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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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the other people in order to find out. The President would ask me questions, and I think he asked Wickard and other people too, on information that had come to him from sources that were so unreliable that you wondered where he ever got it. You would find that Hillman and Knudsen had told him that. But it wasn't so. They'd got it from somebody who had told them, but didn't have the exact facts about the matter. There were alternative methods of operating, that were well established by law and custom and that could have been turned to and probably should have been.

It was a period so confused that I don't remember too much about it. In my memory I blend this planning period with the operating period that came later. They seem to just merge one into the other. I wasn't upset by all this. I did resign after the election. I naturally would. I submitted a resignation and pressed very hard for the acceptance of that resignation because I really didn't want to go on with it. But it didn't upset me to resign. I felt I had done what I came to do. I said to the President, “I've done what I came to do. The foundation stones are laid.” After the Republicans came out with their platform in 1940, which was just a “me too” platform, just saying they would do what we did but better, it seemed to me that our program was now bipartisan. Nobody would ever abandon Social Security.





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