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use of this draft of males. The cost was preposterous. It cost an enormous amount of money to do. The photostatic copies of the registration cards were all reposing in the cellar of the Social Security building and there they had been reposing since the day they were made and turned in. They had never been used.
Arthur Altmeyer had previously made application to Congress for a small budget item to enable him to hire a few people to begin to make some kind of an analysis of all this, but it had already cost so much to get the names that Congress was horrified at appropriating a million dollars more to sort them and analyze them and put them in any kind of useful order. They never would do it. When the war finally did break out Altmeyer called for volunteers in his own organization. They had seven or eight hundred people who volunteered to work three hours a night after work at sorting and analyzing these things. Under the best possible auspices they made progress to something less than 150,000 cards out of millions.
In other words, it couldn't be done. Those seven hundred men and women who were working as volunteers could have been used to much better advantage on other things. In other words, this type of thing is something you can't use after you get it. You can use it in the town of Newcastle, Maine for a fire-fighting brigade. You can register all the able bodied men and women who could be called out to
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