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Notable New     Yorkers
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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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this - because the factory, the manufacturing life and the life of trade furnished occupation for the surplus people of the farms. I remember that because I was horrified at the idea of the surplus people of the farms. like all city people I thought that anybody in trouble ought to go back to the farm. If people were out of work in the cities, it would have occurred to me that it was a wonderful thing to have land to go back to somewhere. I never had expressed that very much.

I also knew perfectly well, in operating the employment service in the first years of the depression in New York State, that we had found that the men coming in, and there were droves of them coming in to the big employment office centers in Rochester and Buffalo - they had hundreds of thousands of people applying for work - didn't want to go to the farms. When you got a call for farm workers, even in the lines of the unemployed you had a very difficult time getting them to go. You could hardly find anybody who would agree to go on the farms. In the spring of the year, during the planting season, we had a good many demands. We had a really heavy call for farm workers and couldn't get them to go.





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