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Cabinet meeting, they all came bustling in with, “Why, wasn't that terrible! What a dreadful thing!”
John Nance Garner was wild, you know. He was very angry. “What a thing for him to say! After all you've done for him--he ought to be put out of this country,” and all that sort of talk. The President by this time had calmed down and said a few wise words. “We've just got to let these things stew. Lewis is a very peculiar man and has his own eccentricities, and we don't know just what he's driving at,” and so on.
But from that time on, it had been impressed on the public mind. That was when John L. Lewis made his great break with the public, really. The public grabbed at this idea: that Lewis was an extreme radical, and that he was striving, through the United Mine Workers and the power of the United Mine Workers, to take over the Government. Something like that was what they thought John L. Lewis was aiming at. And from that time on, everything that John L. Lewis was associated with, the public suspected--although I still regarded him as one of the stabilizing influences, particularly in the automobile industry. I knew he was a stabilizing influence, and when we were having trouble with the automobile workers. I knew that what you could get Lewis to do with them would on the whole settle them and steady them and keep them from going to extremes. I also thought that he would have more
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