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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Monday noon. I knew about the Section 24 scandal and the Garsson squad before I came, because I had read it in the Wickersham report, and I had heard about it from Lieutenant Newman. So I was prepared for that aspect of the mess. What I could do about it, I certainly hadn't yet figured out. I had not fully estimated the weakness of other parts of the Labor Department. Certainly by Tuesday I hadn't had an opportunity to estimate the weakness of other sections. The Cabinet meeting was held at two o'clock in the afternoon. That was the standard Cabinet meeting hour - two o'clock in the afternoon. It started out being on Tuesdays and Fridays. Then I think we switched, after a year or so, to having it only Fridays. I think that at that first meeting we agreed that Tuesdays and Fridays would be the days of Cabinet meetings and that we would try to get things in order then.

I took the meeting as a kind of an organizing meeting, but no pattern evolved out of it. We took an estimate of each other at that meeting - a rough, crude, superficial one, to be sure, but a kind of an estimate of the people the would work with.

My memory is that Lewis Douglas was not in on that first meeting, but that he came in with Rainey and the others. He probably did when it was a question of devising





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