The initial seven-man roster of the Dies Committee consisted of Republicans and conservative Democrats. They opposed strikes and strikers and collective bargaining; they opposed federal legislation setting minimum wages or maximum hours for most working people; they also suspected that Roosevelt’s New Deal had mostly been cooked up by socialist or even communist sympathizers in his cabinet. Key “targets” of the Dies Committee, according to a reporter on the case for The Atlantic, included the Department of Labor, the Works Progress Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, the Wages
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