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good employer. Bad employers were some of these scalawags who would work children on the sly after the factory inspector had gone. They'd go out and send for the women to bring in their children, hurrying them up to do a lot of work and get it out of the way. They were bad employers. He roughly classified them like that.

However, he didn't think of heartless employers like you read about in books. He tended, I think, to think very personally about them. It was always an amazement to me after he came to Washington that there was so much feeling that he was out to get employers. He really wasn't. He thought they were lovely when they were lovely. He was very appreciative of them. He didn't understand the processes by which they made goods, advertised, marketed and sold them, and reinvested the profit. That he didn't understand, but he knew that they were good and bad, that they cared about their employers, that they were honest about the price, and so forth.

I don't remember too many conversations specifically that I had with him, though the one about dust explosions I do remember. Like everybody else he was hard to convince because he started out saying, “How could aluminum explode?” A lot of these things seemed very clear. How could talcum powder explode?