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very kind to him anyway. The press boys all loved him. He had a great capacity to evoke affection. You didn't want to hurt him. You would no more hurt General Johnson than you would hurt a child. You couldn't do it. Although the press people suspected this, they never had the goods. The people who surrounded him, particularly Miss Robinson who was wonderful, kept him from being made a public spectacle during his worst moments.
But he had had this terrible seizure during the summer sometime and he got his brainstorm that the wages ought to be raised by proclamation in all the codes, instead of doing it by code agreement. I'm not sure what part of the summer this was, but it was all during this one summer. He had proposed to the president that they hold a great NRA meeting, bring in all the code authorities, rent Constitution Hall, bring in all the members of code committees, the Labor Advisory Committee, the Employers' Advisory Committee, everyone. First they would make a report to these people about the success of the NRA. Then the President would appear and the President would by proclamation then and there before all declare that the wages were to be raised ten per cent, fifteen per cent, or some such figure - just by proclamation, right then, out of the President's mouth. That, of course, is a perfectly crazy thing to do, but he suggested it.
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