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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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sent in. Everything was in a mess. The men always declared that they swept up every night and had an organization that disciplined and so forth. But it got to be pretty lax toward the end.

At this moment I cannot recall just how this happened, but working through public officials of the City of Detroit, and resting on my assurance, which I had given not only to Sloan but to his lawyer, Mr. Brown, who at least was a man you could deal with because he wasn't angry, the employers and the union did sit down together.

In our preliminary talks the company officials had said that they would rather have John Lewis in on this than anybody else. I remember telling them on one occasion that I didn't think they needed to be quite so sure of that, that Lewis was a very tough customer when he actually came into a thing. If he was at all concerned about it, he would give them a bigger run for their money than these men who were the actual heads of the union, because he had much more experience and much more public prestige.

Lewis's peeve, his great peeve in life, to me had always been that John L. Lewis was ignored by the great people of this country. “If you really want something to happen, why doesn't Pierre Du Pont sit down with me? Why doesn't Jim Francis of the West Virginia Coal





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