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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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That's what we did all morning - seeing each other, encouraging each other, sympathizing with each other, asking questions, giving half-baked answers, but resolving that everybody must get to his work. Everybody must do his work. Everybody must be a little more than ordinarily keyed up to do it, which they did. We also made a plan for a small committee meeting in the afternoon to reorient the program of the department.

By afternoon, when I came back from the Hill, that was the first order of business. I was putting together some ideas in my own mind as to what we should do. As I've said earlier, quite a number of months before this we had laid some rather good plans in the department about what to do in case of war, what to do in case of full war, what to do in case of partial war, what to do in case of the kind of war where we sent supplies, materials, but no men - various things. We tried to figure out what would be the Department of Labor's most useful contribution.

Miss Lenroot of the Children's Bureau and I had worked out a plan for the evacuation of children and relief of a great variety of kinds for children. We had also studied out the operation of the wage-hour act, realizing that under war conditions there would be wholesale variations from the strict letter of the wage-hour act by executive order, but that we were responsible for the executive orders. We had to decide in our own minds what would be the most profitable





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