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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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that they were going to pay it fifty years hence, give us tung oil fifty years from now. Jones was pretty hard-boiled about that and thought it was sort of ridiculous.

I think probably the President was right. He had to set up some kind of a new, outside of the present government, agency to handle production and to stimulate production, to develop a much greater production, to allocate production, to bring the various kinds of manufacturers, small and large, of different kinds of materials into a program which would get the government what it needed. There was nothing in government that previously handled this function. The government doesn't make and sell things itself, nor does it tell anybody what to make and sell, or how much to make. This was a new thing.

The Army and Navy, left to follow their logistics patterns alone, would have almost been competing with each other to give orders to what they regarded as high-grade manufacturers, high-grade producers, that they could trust, who did know how to build good ships, make good guns, and so forth, but Roosevelt saw that much more than that needed to be done. In order to get it done you needed more gun manufacturers than there were in the United States. One of the great victories really was when the General Motors people said, sure, under Knudsen's leadership, they could make gun barrels just the same way





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