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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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allowed to sit down. It just wasn't permitted. Then he thought that wasn't right. Then he would come to the point where he realized there must be a law.

When Al Smith died a Tammany Hall old-timer said something about him which a friend of mine, Isador Lubin, overheard. This fellow was sitting around some cafe or bar, like Scheffel Hall, with a lot of the other old Tammany men. They were sitting around, mourning Al, talking about him, recollecting him, and so on. They were saying, “How did Al get all those new ideas? He never got them out of the organization. Where did he get all those ideas that made him so popular, that made him so that all the people all over the country thought he was so wonderful? They thought he was a great reformer, the man who brought so much good to everybody in New York. How did he get that way? He never got that out of the organization.”

This fellow, Joe Something-or-other, pounded on the floor with his cane and said - or so Lubin told me - “I'll tell you. Al Smith read a book. That book was a person, and her name was Frances Perkins. She told him all these things and he believed her.” Wasn't that amazing?

Scheffel Hall, where all the old Tammany men gathered, was on the corner of Third Avenue and 17th Street. Tammany Hall was located on 14th Street. It was a type of German





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