I went down, of course, with some misgivings because everybody in my community does not feel as I do, especially among the wealthier businessmen. But I went down and spoke there, and when I got back, I found that the air around my community in certain sections became a little bit chilled. Well, I even went into a restaurant there and ordered something, and the man who owns the place, whose ideas on the subject are diametrically opposed to mine, came up to me, and in a very snarling, discourteous way, said, "We don't serve your kind in here. Go out and eat or drink somewhere else."

So I have myself been a victim of Jim Crowism. I know what it is. On February 8, 1948, the New York Herald Tribune bore witness to the effectiveness of New York's fair employment practice law. Quoting from that paper, which nobody could, by long odds, say is a strictly Democratic medium:

The Ives antidiscrimination program is something that works. In close to 3 years of existence the State commission against discrimination conceived among great argument and misgivings by many has quietly shown the way that conciliation and persuasion can establish completely new patterns.

To get back to Pennsylvania, because I happen to know that there is today here a reporter who represents a big paper in Pittsburgh, I would like to go on record as saying that the Republican legislature in Harrisburg is positively responsible for not bringing out of the committee a Pennsylvania State FEPC law, in spite of the fact that Governor Duff of that State has repeatedly made statements that he was in favor of the passage of this law. But, lo and behold, what happened? Mr. G. Mason Owlett, leader of the Pennsylvania Association of Manufacturers, and a Charlie McCarthy for old Joe Grundy, whipped the boys of the Republican delegation into line, and the result was, the bill is still in committee.

Often the argument is voiced that it is impossible to do away with prejudice by legislation, and that therefore fair employment practice legislation offers no real solution to the problem of employment discrimination. As a matter of fact, FEPC measures are not designed against prejudice itself, but instead to prevent overt expression of prejudice as manifested in industrial discrimination.

Mr. J. J. Morrow, personnel manager, Pitney Bowes, Inc., has stated his position succinctly, and I quote Mr. Morrow:

There are, of course, a number of well-meaning people who oppose legislation to abolish discrimination in employment, most of them through the feeling that legislation is not the real answer to a problem which can best be solved by education. Naturally, legislation cannot destroy race prejudice, but it can and should be the framework upon which the building of free economic opportunity for Negroes can be started. The educational side of the picture is the ultimate answer, but as all of you must know very well from experience, the process is a slow and often painful one which needs the assurance of support that only legislation can give it. The purpose of such a law, and all laws, for that matter, is to protect rather than to punish. With proper administration and with cooperation from industry, I think these laws are a very important step in the right direction. If they did nothing else, they would at least be helpful to those employers who prefer to treat the Negro fairly but who lacked the courage to do so without the excuse which the laws furnished.

And there is a very pertinent point, a very, very big factor in this whole issue.

I belong to golf clubs and other clubs, and I get around with these businessmen. I can remember during the Roosevelt years how they would get into the lockers and some of them would start to cry against

Roosevelt and that New Deal, and this law and that law, those laws which saved those very same businessmen from going into bankruptcy, perhaps, and I would notice that some men would hesitate, these men who had nothing before the New Deal started, and then business had started to perk up, and everything was going fine. Yet, they would listen to the eternal harping, harping against Roosevelt, and they would be brought into that ridiculous circle, too.

Now, I know that there are thousands and thousands of businessmen who do not have anti-Negro feelings, but who go along because they are afraid to jump off the track. And the FEPC law would help those liberal American businessmen to give the Negroes and other minority groups discriminated against their American right to a decent job.

We talked about the attitude of business. Now I want to quote here something that Walter Reuther, one of America's outstanding labor leaders, said about FEPC. And remember this, members of the committee, that when the FEPC law is passed, and I believe it will be passed, you have in your union organizations in every city in the country, CIO and A. F. of L., for many years who had a campaign against discrimination, where you have millions and millions of union members who already accept that idea, who have already been worked on to the extent where they do not have anti-Negro, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and anti-foreign-born ideas. They have done a job to help to prepare the American people for this great realization of a Federal Fair Employment Practice Act.

Walter Reuther said:

The Negro minority comprises 1 out of every 10 Americans. If those other groups most actively and persistently victimized are added, the minority problem involved one-third of the Nation. When one adds to this fact the realization that a minority's problem is a consequence of the attitudes and actions of the majority, it should be clear that democracy cannot complacently assume that a gradual, intricate, and fitful process vaguely known as education will somehow turn bigotry into tolerance and discrimination into equal justice in time to save the free way of life from disintegration. Of all vicious circles, that of discrimination is the most vicious. As George Bernard Shaw pointed out a half century ago, America makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the Negro by the fact that he is a bootblack.

I might get away from Walter Reuther's statement for a moment to say this: H. G. Wells, a great English author, said that he believed that the basis of anti-Negro feelings were this, that it is the attempt on the part of small people to want to look down on somebody smaller than they are.

Mr. Reuther continued:

Discrimination deprives Negroes of the opportunity to learn skills and then shoves them out from employment on the ground that they lack the requisite ability. Economic deprivation leads to poverty, ill health, crime and general lack of fitness to play a responsible role in society. And then the wheel of discrimination is given another turn. The Negro is the marginal element in labor forces. When times are good and labor is scarce, a relatively large proportion is able to find jobs, but when times are bad, the proportion of Negroes hired shrinks. This is reflected in the ups and downs of proportions for applicants for social security account numbers who are Negroes.

In all those cities where FEPC has been put into practice, it has been successful in varying degrees. I wish to make this point, Mr. Chairman, and that is that the FEPC is not aimed at any particular section of the country. The FEPC is not aimed at the South, or the Dixiecrats, and we should not carry on our struggle to pass a Federal

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Employment Practices Act in that spirit. This is not recrimination; it is not in any way criticism of any, because it is a universal problem. There is objection to FEPC because they say it is impractical and it will not work. Think back in the history of our country. Think back when we had no income taxes. People accept income taxes today. Think of the time when we had no unemployment insurance, when we had no workmen's compensation, when we had no price control, when we had no rent control.

If we pass this law, the people will abide by it, and it will be successful just like all those other laws which were considered revolutionary and radical at the time.

America has a great heritage. America has a great future, but that future can be assured only if we go arm in arm with our brothers, Protestant and Catholic, Gentile and Jew, White and Negro, and we march into a better world of security for all the people and a world of permanent peace.

Thank you.

Mr. POWELL. Thank you, Representative Davenport.
Mr. Perkins?

Mr. PERKINS. No questions.

Mr. POWELL. Mr. Burke ?

Mr. BURKE. There is just one thing I would like to comment on. You quoted Walter Reuther in his statement, and I think you will find in your district also that this has been true, that union members generally have come to the conclusion that the artificial barriers set up on the basis of race, creed, color, national origin and so on have just militated to keep them apart and to keep them economically downtrodden. And for that reason, they have themselves come to the conclusion that prejudice and discrimination are certainly not things that are good for them.

Mr. DAVENPORT. I agree with you, Mr. Burke. The unions have been a great school preparing a large section of the American people for the acceptance of the FEPC. A large part of the work necessary to bring about the realization of the end of discrimination has been already done by the unions, and it is going to be my mission in Congress, and that, I believe, is the chief reason why I happen to be here, to prepare and help to organize the small businessmen to show them that their interests are identified with the working people of the country and that their interests are also identified with the greater prosperity of all people regardless of race, creed, or color.

Mr. BURKE. That is all.

Mr. POWELL. Thank you.

Mr. DAVENPORT. Thank you.

Mr. POWELL. We have one witness left over from yesterday, a congressional witness. That is Representative Klein, who I understand wishes to file his statement and just say a couple of words.

Representative Klein, from Manhattan.

TESTIMONY OF HON. ARTHUR G. KLEIN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW YORK

Mr. KLEIN. Mr. Chairman, I am not going to take the time of the committee. I have already submitted a statement for the record. I just want to talk about one facet of this problem.

This type of legislation has been called communistic. If it is, then Thomas Jefferson, who advocated this principle, and Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman are Communists. I am sorry that the gentleman from California, Mr. Nixon, is not here. He is a member of the Un-American Activities Committee which is interested in fighting communism. I think that a law enacted along these lines would do more to combat communism in this country than 10 Mundt-Nixon bills. The Un-American Activities Committee ought to advocate legislation such as this.

We all know that communism breeds on discontent and misery; and discrimination in employment, discrimination against different religions, different races, and different nationalities creates that misery. Negroes, we know, are the main objects of discrimination in employment, and in all forms of our national life. In many parts of the country, Jews cannot get employment, or if they do, they get inferior types of employment. Catholics in many parts of the country are a minority, and they are discriminated against.

Discrimination against a particular race or creed, if it gets a start in one part of the country, can spread so that any place in the United States where there is a conspicuous minority may be discriminated against, even though in some other parts of the country they may be in the majority.

I earnestly hope, Mr. Chairman, that this legislation will be adopted. I do not want to go into the merits of it. It has been done here before, and it will be done by others. I think the important thing is to show the people of this country and the world the benefits of democracy, and this certainly is democracy in a real sense. We cannot get away from all extremes, either the left or the right, but we can try. Mr. POWELL. Thank you, Representative Klein. I agree with you on that.

Are there any questions, Mr. Burke?

Mr. BURKE. No questions.

(The prepared statement of Mr. Klein is as follows:)

STATEMENT OF REPRESENTATIVE ARTHUR G. KLEIN

Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, there are some simple facts in the economic life of America, and in the political life, too, which are not quite pretty. There is a glaring gap between our ideals of equality and our practices, not only in the serious business of American citizenship and its rights, privileges, and duties, but in the still more serious business of making a living.

It is a fact that in most parts of the United States American citizens who happen to be Negroes have a harder time making a living than anybody else. It is a fact that in many parts of the United States employers will not knowingly hire Jews, or will hire them only for subordinate tasks, in a pattern of discrimination comparable to that carried out against Negroes.

There are other localities in which Roman Catholics, and especially Roman Catholics of Italian, Spanish or Mexican descent, have difficulty in obtaining jobs in preferred occupations, or cannot gain promotion even if they get jobs. Discrimination in employment against orientals is very widespread; and in some States the very first Americans, our own American Indians, have the same trouble.

American citizenship is absolute and indivisible, except by due process of law, and economic freedom is even more important to the individual's material welfare than political and intellectual freedom. The interests of all Americans are so tightly bound together that you can't take away any part of the rights of one without taking away a little bit of the rights of all.

Now, there are some people with so little faith in what America stands for that they think discrimination against groups of people, and against individuals of that group, is somehow imposed by Heaven and not by bigotry. By and large, these are the kind of people who say that to expose our own abuses of the democratic way of life is somehow communistic, and that it is even more communistic to try to do something about it, as in this bill. Curiously enough, the people who are most vocal against this kind of legislation, which spells out the right of every American to get a job on his own merits, are very likely to be the same ones who demand antiunion legislation in the name of giving workmen the right to get a job.

Calling this kind of legislation communistic is sheer nonsense.

I don't know, Mr. Chairman, and you don't know, whether or not we can pass this bill; and if it is passed we don't know for sure if it will work as we hope it will work. We do know that if this bill is communistic then Thomas Jefferson was a Communist, Abraham Lincoln was a Communist, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a Communist, and Harry Truman is a Communist.

We know that we would be faithless to our own commitments, faithless to our convictions, faithless to our party, and faithless to our country if we did not do everything in our power to stop discrimination in employment, or anywhere else. This country is firmly founded on the principle of the essential and divine dignity of the individual man. When any man or woman is judged as to employability on any other standard except his own worth as an employee, the philosophy of our kind of government is flouted and outraged.

I am always dubious of noble experiments in legislating public morality. I wish that I could be so optimistic as to believe that this law could be made unnecessary by public education and general acceptance of the principles on which the bill is written. That would be wishful thinking. As a realist, I know that education is too slow. Discriminatory practices, especially in times of economic stress, grow and crystallize faster than they can be combatted.

New York State has proved that it is possible to legislate in this field. We haven't stopped economic discrimination in New York; but we have certainly discouraged it. Mr. Chairman, I hope that this bill is favorably reported and passed. I shall do everything in my power to help. Let's make our kind of democratic living work right here in America before we try to reform the rest of the world.

Mr. POWELL. Mr. Charles Houston, general counsel of the Negro Railway Executives Committee.

Will you kindly tell us for the benefit of the record all the other things you have done in this field of FEPC, because I consider you the most valuable witness who probably will appear in the course of the entire hearings.

Mr. HOUSTON. Thank you very much.

Mr. POWELL. Will you tell the reporter, so that we can have it in the record?

TESTIMONY OF CHARLES HOUSTON, GENERAL COUNSEL, NEGRO RAILWAY LABOR EXECUTIVES COMMITTEE

Mr. HOUSTON. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I identify myself as general counsel, with Archibald Bromsen of New York and Joseph C. Waddy of Washington of the Negro Railway Labor Executives Committee. That committee is made up of the heads of the following unions: The Association of Colored Railway Trainmen and Locomotive Firemen, Colored Trainmen of America, the Dining Car and Food Workers Union, International Association of Railway Employees, and the Southern Association of Colored Railway Trainmen and Firemen.

It might be important for the record to note that the reason for the existence of at least four of these organizations is because the