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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Wallace had been a good Secretary of Agriculture, but he hadn't been politically popular. They wanted a regular politician for the Vice Presidency. The party longs to promote its own, and Wallace was not its own. He wasn't born a Democratic politician. It is true that he had been a Republican, but they had forgotten that. They didn't think that he was much of a Republican. There was nobody in the convention who thought that he was much of a Republican, but he just wasn't their own. They would have liked to have had somebody that came right up through the Democratic machine, who owed his whole life to them. They wouldn't have put it in just those words, but that's what they always long for. What do you run a party machine for it it isn't to bring your own forward? They have noble patriotic purposes, but it's hard to completely dedicate your political activities in a party machine to high, noble patriotism. You want to promote your own boys too. They would have accepted a quite third-rate person without antagonism if he had been one of their own. It was this selection by Roosevelt of somebody who wasn't one of their own as a running mate, combined with what I think was undoubtedly a machine, an organized claque, partly of McNutt forces, that caused the trouble.





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