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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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shipping of scrap iron to Japan. That was one of the great counts they had against LaGuardia. He permitted the Sixth Avenue Elevated to be torn down and allowed the scrap to be shipped to Japan. There was also a movement not to wear silk stockings. That was really what gave nylon stockings their boom, the prejudice against silk stockings because they were Japanese made. The anti-Japanese feeling began to be very strong certainly by 1935 and 1936. It kept increasing. There was a feeling that the Japanese were aggressive and encroaching and that we were helping them by buying their silk and selling them scrap iron.

The President was always asking Hull for the latest information he had on the Japanese. He was always asking War and Navy for whatever information they had through, apparently, their intelligence services on the state of the Japanese. I remember being very surprised then, and thinking to myself that there must be something more, that the War and Navy Departments knew so little. I remember thinking to myself, “They either haven't got much of an intelligence service, or there is another way of getting information that is just not being given to the President here in Cabinet meeting. But surely there must be more knowledge of what's going on in Japan than they're telling.” When he would ask for information in those early months of 1941, there was so little





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