and politics by taking State Committee Members out to lunch to take them off Woodrow Wilson's hands than he had in any other way. Wilson, because Franklin Roosevelt was agreeable and pleasant, had turned to him as State Committee men came to make a visit in Washington. They wanted to stay with the President all the time and tell the President how he should do this and that. Wilson would ask the Assistant Secretary of the Navy in and that meant taking them out for lunch, asking them for dinner at the club, or something or other. He said,





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help