Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 915

to look out for, the President can fire one of them or all of them. You can lay the blame on them, and the President isn't too involved.

I'm pretty sure it was Harry's advice, and it was the kind of thing that Harry was always thinking of. He did the same kind of thinking for the protection of the WPA in the localities. He put local people on advisory committees, and they would take the brunt of the denunciation locally in Atlanta, Georgia, in Kansas City, Kansas, and so on. It was the local people who had to stand up to it, and they were expendable. Whereas, if it had been high persons appointed by the President, then it was the President doing this.

Maybe other people had heard of it before, but I didn't hear a single rumor about an advisory commission until this day in Cabinet meeting when the President announced it sometime in the spring of 1940. The war had only begun in September, 1939, and the advisory commission was set up in May, 1940. I remember that the President said in Cabinet meeting that the law that created and established the Council of National Defense was still in existence, that a defense program was entirely different from a war program, that one of the things we had to be thinking of was the prevention of the episodes which might involve us in war





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help