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I took the post was to call a meeting of the commissioners of labor of all the states and to plant the seeds of good labor legislation in every state. I meant to carry that out and get some labor legislation that way.

Well, that has been perhaps the most successful single thing I ever did in the Department of Labor and I think has had perhaps wider reverberations than anything else. I don't know of anything else that gave me any more satisfaction than that. That conference that was first called in the fall of '33 was called the Interstate Conference on Labor Legislation. They've had them every single year since, never missing a year. It has no legal or statutory position at all, but the amount of labor legislation since passed in the states of this country is enormous. You just can't believe. But it all stems from that. I know it does. Not only do I know it from having observed it, and knowing what we urged and what we persuaded them to do, but also from their testimony. They had a big meeting in Washington in the fall of '52 which I addressed. Man after man got up to say, “I was at that first conference that Miss Perkins speaks about. I remember that we had no more idea of going ahead with a change in the workmen's compensation law to cover occupation diseases, but I got the idea from this conference. So we sold it at home.”