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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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all is lost. It's not that I have any greater wisdom on things, but I always think that something can be salvaged out of a wreck. So without knowing the law on the subject, and certainly without rereading the opinions on the case, I could make myself believe that all was not lost. I've already described how Wyzanski urged me to hold the fort until he got back from Europe, and how I tried to get that idea over to the President, but that Cummings had gotten there first.

Stephens told me that he and one or two other members of the Department of Justice advised that the Schechter case, as I've already described, was not the proper case to take to the Supreme Court and that one or two other cases should be taken up, but that Cummings himself made the decision to take the Schechter case before the Court. By the time I asked Harold Stephens about this I had a clear conviction in my mind that Cummings had been responsible for the whole Supreme Court plan and that it was based upon some semi-fantastic reasoning of his own, combined with a deep, implacable desire to be a member of the Supreme Court himself. As an Attorney General of the United States, there were precedents which put him in line, whereas, as the Chairman of the National Democratic Committee only, or





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