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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Service, the old heads of agencies, felt related to the Department of Labor, always did. They felt they belonged there and so forth.

I felt very badly about the Employment Service being moved out. I didn't like that at all, but what could I do?

So this whole change took place. The old line agencies were burglarized. New people were brought in. The Cabinet meetings were so full of extra people that they were too big to handle, and even the President didn't like that system. We used to have private little meetings of the Cabinet, the “real Cabinet,” as he called it. If on a Friday the whole mob was coming in, he got so bored by this big congregation that came in, that we had a little Cabinet meeting. You couldn't discuss anything and nobody did discuss anything of any importance.

The Cabinet behaved very well, on the whole, I thought during the war, except for the rumpus between Louis Johnson and Harry Woodring. That was, perhaps, just before the war. The Cabinet, however, did behave pretty well; took on the new problems, adjusted to having some of their supervisory authority cut down, and the War Production Board and other agencies of that sort set up to do what many of them thought they could have done just as well themselves. I thought they behaved pretty well.

Really, I'm not sure that it couldn't have been done any other way. I realize that the problem was to get enough





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