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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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to plant more, and so on. I remember his discussing that. I remember his saying, “If we're going to prepare to feed this area, we have to know by a certain date because crops won't grow in a minute. You have to prepare the people, the ground, the seeds. You have to be sure that you have your marketing program, your control program, and so forth.”

I'm sure he was thinking of all that, thinking of it as a desperate method of meeting a world emergency. How profoundly he was committed to it, I don't know, but I know he was planning in that direction. Every department was planning. The President was riding in that direction.

So when people tell me that they don't know how they happened to take those action agencies away from Wickard, I say that they didn't take them away to do him any dirt. He may have taken it personally, though I didn't think he did. It was Harold Smith's idea. This happened to everybody - Interior, Labor, Agriculture, Commerce, Treasury to a certain extent, Commerce was shot to pieces. Hillman and Knudsen tried to usurp the functions of the Department of Labor.

Nobody in the Cabinet took that personally. Nobody thought they ought to resign, as far as I know. Of course, there was a constant effort on the part of newspapers to set up trouble between Roosevelt and his Cabinet





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