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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Part:         Session:         Page of 915

Of course, the Wage-Hour Division got to work at once upon the possible and likely modifications of the requirements that we were looking towards having done, not by law, by executive order, giving the Secretary of Labor, or the Wage-Hour Division, the right to make modifications in these standards.

Immigration was still with us in the department for part of this period. We knew from the beginning that the immigration problem would be loaded by people who we had reason to suspect were coming here for no good purpose. They were German and Italian spies. We would stumble upon that early without really knowing it. We had no secret information coming to us. We got bits of secret information from the Ritter brothers and people like that, but that was only an occasional case. So we went to work on tightening up the controls in the way of finding some method by which we could distinguish a possible entry who might be a spy. They usually look so innocent. Their papers are always in good order, and they look perfectly innocent.

So practically every division had planning to do. We had to think about new things. We were definitely planning ahead for projects, modifications in our way of doing things, and so on, to provide for a war emergency.





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