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A great many boys worked on a farm during their summer vacations from college. They all claimed to be farm laborers. Even the local draft boards would wink at it.

Harold Smith invented the idea of the War Manpower Commission. Some of the people in the army - Patterson, I think - thought that it was a good idea. Smith talked about it to everybody all the time. I don't remember now just who he made converts of, who agreed that it was a good thing, and who didn't. But I was always the leader of the party who said that it was not a good thing, that we didn't need it.

My theory was this: “Mr. President, when we talked about what we should do in time of war before the war began we had a much better plan than this.” I would always take the most violent opposition to it. I think I saw this more realistically than most people did, because, after all, I had invented and operated the Public Employment System. A manpower commission would simply be a kind of glorified, expanded, or so I thought, employment system, which would gear in, mesh in, to the draft service, the draft pattern. It would have some relationship to the army, of course.

Actually, as time went on and as talk continued, the idea of compelling people to do certain things came to be very large. I always think it's a bad idea to compel people to do things unless you absolutely have to, and I didn't believe the United States had come to any such position as that. I