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pleasant to all of them. He knew Hillman from New York, where the garment trades had often come before the Governor when they were in trouble about mediation.

That was the first of the conferences. Then I built on that. I gave great publicity to these ideas of theirs, which I elicited from this conference. I would often refer to these ideas as being the labor proposals. It had a good deal of political strength. It also gave political strength to the labor position in the NRA. It gave a good deal of political strength to the Walsh-Healey Bill, when I wanted to propose that. I proposed to them in that meeting this idea of Felix Frankfurter's that the government could control wages and hours on its contracts, just as it controlled the quality of the goods manufactured under its contracts. They endorsed that. That was quite a victory. That was a good leverage for the future.

That began my formal relations with the unions and with the AF of L. I never let that die completely. I always kept a committee on something or other alive. I didn't try to have one general committee, because my experience has been that one committee, which is generally advisory, just gets you and everybody else into trouble because they have no special knowledge of the subjects that come up in the Labor Department, we'll say. What really want is an