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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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They passed some laws in Congress in which they gave the Department of Labor some responsibility. I talked to Wickard about this once and told him my theory that agriculture was agriculture and he had better keep it all, that all of agriculture belonged together, that if you split off agricultural labor and treated it as a special problem from agricultural fertilizer and agricultural techniques for the utilization of land, agricultural planning, homesteading, and so forth, you wouldn't have a true agricultural part of life. I told him that I proposed to keep the Department of Labor out of it just as far as possible. I remember saying that to Wickard when he first came in.

Of course, the Department of Agriculture's problem was not with the Department of Labor, but with the War Manpower Commission. The War Manpower Commission made trouble for everybody. It was the greatest pain in the neck that I ever had to deal with in the Department of Labor, the greatest pain in the neck that General Lewis Hershey and the Selective Service machinery ever had to deal with, the greatest problem that the army people ever had to deal with, the greatest problem that the Department of Education ever had to deal with.

It was a mess primarily just because it was created. It never should have been. If the idea of creating it seemed valid to the President and his advisers, they couldn't have made it worse than by appointing McNutt. It was wrongly conceived.





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