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Mr. KENNEDY. It seems to me that the problem there is as to what is necessary to get done, in order to arrive at the point that you are to have them ready to give. I do not think there is any trouble in delivering, having them done, and getting them over there, and making arrangements, and I should think we could handle that very easily, but the problem is as to what is necessary in this bill in order to do what the President evidently wants to get done-that is, to expedite armament.

Mr. FISH. My question is simply this, because it follows almost from everything you said from the beginning: You want immediate action? Mr. KENNEDY. Yes, sir.

Mr. FISH. You want national unity?

Mr. KENNEDY. Yes, sir.

Mr. FISH. To do away with all of this bitterness and controversy? Mr. KENNEDY. Yes, sir.

Mr. FISH. And to expedite war goods to Great Britain?

Mr. KENNEDY. That is right.

Mr. FISH. The most needed, as I say, are planes and munitions and merchant ships to carry them over?

Mr. KENNEDY. Yes, sir.

Mr. FISH. Could not that be very well done by merely having Congress authorize some lending agency of the Government-Mr. Jesse Jones, in his capacity as head of the R. F. C., and the Federal lending agency-to loan this money, getting the best securities and the best collateral available, and when the English money is exhausted, give these supplies to them? Would not that answer the whole thing?

Mr. KENNEDY. It sounds very nice, and I would rather take a chance on you gentlemen straightening that out rather than asking my opinion.

Mr. FISH. I do not mind telling you now that I propose tomorrow to put that in as a substitute for this bill.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Ambassador, is there any further statement you wish to make?

Mr. KENNEDY. No, sir, Mr. Chairman; except to express my appreciation of the kind way in which you have treated me.

The CHAIRMAN. You mean the committee by that?

Mr. KENNEDY. Yes, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. The committee is very grateful to you for being here today and for giving us a great deal of your time. We thank you very, very much, and I know Mr. Fish joins me in that, Mr. Kennedy.

Mr. FISH. I would like to join with you and say that I know of no man in the country who is doing more to keep America out of war than you are, Mr. Ambassador. [Long and sustained applause.]

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Mr. Kennedy.

Tomorrow we will have as the first witness Mr. Norman Thomas at 10 o'clock. The meeting stands at recess until 10 o'clock tomorrow morning.

On Wednesday morning we will hear Mr. Hanford MacNider.

(Thereupon, at 4:30 p. m., the committee adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, January 22, 1941, at 10 a. m.)

LEND-LEASE BILL

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22, 1941

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS, Washington, D. C.

The committee met at 10 a. m., Hon. Sol Bloom (chairman) presiding.

The CHAIRMAN. The committee will kindly come to order. Our first witness this morning is Mr. Norman Thomas.

STATEMENT OF NORMAN THOMAS, NATIONAL CHAIRMAN,

SOCIALIST PARTY

The CHAIRMAN. You may proceed, Mr. Thomas.
Mr. THOMAS. Members of the committee:

I thank you for inviting me to appear before you to give my views on one of the gravest issues on which Congress was ever asked to pass. It is a bill which Americans who love democracy should consider on its merits regardless of party lines, Presidential pressures, and inducements, and the extroardinary and largely irrelevant propaganda which has been whipped up in its behalf. It is a bill to authorize undecleared war in the name of peace and dictatorship in the name of defendant democracy.

American democracy is still so strong that it will not be killed even by the passage of this bill but it will be sorely wounded in the house of its alleged friends. That such a bill should be introduced at all at the request of the popular leader, President Roosevelt, on the eve of his inauguration, after an election campaign in which he gave not the slightest hint of asking such powers, is a technique completely at variance with proper democratic procedure. It cannot be justi fied by any event which has happened since the first of November. Any statesman should have been as well aware of England's need then as now. The only unexpected event since the election is the magnitude of British and Greek victories over the Italians in Albania and Africa. The President cannot possibly argue that he received a popular mandate for this measure. Not even Mr. Willkie's hearty support-that is, hearty support one day (with qualifications, which he never mentioned when he addressed millions of people through the Town Hall of the Air, on Thursday) constitutes a popular mandate.

This bill in the form in which the President ordered its introduction and prompt passage gives the President power to commit any and every conceivable act of war except the dispatch abroad of large armies. If words have their ordinary meaning he could even use

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our sailors and airmen to deliver so much of our fleets to England or any other country, as he might desire. Admittedly he could completely ignore the Johnson Act and the neutrality law. I think under the breadth of powers given him in section 9 he could ignore all labor laws insofar as they applied to the production of defense articles which in turn have been so broadly defined that they might include almost every conceivable thing.

I am aware that there has been some attempt to deny that this law could be pushed so far and the President and his supporters have laughed at the idea that it would be pushed so far.

I was very pleased to read in this morning's paper that the President now denies that he wants to send convoys, even to England or to the Falkland Islands. He referred to precedents like the cow jumping over the moon and other illustrative material, but I do not think that he was as convincing as he would have been if he had suggested an amendment to the bill.

But it is highly significant that from the administration's side has come no proposal for limitations on the law or clarification of its extent. There has not even come a proposal to limit its duration. As the law now stands it is to endure forever unless it should be repealed by a congressional vote which could be vetoed by some future ambitious President who might even find patronage inducements and other pressures sufficient to sustain his veto in some of course-future Congress.

I am informed by competent students that even after war has been legitimately declared by Congress, no such powers as this bill contemplates were ever given to President Wilson, who however, never complained that he lacked power efficiently to wage war.

I have not attacked and do not attack the excellence of the Presi dent's moral intentions. I have praised as well as criticized his use of the emergency powers already given him, and his record as an administrator. In no sense, then, do I make a personal or partisan attack on Mr. Roosevelt when I say that no man, not even an angel from heaven, who asks such breath-taking powers of war or peace with such vague limitations, should be trusted with them. If democracy in this crisis gives sole control of peace or war to one man it has already surrendered the front line trenches to the principle of totalitarian dictatorship. For supporters of this measure to say that we will still have democracy unimpaired "because this is America and we are a great people" or because the President has not yet asked Congress to abdicate altogether he was, I remember, exceedingly anxious to ask the last Congress to go home or because we still have popular elections is about as unrealistic as were Caesar Augustus and his followers when they assured the Romans that they still had a republic because Rome still had that name and still kept the Senate.

These things I have believed from the day when I first studied the text of this extraordinary bill. I read eagerly the testimonyso much of it as was in the press-of the Cabinet members and other distinguished officials who have already appeared before you in support of this measure. To my amazement their statements, as reported in the press, had virtually nothing to do with the bill they were discussing and that you were considering. Their arguments might have been considered a case-a very weak one-for an honest and

straightforward declaration of war by Congress. They constituted a stronger case for increasing the already large aid which we are giving to Great Britain. But in no way did they prove that we had to give our own President the power to put us crabwise into total war in order to aid England.

What does England need, at least for 1941, according to her own story? More purchasing power in America, and more supplies, especially ships and planes to purchase. This bill of itself supplies neither need. Congress will still have to appropriate any money that may be required by the President's orders and, while I think that any Congress which passes this bill will docilely vote the money to make good the blank-check power given the President, it is still true that this bill, of itself, gives Britain no more purchasing power, and will only add to her armaments what the President may "lease or lend," which means give, out of our own Navy, air fleet, and store of munitions. Do the Secretaries of War and the Navy want us to believe that they favor these gifts?

What Britain needs most of all is ships and planes not yet produced. I should have no quarel with any reasonable plan of the President's to speed up production of planes, nor even in this emergency, with his giving England right-of-way over our own air force in procuring those planes from our factories.

From this point of view I am inclined to think that something like the Reuther plan, which the experts so promptly and so unceremoniously rejected, might have done more to solve the production problem than this bill ever will. The President has already all the power he needs in this field.

If it is morale that he wants and now thinks lacking, this bill is about the worst way to get it, because inevitably it awakens fear, suspicion, and mistrust in the hearts of millions of Americans. I do not speak without evidence from a large mass of my own unsolicited correspondence when I say that already this bill has been a great blow to American morale. If, and when we get into total war as the result of it, we shall find not only that that war will be resented by millions who now consider it unnecessary, but by other millions who, encouraged by the supporters of this bill, now live in the fool's paradise of belief that we can fight a partial and limited war with things and not with

men.

Do not misunderstand me. I have no doubt the country would accept any war into which the President put it and would fight bravely. But there is a question of morale which goes deeper than mere acceptance.

I am dismissing from extensive consideration any treatment of the payments which the President may require under this bill, because those sections of the bill, like our present gold-purchase law, merely disguise the subsidy. England isn't going to pay us back in kind or otherwise after this war any more than after the first World War. She will be in a far worse position to pay us back. The only thing of much value which she could really offer us would be preferential access to some of the vast mineral wealth now under her control. We hope we aren't going to want all this armament after the war is over. If we do want it, we'll want it new, not old; that is, we do not want returned articles. American industrialists

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