group that is very close to a certain segment of the manufacturers association. I think it is the latter group that, as far as I can see, more for traditional reasons than almost any basis of logic, has opposed this. Mr. POWELL. Yet many of the outstanding members of the manufacturers group have offices in Philadelphia.

Mr. LOESCHER. That is true. Mr. Batt of SKF was chairman of the Businessmen's Committee for State FEPC. I don't know whether some of the businessmen are not as active in some of these manufacturers' associations as they ought to be or just what is responsible for it.

Mr. POWELL. There isn't a single industrialist in New York who is opposed to it. The other day Commissioner McKenney of Massachusetts pointed out that in Boston the Boston Chamber of Commerce has gone on record for it, and the New York State Chamber of Commerce has gone on record approving it. There just does not seem to be any reason or logic against approving it.

Mr. LOESCHER. I think it it more a habit, more a pattern that has been established. Most of us resist change. However, once the legislation goes through it is really remarkable how the businessmen get worked up in being invited to come to some other community to tell how they did it. There is no reflection on what a person might have thought 10 years ago. I think particularly a person like Floyd Shannon, who is superintendent of relations at Western Electric at Kearney, N. J., he was in very great demand to tell how Western Electric went about this.

Mr. POWELL. That was one of the toughest nuts to crack.

Mr. LOESCHER. They have done a very bang-up job. I remember seeing the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. being picketed in January

1945.

Mr. POWELL. I picketed the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. home office in Harlem for 10 months. I saw Mr. Lincoln, the president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., one afternoon and he said, "Never, never, will we employ a Negro."

I said, "Well, we are going to picket you, then."

He said, "You can't scare us," and he pulled out a check, a photostatic copy of a check for $165,000,000. He said, "We just bought $165,000,000 of war bonds. We take in a million dollars every day that we don't know what to do with. How can you hurt us by picketing us? You will never make us employ Negroes."

Mr. LOESCHER. I talked to Mr. Rhodes, the vice president in charge of personnel. It is a thrilling story. I wish every businessman in the United States could sit down with Mr. Rhoades and hear how they did it, and they had no problems.

I remember your interest in the activity of the bus situation in New York.

Mr. POWELL. Yes. The chairman of the Board told me, "These Irishmen on the bus company will not work with Negroes." Do you know what the Irishmen did? The next day the Irishmen of the Transport Workers Union came uptown and picketed with us against their own bus company, and in 12 days we broke the back of the bus company regarding discrimination, and today there are 10,000 Negroes working on the various transport systems in the city of New York.

Mr. LOESCHER. Everybody refers back to the PTC strike in Philadelphia, and today you get on a trolley and you don't know whether

it is going to be a man or woman operating the car, or colored or white. The same with the conductor, you don't know what the sex is going to be. Nobody pays attention to it.

Mr. POWELL. Mr. Burke?

Mr. BURKE. I have no questions.

Mr. POWELL. Thank you ever so much.

Our next witness is Mr. Herman Edelsberg of the Anti-Defamation League.

TESTIMONY OF HERMAN EDELSBERG, WASHINGTON REPRESENTATIVE, ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE OF B'NAI B’RITH

Mr. EDELSBERG. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, my name is Herman Edelsberg. I am the Washington representative of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.

B'nai B'rith, founded in 1843, is the oldest civic organization of American Jews. It represents a membership of over 350,000 men and women and their families. The ADL was organized in 1913, as a section of B'nai B'rith, in order to cope with racial and religious prejudice in the United States.

The program developed by the league was designed to achieve the following objectives: The elimination and counteraction of defamation and discrimination against the various racial, religious, and ethnic groups which comprise our American people; the counteraction of un-American and antidemocratic activity; the advancement of good will and mutual understanding among American groups; the encouragement and translation into greater effectiveness of the ideals of American democracy.

I have been delegated by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith to appear before you to testify in behalf of H. R. 4453, a bill intended to insure equality of job opportunity for all, regardless of race or creed. B'nai B'rith has, for a number of years recognized that its work for the implementation of our American democracy requires that it seek to attain equality of opportunity for all in every area of community activity essential to the happiness and well-being of all persons within the community.

We present this statement on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, not as a mater of form, not because it is the fashionably liberal thing to do, but because we are deeply and intensely concerned with the enactment of an FEPC law. We are concerned with it to defend American democracy and security, to strengthen the American economy, and to improve the mental and social health of all Americans, because we are satisfied that discrimination is almost as bad for the one who discriminates as it is for the victim of his discrimination.

Mr. POWELL. From a moral point of view I think it is worse.

Mr. EDELSBERG. Of course. Let me address myself first to two of the classic arguments used by the opponents of this bill. In the first place, they like to compare it to the prohibition law, which was notoriously ineffective. To me, that comparison is fantastic, Mr. Chairman.

We have, in the case of FEPC, a great reservoir of voluntary cooperation by the major groups in this country.

When we come here to endorse FEPC, we come at the same time to pledge the full coperation of B'nai B'rith toward the effective and just enforcement of this act. We are sure we are joined by all the religious groups in this country, by the great trade-union groups, by veterans' groups, and many other social and civic groups.

So, in the first place, we have a vastly different situation, we have a great store of active cooperation. In the second place, there is a reservoir of general good will that this bill will tap when it becomes law. I think there are literally millions of Americans who are just waiting for a chance to say that they prefer to live by the ideals of their political and religious professions rather than by practices which fall short of those ideals.

Now in those two respects this situation is vastly different from the prohibition experiment.

We are also told by the opponents of FEPC that you cannot legislate against prejudice. The first and decisive answer to that suggestion is that the bill is not aimed at prejudice, the bill is aimed at discrimination, at overt acts which you might call the bitter fruits of prejudice.

I myself go further and suggest to you, in all earnestness, that this bill can strike at prejudice in the human heart. We all know that prejudice is not something that is God-given, it isn't innate, it isn't born in the child, it is learned, it is acquired somehow.

I say to you it is easy to learn prejudice if you ride on Jim Crow school busses or go to Jim Crow schools. Certainly a child who is born in a restricted neighborhood is born with two strikes on him, as far as his possibility of becoming a tolerant American is concerned. That child, from the earliest days of comprehension, develops the feeling that he is better than the others who are not permitted to move into his neighborhood.

So I say that if, by statute, we prevent overt discrimination, overt segregation, overt Jim Crowing, we have made it possible for all Americans to grow up in an environment in which it becomes more and more difficult to develop prejudices.

In a real sense, therefore, while this bill is directly aimed only at discrimination, it is also aimed toward eliminating prejudice itself from the human heart.

The Anti-Defamation League has done some special work in the matter of getting scientific and objective accounts of the extent of prejudice and I would like to bring to your attention and consideration some of the fruits of our research, which Doubleday has seen fit to publish as a commercial book this year, entitled "How Secure These Rights." It was written for us by Professor Ruth Weintraub of Hunter College, under the direction of our civil-rights committee, of which Mr. Jacob Grumet of New York is chairman and Mr. Arnold Forster is director.

Mr. BURKE. Is it in print?

Mr. EDELSBERG. It is in print by Doubleday. It is a survey of the whole problem of discrimination and prejudice and Doubleday thought it was good enough to warant its publication as a regular commercial book.

The campaign for democracy and against discrimination based on race or creed is one to which the Jew is no stranger. Our first participation in the struggle for the recognition of the essential dignity of

every individual was when we successfully sought to burst the bonds of the European ghettos. The artificial constraints set up for Jews throughout Europe were intended to exclude them from the normal life of the community and to restrict them to a second-class status in the state.

We Jews succeeded-we thought, for all time-in breaking down the ghetto walls. But we found that the mere smashing of the physical walls was only part of the job. In its stead, those who wished to restrict competition and those who could not overcome their bigoted background sought to achieve the same constraint by building economic and spiritual walls to replace the physical ones of the ghetto. Thus, for centuries, the Jew found himself excluded from certain industries and occupations. Large portions of the social life of the community were surrounded by bars erected against the Jew.

In our dynamic society there can be no standing still. The existence of economic, social, and spiritual walls operate against the victim but also against the oppressor. The oppressor is increasingly corrupted by such walls and seek in time to strengthen them by both legal and physical means. The Hitlerian hegemony in Germany showed how absolutly discrimination can corrupt the oppressor.

Unless we here in democratic America advance continually and consistently against racial and religious discrimination, we face the danger of a reversion to the brutality and ignorance of Hitlerism.

The essential basis of democracy is its affirmation of the worth and dignity of the individual. Democracy grants to every individual an equal voice in every important decision affecting the community. It affirms the right of each person to be judged by the community on the basis of his own behavior, not on the basis of such irrelevant factors as the color of his skin, his religious affiliation, his racial origin, or his ancestry.

As our understanding of democracy advanced, it became clear to us that a man who is hungry or unemployed cannot maintain his dignity. It was recognized that the right to equality of opportunity for employment was a necessary concomitant of the democratic way of life. The exclusion of members of any racial or religious group from the opportunity to obtain work for which they were qualified was seen to be a denial of the democratic rights of that group.

And the denial of democratic rights in one area threatens the denial of those same rights in all areas. Those whose rights are denied lose their faith in democracy. They are easy prey for the groups which would subvert democracy. Similarly, those who participate in the denial of such rights become contemptuous of the democratic way of life, and are also more likely to listen to the siren song of totalitaranism.

It is also noteworthy that the doctrine of the equality of man before God is fundamental to our Judeo-Christian religious philosophy. Discrimination in employment based on race or creed is, by our religious concepts, immoral and ungodly. Such discrimination can serve only to perpetuate slavery in one form or another. From the point of view of the economic health of the community, racial and religious discdimination in employment is wasteful.

Clearly, it is economically unwish to deny to the community the fullest possible use of productive skills of every individual in the commu

nity. To compel a person who has gone through long years of costly training to qualify as a lawyer or an economist, or a teacher to go to work as an electator operator, or as a tailer, is to destroy an invest

ment.

Nor does the foregoing exhaust the list of considerations of practical self-interest which demonstrate the need for legislation to insure equality of opportunity in employment. It has been repeatedly shown by our experts in sociology that the poverty resulting from job discrimination breeds crime, disease, and slums. The victim of discrimination is frequently also the victim of malnutrition, and hate which warps his mind and stunts his body.

Racial and religious discrimination in employment has, we have seen, resulted in compelling people to live on relief because they could not get a job even in the face of a labor shortage. It has lowered the purchasing power of large portions of the population, and has thereby lowered the standard of living of the entire community.

Hundreds of businessmen have recognized the validity of the point I have just made. Hence, many of them have indicated their support for FEP legislation. This is particularly true of the businessmen who have had experience in the operation of such legislation, both under the old Federal FEPC and under the few State FEP acts now on the books.

The benefits we shall derive from the enactment of a bill such as H. R. 4453 extend beyond our shores. We are presently engaged in a world ideological conflict with totalitarianism. Our country has had to take the leadership of those forces in the world which are fighting for democracy. This battle cannot be won by guns or food. The magnificent effort embodied in the airlift to Berlin was but a stopgap. The battle is one of ideologies, and we will win it only if we win the minds of people all over the world.

So long as we permit a substantial discrepancy to exist between our preachments of democracy and our actual practices here in the United States, the people of the world will find it hard to trust us and to accept the doctrines we preach. So long as we continue to deny fair treatment to large portions of our population because of their race or religion, we cannot expect the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Europe to believe in our good faith.

Just the other day the New York Times showed how our democratic shortcomings are being made capital of beyond the iron curtain and in the cockpit of western Europe. A parade in Czechoslovakia made much of Klan oppression of American Negroes. We must remove this ideological weapon from the hands of our opponents.

Now that the Human Rights Commission has reported and has embodied in the UN Declaration of Human Rights a provision that "everyone has the right to work," and that "everyone without any discrimination has the right to equal pay for equal work," it becomes necessary for us to put up or shut up. We stand before the bar of world public opinion engaged in a controversy which will, if we succeed, chart a course of peace and prosperity for the world.

Let us not be found lacking. Let us proceed with our present campaign to eradicate racial and religious discrimination in this country. Only thus can we insure peace, prosperity, and democracy for our country and for all the peoples of the world.