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Defense Labor Board was appointed perhaps a year before.
Foster Dulles cites a meeting on December 17, 1941, on page 334 of his book, dealing with this topic. He cites that as the meeting, but actually, of course, there had been a great many meetings before that. That is the one that gets into a fixed point. There was a meeting. There was discussion. There was agreement. He says that the President out the Gordian knot by insisting on the settlement of the question of union security, as it was then called, which really means the maintenance of a closed shop. That had been given a fancy name by the Defense Mediation Board. Dulles says that happened at the meeting, but of course things don't happen that way. One meeting, de novo, bringing up all these subjects, wouldn't settle any of them. They had practically been settled by a series of conferences held earlier at different times and with different groups. So when this meeting was called with the President in mid--December 1941, both sides came in greatly excited and stimulated because of the hazards of the war which had broken out, as of the date of Pearl Harbor. Therefore they were prepared to do their patriotic duty and to give up their personal notions, as they wouldn't have been six weeks earlier, or four weeks earlier.
I'm very sure, that the President saw some proposed employer members of the board before he saw the full board, and he had previously seen some proposed members of the labor group on the board. Some of these proposed employer members felt
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