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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Perkins:

Well, it wasn't a whale of a book. She's nothing but a writer, that's all. She saw a dramatic situation and she wrote about it, and she got herself involved. She's definitely hipped on the subject. It's so exaggerated. All right, if you like it exaggerated, that's that. But if you make that the basis of a social reform, you don't get anywhere, you know. You can't take an exaggerated story, written in a book--like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, an exaggerated, sensitive, tenuous kind of a thing, which will raise a question and start people moving towards a solution-- and go forward on that, as the basis of a social reform.

You've got to be flat-footed and say, “Well, there are five percent, on examination by social workers, five percent of the people in the stockyards that live this way. The other ninety-five percent live this way.”

Sure, we've got to fix up this five percent, but the important thing is to get the ninety-five percent on a better level of wages and hours and living conditions and so forth. And the important thing, in immigration, is to recognize that the immigrants flood into the stockyards where they get pretty high wages. But there hasn't been any particularly provision made for their living. So when you go forward to make some improvements, you got to go at it from the angle of: well, how many families are there needing a five room tenement?





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