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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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participating knowledge of how things are done, what the Constitution requires, and all that kind of thing.

Therefore, in a period when you have two terms, eight years, of more or less the same people, without any very great changes, you don't have the opportunity for rising persons to come up and get acknowledged and get noted.

Also having the same man run for President again and again tends to discourage all the local candidates from seeking to get the nomination for Congressmen - all the way down the line. The young men who are coming up, who ought to be out hustling for votes, and their friends, get a sort of numbed feeling that it's all been sort of arranged, all done. The ardor peters out. The ardor in the 1940 campaign was nothing like what it had been earlier. I lay that not to the rows that had taken place, but to the general apathy that developed in the Democratic Party, partly because there hadn't been the stimulus of an entirely new set of Democrats going to start out to run the country.

So I always had scruples about the third term, although for the life of me I couldn't see that anything else would happen. As time went on, as I looked over the possibilities, I thought more and more that Roosevelt





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