man without exception, no matter where he is, can on occasion justify acts under the name of patriotism that are really in his own interest.

And I think it is exceedingly dangerous to open that door so widely for the domination of so many small business units by large ones, for the possible turning over of control of our industries to foreign groups or foreign commissions.

Even that during the course of the war might not be so serious, but there is no limitation. Then property might be turned over, leases given over; but it is not provided as to when that shall cease or how soon or when they shall be turned back.

If one were to ask for a piece of legislation which in effect would socialize all property, not only for today, but for all time, I personally would ask for nothing more effective than this particular piece of legislation, bearing in mind, if you please, that we are not objecting to the stated purpose of it. We are objecting to what may easily come and in our judgment will come in the train of that bill.

We don't think it is necessary. I understand that testimony already has been given to the committee that the President possesses all the power that is needed in the taking over of general property, such as corporations and materials, but that the present situation does not enable him to take over personal property, which this bill goes to extreme length in doing.

The Vultee incident in Los Angeles demonstrated that the President does have authority to act and adequate power to act to handle a labor situation. More power would not seem necessary for that purpose.

I am reminded-I don't like to point this out, but I think it should be that at the time that the lend-lease bill was before Congress, the country was assured that this was a peace bill. And yet after the bill was passed, I recall reading in the press from one of the proponents of that bill that in effect the public should have had sufficient intelligence to realize that it really was a war bill.

Well, millions of people in the United States believed it to be a bill for the purpose of peace. It turns out to be a bill which facilitates

our entrance in and our effectiveness in war.

I don't quarrel with that particularly, if there were not the element of misrepresentation. The people don't know just what to believe. I think honestly we should be forthright on all occasions in all directions.

That argument holds with respect to this bill. It seems to me that forthrightness requires that the public clearly understand that this bill gives one man the power to socialize all property within the United States.

I have had personally enough contact with a good many executives and officials, lesser as well as some of the more important ones in Washington, to believe in my heart of hearts that there is a conviction in the minds of many men of power that we must have socialism of our economic structure. With that I quarrel most emphatically.

Finally, I say it is not necessary, because, unhappily, it is, while businessmen have been accused from time to time of being profiteers and being more interested in profits than they are in the support of their country, there has never been a greater libel perpetrated on any group of men.

You will find among businessmen-and I have no doubt that you have had that experience yourself, Senator-just as abiding and keen

a sense of loyalty to our Government as one will find anywhere. They are not trying to make enormous profits. They are trying to keep their concerns going, to provide employment, to keep this economic structure of ours alive. And we are concerned, and we must be concerned, with what will be the conditions and the status under which business operates when this war, the next war, is over. We saw what our difficulty was after the last war to remove powers that had been given to bureaus in the course of that war. And had it not been for the intelligent and rather forceful action of President Wilson and several others, it may be that the governmental control which was fastened necessarily upon us during that war might then have become permanent.

At that time, if you please, we had a public which was much less susceptible to socialism than it has become today. You will find a curious conflict, a contradiction, in the minds of many people. If you ask them two questions you will get answers that are directly contrary to each other.

If you go and ask the average American, "Do you believe that the individual citizen should have the right to work?" he will say, "Yes." If you ask, "Should he have the right to keep and use the proceeds of his earnings as he sees fit?" the answer will be "Yes." If you ask, "Should he have the right either to use them or to deny himself and to invest them; and if he invests them, shall he have the right to the returns on that investment?" the answer will be "Yes." If you ask him, "Shall we retain democracy in our economic life which gives the individual the right to make free contracts and control his own property?" the answer is "Yes."

And yet, on the other hand, the same citizen can become so enamored and so carried away with enthusiasm over the specter of a German coming over here-a rather silly specter in my imagination, and destroying our country or destroying his economy—when that picture is held before him, he is prone to forget the deep convictions which he held with respect to free enterprise, and to become disposed to go along and give the President, or any other person so delegated, the necessary power, even to the point of socializing our property and destroying the very thing which to him means America.

We have a horde of new bureaucrats in prospect. I say that without any disrespect, because, having been one on one occasion myself, I think I understand something of their psychology.

Those men, like any other citizens, are earnest and anxious to do what they can for their country. It is also inherent in every man to hold on to his job as long as he can, and to make his job as important and effective as he possibly can. We saw that under the N. R. A., which started out on a very modest program. I recall General Johnson making the remark one day in the United States Chamber of Commerce, when he was asked a question, he made the remark that he didn't expect that he would need more than 50 people for the entire set-up. By the time the thing got well under way we all remember that there were thousands, something over 6,000 employees.

And from having started out with fairly well defined objectives, the powers reached out in all directions, and in my judgment, the N. R. A. destroyed itself by trying to do too much.

That same tendency is inherent today, as it was then, in the average human being. We simply dare not set up a group of bureaus or officials with powers such as these with the reasonable expectancy of their giving those powers up when the time comes. to do so.

It would be so easy when that time comes to offer this kind of explanation: "We have just gone through a war. Our economic structure is distorted and badly disarranged. Men must be retained in work. We must keep this thing going. It is not safe to turn this whole economic structure back to the men who brought on the great depression."

That will be with the tacit and unjustified assumption that business itself brought on that depression, again not realizing that the war itself, the last war, was the major cause of the seriousness of that depression. And the one that is coming to us-the one will come just as surely as the sun rises tomorrow morning-the one that comes to us is going to be more serious than the one that we had before. And the sophistry by means of which a continuation of bureaucratic control of our economic life could be urged in the past will be even stronger in the future.

It seems to me, gentlemen, that we have at stake here a great deal more than the immediate defense of our country. And in considering this bill, if you will permit me to say it to you, you are considering the issue of whether we are going to have a continuation of democracy, free enterprise, with the rights of the individual regarded as sacred, as they have been in the past, with the limitation that they may not, of course, be used to destroy the rights of other people, you are going to choose between that and the alternative of some kind of a system similar to that which we have in Germany, Russia, or Italy.

I don't care what you call it. We may call the man at the head of the Government the Fuehrer, we may call him the Commissioner, we may call him the President. That is not important. The thing that is important is whether or not we shall have in the hands of one man the power to control our economic life, a virtual dictatorship over the goods, property, and through that over the lives of American citizens.

The name does not matter. It is the fact that is important. And in my judgment, in the passage of this bill you have definitely set your faces in the direction of socializing the United States of America.

Without offering any condemnation or praise of our President, not considering that one way or the other, the fact remains that that is too much power to put in the hands of any one man.

We have no assurance as to the quality of the man who may succeed him. We know that a group of people with power such as this have a reasonably good chance to perpetuate themselves in power. Who in Germany could destroy Hitler? Who in Russia can destroy Stalin? Who in the United States could destroy a man who had that power; and who could reach out through all the ramifications of Government and its intimate contacts with business, our whole economic life who could destroy such an individual and group as that? It could not be done.

Even at the risk of a greater cost of preparation-and God knows it is high enough now-even at the cost of more inefficiency, it seems to me, somewhat better to make sure that we do now not destroy that for which we profess to be fighting.

Let me give you an example or two of how ineffective the control by the Government officials might be of business if they took it over. There is no way of proving it. One can point to illustrations.

Take, for example, a carpenter, a personal friend of mine, whose name I trust you will not ask me to mention, because he would lose his job if I mentioned his name.

He works in one of the enterprises not very far out of Chicago. About 10 years ago he told me he was getting $74 a week. Then he laughed and said that the work that he was doing was worth about $15 a week.

I said to him, "You are a splendid citizen, aren't you-taking $74 a week pay-we don't mind that—but giving only $15 worth of werk."

His answer was that he did not dare do more than that, because if he did more than that he would lose his job.

And that can be multiplied. I think it might be worth while to conduct a quiet investigation into many of these places and see whether Uncle Sam is getting his money's worth for the money that is being spent.

There is simply one illustration of how the defense program might be stepped up two or possibly three times for the cost that it is now occasioning us.

Or again, in a factory where certain kinds of machine products are produced, there are several inspectors who watch all the stuff that comes over the line. There are lots of those inspectors that do not have the facilities to know very much about that product; but apparently on general principles they have to show their authority; so they just throw out a machine every now and then.

It happened in one of these factories that the machines that were thown out were perfectly good, as shown by an inspection of the plant's own officials. They were very angry about it. But then the plant manager decided to try something. He simply took the machines that had been discarded and put them back in the line again; and the second time they went through. At the present time every bit of that product is going through, except that some of them have to go through twice.

Take the case of a paint inspector. There was some paint that was about to be put into the cans. There appeared at the plant an inspector. He didn't know how to go at it. Finally the plant officials offered to help him. The outcome of the matter was that the plant manager offered to take the inspector into their laboratory and conduct the kind of tests which they conducted, and he could see how they did it.

It was done, and the inspecting there now is being done by the plant officials themselves, with the inspector standing there and accepting their word for that paint as perfectly all right.

It is not within the bounds of expectation that in a short period of time we can supplant expert men, who know their business, with others representing the Government, whether it be the Army or the Navy, and expect them to do as good a job.

Those things are happening in thousands and thousands of places. We can go through one of the plants in Chicago and find where a product that took literally weeks of work has just been thrown out because the specifications were changed during the process of pro

duction.

There has been a sad laxity in planning. That sad laxity in planning has not been on the part of business.

I came here just a year ago, on July 22 of 1940, on the 21st or 22d, and tried to find out then what the furniture industry possibly could do to help in this situation, having in mind not exercising any power or influence on that industry that I had, but thinking that if I could know something of what was going to be required, we could begin then to get ourselves ready so that when the Government wanted something from us, we could produce it immediately. To this day I have not been able to find out.

Not long ago an official from the Quartermaster General's office called up my office and said that they wanted some ammunition boxes. My assistant asked what kind of boxes they wanted, what kind of wood. He didn't know. What size? He didn't know. He knew only one thing; he wanted dovetailed joints. But beyond that he knew nothing.

Well, we turned over to him the names of several manufacturers; and I hope that in time there will be knowledge which will be sufficient to produce those particular articles.

Business is more than ready and willing to do its whole share if it is given a decent opportunity to do so. But the price of helping should not be to turn over that entire economic structure to a group of men who, with all due respect to them, would be inept in their management of those concerns.

I find it difficult, frankly, to speak quietly and with restraint when I think of the possible consequences on a business of legislation like this, when I think of the things that Washington has said, that Lincoln has said, that Jefferson has said, that Wilson has said, and that Mr. Roosevelt himself has said, and then realize that this goes exactly counter to all of them.

When I think of the possibility of turning over an entire Nation to a group of experimenters, no matter how sincere and earnest and honest they may be, taking it out of the hands of the men who are qualified by years of experience and by the risk of their own funds to know what it is all about, it is enough to make one stand aghast. It is paying too big a price.

In the last analysis, if we really want production, we can get production. It is not a very difficult think to do. The most powerful force that we have in this country is the force that is contained in the emotion of individual initiative and the personal hope for gain. I know that both of those are sometimes denounced. But the difficulty with the bureau that runs things is that it has the power without the responsibility. And there is no responsibility more constraining, that is more likely to make a man keep his feet on the ground and his head out of the clouds, than the realization that if he makes a mistake, there is going to be a loss.

Why should I, if I were a member of a bureau, be much concerned with what is going to happen to that company? In the first place, I don't know what is going to happen to that company. I don't know