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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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to give you a new deal.” I think I've said over and over again - I've told everyone in reach of my voice - that it was a figure of speech, an ornamental phrase in a speech. It meant just what it means when you're playing cards. “All right, you've run into bad luck. So let's have a new deal and start over again.” That's all it meant. It had no program. It had no policy.

Although the phrase has come to have a meaning, I'll grant you that, it doesn't have a very exact meaning. I'll admit there was a humanitarian attitude toward life that permeated our administrations. Certainly nobody who was unable to tolerate the idea of humanitarianism could have been even reasonably comfortable in the government at that time. Nobody who didn't think that we had some obligation to the unemployed as such, and to the depressed and harassed farmers as such, could have been comfortable at all. Practically everybody who was in the government did believe that something had to be done.

There were plenty of people who weren't in sympathy with the whole works. I wasn't in sympathy with the whole works. There were many people other than Democrats in the New Deal. For instance, Henry Stimson, a Republican, who was in the Roosevelt Cabinet, was one of the first





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