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authority if ever we went to war. There was quite a lot written on the subject - enough so that we all smelled a rat. These so-called administrative specialists were all thinking up things like that all the time. However, there was a great Cabinet emphasis on advising the President not to. For the most part we felt we were winning the day. Every department was taking its war plans. The President was encouraging them. Agriculture, I know, was making plans. We were. Commerce was. Every department was making its plans of what it would do and how it would do them if there were war.
It must have been in discussions about the world food problem and the problem of the utilization of American agricultural products for the feeding of the world that Wickard impressed me with knowing so much. I know that he was then preparing to operate that part of the thing through the Department of Agriculture. Of course, the whole trend in the '30's had been to cut back agricultural production. Now there had to be all out production. Whether Wickard himself had that idea, or whether he took it from the President, he was certainly working on the detail of what you would do, where you could increase production, how you would increase it, the time and the date that you would have to tell farmers
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