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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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That went on for a long time. They fired one whole batch of workmen. The Labor Department didn't usually get into these cases, but we got into that because these workmen complained they had been improperly fired. There was no law to enforce, but it was our duty to see that fairness prevailed. That was how I got to know about it. I probably would never have known about it otherwise. The Department of Labor wouldn't have been called in on it. The Army would have handled it himself. Then we discovered that they hadn't been able to put their finger on anybody and that these men were merely suspects. They couldn't believe that all dozen were guilty, but they had fired everybody in that room on the ground that somewhere there was a bad apple and they had to weed them all out. They transferred other workmen in and the same old iron filings appeared again after a day or two, so somebody among the new people who had come in did it.

In the end I think they took most of the people they had fired back. On checking them up they didn't find any Communist connections on the part of any of them. Since the clogging up of the gears still went on, they decided that that wasn't the exclusive





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