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

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 915

today—all friendly and sweet. They would proceed to tell you in the sweetest way how wonderful you were as an administrator, what remarkable people you had working for you, what wonderful work your department had done, and how they now proposed to change it all around, take most of your functions from you and put them somewhere else, that they had been thinking about this for a year or two and had excellent evidence and documentation. They knew more than you did just what was wrong, what would be better, pointing out all the blunders and errors that had been made by your present form of organization. They never showed you anything that you could put your teeth into. They just told you as much or as little as they thought was good enough for you to know at the time. If you hit the ceiling too hard, and your temperature appeared to be rising, apparently they didn't give you any more right then. The dished it out to you in small doses.

I suppose I liked Brownlow and Merriam and had represented myself to them as being very desirous of cooperating. Modern methods of administration were all right with me if I could find out what they were. I would like to introduce some. It was a long time before I could ever see Brownlow. He avoided me. He evaded me. I would call and ask to see him. I would made a date, and then he would break it. It became obvious





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