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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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The ones who were willing to do this kind of work would come forward.

Of course, the best thing the Manpower Commission ever did, and it could have been done just as well by some other agency of government, was this. It could have been done by the Department of Commerce, by the Army itself. The best thing they did was not the Employment Service, which had to do with our Department anyhow. We'd made it and they just took it over and called it theirs. It was the same thing, the same people, the same office, the same operation, the same regulations. You just gave it another name.

However, the best thing they did was to work out a scheme for the discontinuance of the supply of materials to different types of industry. It could have been done by anybody. They gradually took away the material supplies for non-essential industries, like lampshade making. Lampshades made more fuss. You would have supposed that lampshades were the necessity of life from the protests that came. They did that simply, not moving all the workers from there into other industries, but letting the market for labor find its own level.

It was a terrible mistake to try to move hordes of workers to where you wanted them by decree. That's what these nice, logical people like Harold Smith had assumed would be done. That was what McNutt thought could be done. You





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