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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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and would be glad to see them.

Go a great many people came right off the street up to the Secretary's office. I had all the doors open. It was the instinct that I would have to see my own family. We were all in trouble, but they would be more troubled than I was because they had heard of it more recently and in less detail presumably. At le st, they would feel that I must know more than they knew.

All I could say to them was the appropriate thing to say under any conditions of disaster, “We will find the strength to meet this. We will meet it.” It's an encouraging thing. People musn't lie down in the gutter and groan just because something untoward has happened. They must be up and doing and they must do better than they think they can do. Also, for their own morale, and for the welfare of the country, they must perform their accustomed tasks. Just as the letter carriers must deliver the mail, so the people who run the mimeograph machines in the Department of Labor must run them and run out the statistics of employment, of cost of living, or whatever it is they're doing. Perhaps there would be at that moment, if you were wise enough to know it, something more important for them to be doing than the cost of living statistics, but, as the matter turned out, there wasn't. At any rate, people must do what their duty requires them to do. They've taken an oath of office and they must perform it.





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