of their country in the belief that constitutional guaranties of equal justice and equal opportunity were more than fair compensation for the equal hazards of fighting a war.

Our organization is unanimous in its belief that this Congress has before it a prime opportunity to provide the world with a conclusive and unassailable demonstration of genuine Americanism in action. We are convinced that enactment of H. R. 4453 can serve as a final refutation to the sinister propaganda offensive being waged on a global scale in a determined effort to discredit our way of life. Gentlemen, the privilege-yes, the responsibility—of closing one of the last remaining gaps in the structure of our national security is within your grasp. Failure to take affirmative action on this vital issue will be construed, unfortunately, as a tacit endorsement of the existing undemocratic and un-American practices which H. R. 4453 seeks to correct.

The Jewish War Veterans of the United States strongly urges your honorable committee to do everything possible to speed the passage of this legislation.

Thank you.

Mr. POWELL. Thank you ever so much. It is very interesting to know that the Jewish War Veterans fought on both sides.

Mr. KAUFMAN. Yes, sir; there were over 10,000 of us in the Civil War, sir.

Mr. POWELL. I appreciate your testimony. Thank you very much. We are pushing along because the House of Representatives is going to operate under the 5-minute rule any minute now, and when it operates under the 5-minute rule all committees must adjourn. The last witness is Dr. Felix Cohen.

I would like to say this afternoon at 2 o'clock, or as close to 2 o'clock as the operation of the 5-minute rule will permit, Congressman Brooks Hays, of Arkansas, will appear to offer a counter proposal to this committee as to the FEPC proposal for the South. We are going to give him ample time to develop it, and we hope to meet at 2 o'clock, if the 5-minute rule permits. If the House is under the 5-minute rule we will meet as soon as the 5-minute rule comes to conclusion.

Dr. Cohen.

TESTIMONY OF FELIX S. COHEN, REPRESENTING ASSOCIATION ON AMERICAN INDIAN AFFAIRS

Mr. COHEN. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the privilege of appearing here on behalf of the oldest minority group, the Indians.

I want to reciprocate the courtesy of the committee by limiting myself to matters which the committee has not heard, as far as I know, from any of the witnesses who have been testifying on this subject in the last 6 years.

Mr. POWELL. Do you want to file your statement?

Mr. COHEN. I should like to file it; yes, sir.

Mr. POWELL. Without objection, it is so ordered.

(The statement is as follows:)

I appear here today, through the courtesy of this committee, to testify on behalf of the Association on American Indian Affairs, Inc., on H. R. 4453. This organization, with offices at 48 East Eighty-sixth Street, New York 28, N. Y., represents

people in almost every State of the Union who are interested in promoting a better understanding of the needs and problems of our Indian fellow citizens. The president of this organization is Oliver LaFarge, of Santa Fe, N. Mex. The honorary president of the organization is Dr. Haven Emerson, of New York City. For 25 years the chief activity of this organization and of the various associations which combined in 1937 to form the Association on American Indian Affairs, Inc., has been that of educating the American public as to the needs and problems of our first Americans, and, in particular, this organization has tried to educate the American public concerning the various discriminatory schemes and devices, public and private, which have been used to deprive the Indian of his fair share of the benefits of American life.

My own qualifications to speak on the subject of the fair employment practices bill can be summarized very briefly. In the first place, I served for some 14 years in the Department of the Interior as legal adviser to Secretary Ickes and to Secretary Krug, and during that time specialized in the various racial problems which fall within the jurisdiction of the Interior Department, particularly Indian problems, problems of discrimination and segregation affecting the Negro, and similar problems affecting Puerto Ricans, Alaskan natives, Hawaiians, and Americans of Japanese descent. In the second place, as an outgrowth of that experience, I assisted informally, at the request of various Senators and Congressmen, in the drafting of the various bills dealing with this problem of job discrimination in the Seventy-eighth, Seventy-ninth, and Eightieth Congresses. Finally, as a private attorney both before and after my years with the Government, I have specialized in the legal problems of minority groups. Among the minority groups which I now serve are the Consultative Council of Jewish Organizations, which serves as an adviser to the United Nations on Jewish problems, and the All-Pueblo Council, which is an organization of 18 Indian tribes or pueblos in the Southwest established in 1685 for the purpose of protecting Indians against attacks on their human rights and their property rights; also among my clients are the American Jewish Committee, the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the Oglala Sioux Indians of South Dakota, the Hualapai Indians of Arizona, the Omaha Indians of Nebraska, and various native communities in Alaska.

I am appearing today on behalf of the Association on American Indian Affairs, of which I am general counsel, but I think I may say that the position which the Association on American Indian Affairs takes with respect to fair employment practice legislation is a position which is supported in principle by every other minority group with which I have ever had any professional contact.

There are two reasons why the Association on American Indian Affairs appears before this committee.

In the first place we believe that this committee is faced with one of the most difficult problems of American statesmanship and will want to take account of all phases of our national experience that bear on its solution. We think that our experience on this continent with our oldest minority-an experience that stretches across four and one-half centuries-has a very important bearing upon our choice of effective measures in dealing with the general problem of discrimination.

In the second place, we appear before this committee because the American Indian even today is a victim of serious economic discriminations and we hope this committee will do its part to eliminate those discriminations.

On the first point, the bearing of our experience with Indian discrimination on the general problem which this committee faces, I should like to call attention to the fact that discrimination against the Indian has not been primarily a matter of social segregation. Discrimination against the Indian has almost always taken the form of denying to the Indian the right to engage in the economic pursuits open to his fellow countrymen. We thus have a good case study of the consequences of economic discrimination. This economic distribution began when we denied the Indians the right to sell their land or furs or agricultural produce to customers of their own choosing or to hire agents or managers of their own choosing, insisting that they could sell only to the United States or its agents or Government-approved traders and could not employ unapproved attorneys or real-estate agents or business management to advance their own economic interests. That discrimination resulted in the Indians being forced to sell their lands, their furs, their fish, their timber, their agricultural produce, and their minerals at prices which were generally far below the market prices at which their white neighbors could make such sales. The long-range effect of such discrimination has been to make of our Indian reservations hos

pitals for the victims of our oldest social disease on this continent-discrimination. I have seen on a number of these reservations conditions of helplessness, misery, starvation, and preventable deaths which could not be duplicated in the worst city slums in America-not even in the slums of Puerto Rico, which I have visited. One would have to look to China or India for parallels. And these centers of misery and starvation infect surrounding communities, keeping wages down, and add to local and national tax burdens. That is the end result of centuries of economic discrimination. That is the end result to which similar discriminations in the economic field can reduce any segment of our population. And that is a result which we know this committee wants to avoid.

Now the second and final point which I want to make is more specific and relates to the impact of the particular bill before this committee on the American Indian.

It may seem strange to some members of this committee, particularly to those whose constituencies do not include very many Indian tribes, that Indians should have a special interest in nondiscriminatory employment. The general picture of the Indian is a romantic and unrealistic picture of somebody with a war bonnet on a horse, somebody at the end of a trail, who wouldn't know what to do with a job if he had one. Indeed it may come as a surprise to some members of this committee that Indians are subject to economic discrimination to this day. In some parts of the country is it rather considered a distinction to carry in one's veins the blood of Pocahontas or some other distinguished Indian chief or princess. In any event the common opinion is that the Indian is an insignificant and vanishing minority.

Now, in fact, the Indians of our country-more than 450,000 of them-about as many as the total Jewish population of Germany when Hitler assumed powerare the most rapidly incerasing racial group in the United States. And the economic discriminations practiced against them today are probably more serious than those practiced against any other minority group. Conditions are particularly acute in Alaska. For example, under the Tongass Act of 1947, in southeastern Alaska, Indian timber may be sold by the Forestry Service at its discretion as to buyer and price and the Indians may not receive any part of the proceeds unless they carry through expensive litigation over a period of many years to win it. Under present laws and regulations, Indian fishing sites in Alaska may be and are given into the control of non-Indian canning companies without compensation to the Indians. In one extreme case, a Government agency controls the disposition of the fur catch of a valuable native fur ground, and year after year practically all the sealskins in Alaska are turned over to a certain fur company. The native owner of the hunting ground may receive as little as $176 a year out of the millions made in this transaction by the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Fouke Fur Co.

I mention Alaska as an outstanding example of systematic economic discrimination, because only a hundred years ago these natives were among the wealthiest people in America and they have now been pushed down to the bottom of the economic ladder.

I might also mention that in two States of the Union they are not even allowed to stand on the lowest rung of the economic ladder. An American citizen who is otherwise entitled to social-security benefits-aid to the aged, aid to the blind. or aid to dependent children-cannot receive such benefits in Arizona or New Mexico if it is discovered that he is a member of any Indian tribe. In that connection I should like to quote very briefly from a petition to the President, to Secretary Krug, and to Federal Security Administrator Ewing by the Association on American Indian Affairs, and signed by its president, Mr. Oliver LaFarge, and its honorary president, Dr. Haven Emerson: "By such arrogant racial discrimination 100,000 American citizens are excluded from the benefits granted all others and their right to live is thereby seriously impaired. This callous denial of rights guaranteed by national law has intensified suffering among American Indian people in New Mexico and Arizona for the past 14 years. These people are among the most deprived in our country. * * The conscience of Americans cannot tolerate the racial discrimination by which the States of New Mexico and Arizona violate the social-security law and deal without justice or humanity with thousands of their citizens of American Indian blood." These things I mention not because the social-security problem is within the jurisdiction of this subcommittee, but merely to indicate that Indians are, at least in some parts of our country, victims of a peculiarly devastating set of prejudices and economic discriminations. I know of no Southern State, for instance, where prejudice against the Negro goes so far as to deny to the Negro

*

the right to sell wood from his own woodlot or the right to a place on the socialsecurity rolls of the State when he suffers misfortune.

The same attitudes that reflect themselves in these forms of public discrimination are also reflected in private discrimination in employment. The result of all this is not only to blacken the economic lot of the Indian but also to blacken the international prestige of the United States throughout the world. For we must remember that what we do to Alaskan natives, who were once Russian citizens, may be far removed from the American public, but it does reach within 2 miles of Russian soil and Russian eyes and Russian loud-speakers. And what we do on the Mexican border to Spanish-speaking Indians reaches through the length and breadth of Latin America.

I may say, incidentally, that the line between prejudice against the Indian and prejudice against the Spanish-American, or Mexican, as he is sometimes called, is very difficult to draw. Biologically, of course, the Indian element is a very large element of our Spanish-American population. The Spanish conquistadores did not bring their womenfolk with them when they came to settle what is now the United States, a good many years before the Pilgrims landed here. Most of the Indians of the Southwest speak or understand Spanish, if they understand any white man's language. At least that would be true of the older Indians who are in the market for jobs. Discrimination against the Indian thus goes hand in hand with discrimination against the Spanish-American, and I am sure that other more competent witnesses have already testified, or will testify, before this committee on the extent and seriousness of such discrimination. But discrimination against American Indians is not limited to the Southwest where they share the problems of the Spanish-American. Indians of the State of Washington, for example, suffer from discrimination, as the final report of the President's FEPC reported, "American Indians around Seattle have serious employment problems" (p. 77).

In those sections of the United States where prejudice against the Indian is most marked, Indians are the last to be hired and the first to be fired. Many Indians whom I know to be keen observers of economic conditions, persons who have achieved distinction in public service or social work or missionary activities, have told me of the long patient waiting that Indians must endure before it can be determined whether there are enough non-Indians available to fill all job openings or whether there will be some left over for Indians. As the Rev. David Owl once said to me, an Indian can get a job, if he is twice as good as the next

man.

Several employers have commented to me upon the high degree of manual skill exemplified by Indian workers in war industries. During the years when the President's Fair Employment Practices Commission was in operation Indians made a very great contribution to such war industries as ordnance assembly and torpedo manufacture. Such employers, however, are in a small minority. Generally speaking, the areas in which prejudice against the Indian is most extreme are areas where rich natural resources are being siphoned off by absentee ownership. Such is the case particularly in Alaska, Arizona, and New Mexico. The local managers of these absentee corporations are likely to accept the local lines of prejudice, particularly insofar as these lines of prejudice help to keep different groups of employees at each other's throats. Of course, many Indians do get industrial jobs. But generally they are down-graded so that they must do a higher grade of work than a man of another race in the same position, in order to hold on to the job.

Now it should be noted that this discrimination against Indians in industrial employment casts a particularly heavy burden upon the United States Government itself, and serves to defeat one of the major purposes of our American Indian policy, which is to supply the Indians as rapidly as possible with the experience and techniques which their fellow-citizens of other races have mastered during the past two or three thousand years, so that the Indian will be able to take his place on the American economic scene, and make the fullest contribution of which he is capable to American life and to the American economy. What happens when an Indian is discriminated against and thrown out of his job is that he must, perforce, drift back to his family on the reservation which is generally an overcrowded and blighted economic area. The worst lands of the United States are, generally speaking, the lands which the Indians were permitted to reserve for themselves. Every additional mouth on these reservation lands drags down the standard of living. We have, therefore, strategic depots of undernourished, underfed, underpaid, underprivileged American citizens. This is not a healthy situation either for the United States or for the States

and countries in which these Indians reside. We do not suggest that the elimination of job discrimination is a complete answer to the problem of Indian suffering; but it is at least a major part of any complete answer, and we hope, therefore, that this committee will do its part toward securing legislation that will give the Indian a fair break in the Nation's economy.

We think that H. R. 4453 represents a great forward step in achieving that objective, and we therefore support this legislation in principle and in substance. At the same time we should like to call attention to certain points where we hope this committee can improve upon the bill it is now considering. In the first place, I call attention to the fact that H. R. 4453 does not prohibit discrimination based upon ancestry, as does, for example, S. 174, introduced by Senators Ives, Chavez, Downey, Morse, Murray, Myers, Saltonstall, and Smith of New Jersey, and as provided in practically all of the bills introduced on this subject in the Seventy-eighth, Seventy-ninth, and Eightieth Congresses. I think that the omission is particularly unfortunate. Discrimination against Indians is generally discrimination based upon ancestry. It is certainly not based upon religion or national origin, and it is not always based upon race, technically, or color; from any Indians, who suffer discrimination as Indians are, from a biological standpoint, racially more white than Indian. I am sure that this committee does not want to advise employers that they can discriminate against the children of Indians or Jews or other designated groups. Yet that would, I think, be the effect of omitting the word "ancestry" in section 2 (a), and in the subsequent section of H. R. 4453, where the types of discrimination outlawed by this bill are enumerated.

There is a second point at which I think the language of H. R. 4453 is defective, and that is in section 4, which grants an exemption from the provisions of the act to any employer who employs aliens outside the continental United States, its Territories, and possessions. Although the Association on American Indian Affairs is concerned officially with problems of Indians of continental United States and Alaska, this provision affecting Indians in other areas has consequences which I feel should be called to the attention of this committee. If this exemption merely allowed American employers abroad to give preference to nationals of the country in which they are operating there would be no reason to object, at least so long as other nations insist upon such preferences. But this exemption granted by section 4 goes far beyond any such dispensation. In effect, section 4 grants advance dispensation to American corporations to establish policies of anti-Indian, anti-Semitic, or anti-Negro discrimination abroad if they choose. Now with respect to the Indian, the fact is that American corporations in Latin-American countries, if they pursue anti-Indian policies, give the United States a black name in the eyes of a majority of our good neighbors. American firms abroad can be the salesmen of the American way of life. Or they can furnish ammunition to enemies abroad who paint us as a nation of bigots and hypocrites. I can see no justification whatsoever for granting to American firms the right to commit nuisances in other people's backyards. I think, rather, that we ought to be particularly careful about the attitudes and activities of American corporations in other parts of the world, especially when this involves racial or religious discrimination.

There are two points of draftsmanship on which I hesitate to criticize the present draft because I am not familiar with the reasons which led the draftsman of this bill to decide upon its present language. I therefore merely call the committee's attention to the fact that section 7 at page 10 appears to give to the Commission an exclusive power which would eliminate parallel activities by other State or Federal agencies. Both in Alaska and in New Mexico there are State or territorial agencies which are trying to put a stop to anti-Indian discrimination in certain fields, and it is questionable in my mind whether these State and territorial activities should be stopped, if that is the purpose and effect of section 7. At the same time I question the consistency of section 7 with the language of section 10. Section 10 appears to contemplate that the Civil Service Commission or other Federal agencies will retain existing jurisdiction in discrimination cases. On the other hand, section 7 says that the jurisdiction of the Commission shall be exclusive. I don't know how those two sections can be reconciled.

I call attention, finally, to the omission in section 13 of any provision whereby Congress could scrutinize and pass upon the regulations issued by the Commission as is provided by S. 174 and other drafts of legislation in this field. I do not wish at this time and place to argue for or against such a provision, but I merely