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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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the way I saw it. I thought we ought to utilize all that we knew about social, political, economic and patriotic incentives to lure people into doing what we wanted them to do. Just as we never had to draft women, saying only that the job was theirs, that this was the wage, and they responded, so it was with men.

The War Manpower Commission theoretically was set up to mobilize and direct the total economy insofar as it was represented by man labor so that with the drafting of the necessary number of men of military age for military service, you would have drawn in and drafted all the other people that were needed for every other kind of work--agriculture, industry, transportation, and so on.

However, there was no one over in the War Manpower Commission who had the slightest idea of what went on in a factory, or on a farm. There was nobody over there who had the slightest idea of just how General Hershey had to deal with people who had to be drafted for military service. There were terrible conflicts about who should decide whether a doctor who was engaged in cancer research should be drafted to go with the troops, or whether he should be put into one of the deferred classes. There was a terrible conflict about who was 4-F. There is somewhere or other a roster of all educational divisions and departments in the United States. It's all broken up into four or five hundred different kinds





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