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DISCRIMINATION AND FULL UTILIZATION OF

MANPOWER RESOURCES

MONDAY, APRIL 21, 1952

UNITED STATES SENATE,

LABOR AND LABOR-MANAGEMENT RELATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
OF THE COMMITTEE ON LABOR AND PUBLIC WELFARE,

Washington, D. C.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10 a. m., in the Old Supreme Court room, the Capitol, Hon. Hubert H. Humphrey, chairman of the subcommittee, presiding.

Present: Senators Humphrey and Lehman.

Also present: Jack Barbash, staff director; Merton C. Berstein, subcommittee counsel; and Ray Rodgers, assistant clerk.

Senator HUMPHREY. The subcommittee will please come to order. Mr. Roy Reuther.

Mr. Reuther, you have some associates whom you wish to join you.

STATEMENT OF ROY L. REUTHER, ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT TO WALTER P. REUTHER, PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR, FAIR PRACTICES AND ANTIDISCRIMINATION DEPARTMENT OF THE UAW-CIO, ACCOMPANIED BY WILLIAM OLIVER, CODIRECTOR, FAIR PRACTICES AND ANTIDISCRIMINATION DEPARTMENT; PAUL SIFTON, NATIONAL LEGISLATIVE REPRESENTATIVE; AND JOSEPH L. RAUH, JR., COUNSEL, UAW-CIO

Mr. REUTHER. Yes; Mr. William Oliver, codirector of our fair practices and antidiscrimination department; Mr. Paul Sifton, national legislative representative; and Mr. Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., our counsel.

Senator HUMPHREY. Just like old-home week.

Mr. REUTHER. Yes; it is.

Senator HUMPHREY. I shall not brief you on how to proceed. May I suggest you are at liberty to paraphrase what you have here, or you can read it all, or have it printed in the record, as you wish, or take off from there with your associates making their contributions as you go along.

Mr. REUTHER. Thank you, Senator.

First, I would like to say that we appreciate the opportunity to appear before this committee to present our testimony. We understand the committee did extend the period for testifying. We really appreciate that.

We also would like to express UAW President Reuther's regret that he personally could not be present to testify as was planned,

Senator, that Walter is right now currently in the White House meeting with the President's Defense Mobilization Advisory Board on the current steel crisis. I believe your office was advised of that, and I think we are all appreciative of the importance of that, not that the matter of civil rights takes second place, but he did ask that I come here and present his testimony.

Senator HUMPHREY. We are very grateful that you are here, and I want the record to show that as chairman of this subcommittee I am fully cognizant of the work that Walter Reuther and all his associates have done in the field of civil rights, and we highly commend Mr. Reuther and the UAW.

By the way, I want the record to show that Mr. Oliver and I have worked closely together on another matter of discrimination, fair play in bowling. We started out the first national congress or group on this, and that is one field in which a victory was obtained after a considerable amount of perseverance on the part of Mr. Oliver and some of the others. I was very honored to participate as cochairman in that endeavor.

Needless to say, I know Mr. Rauh well as an associate in Americans for Democratic Action; and Mr. Rauh and I have rubbed shoulders frequently.

Mr. REUTHER. Senator, I would like to file the statement prepared by President Reuther. In addition to filing this statement, I should like to make a brief oral statement, citing certain passages out of the prepared statement, if that is satisfactory.

Senator HUMPHREY. That is very good.

(The prepared statement of Walter P. Reuther is as follows:)

STATEMENT IN SUPPORT OF AN EFFECTIVE FEDERAL FEPC (S. 551 AND S. 1732) To THE SENATE LABOR AND PUBLIC WELFARE SUBCOMMITTEE ON LABOR FOR THE UAW-CIO BY WALTER P. REUTHER, PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR FAIR PRACTICES AND ANTIDISCRIMINATION DEPARTMENT OF THE UAW-CIO

Presented by Roy L. Reuther, Administrative Assistant to the President

I. NEED FOR FEPC IS GREATER NOW THAN IN 1947, WHEN LAST HEARINGS WERE HELD Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, within our economy and in our own society, the need for an effective Federal FEPC such as would be provided under these bills (S. 551 and S. 1732) is as great today as it was five costly and heartbreaking years ago when this committtee, then under Republican leadership, last held hearings on the subject of discrimination in employment because of race, religion, color, national origin, or ancestry.

While the median income among nonwhite families and individuals whose major source of income is wages, did increase from 38 percent of the income of white families and individuals in 1939 to 55 percent in 1950, it is also true that fair employment has lost ground since 1945, when the wartime FEPC, now dead by act of Congress, was most effective.`

And, measured in terms of effect upon our moral standing among the peoples of the world and upon our prospects and costs of survival, that need is greater and more obvious now than it was then.

In the eyes of the colored majority of the world's population now in rebellion against colonial exploitation, poverty, and insecurity, the discrimination practiced within the United States is not excused by pointing to worse discrimnaton, outright slavery, and rule by mass terror behind the iron curtain.

After all, we are the ones who declare that mankind can have both bread and freedom; we assert the dignity and the importance of the individual human being; communism offers the promise of bread in exchange for disciplined obedience to a so-called temporary dictatorship of the proletariat that in Russia has persisted for more than 34 years and by subversion and aggression has extended its iron rule to 800,000,000 of the world's population.

Senator Benton has estimated that, in the world contest for men's minds and loyalties, discrimination is costing us $10 billion a year. This is in addition to the estimated $30 billion cost of discrimination within our domestic economy to which Mr. Walter White and other witnesses have referred.

The cost may be more than this. It might be the difference between survival with allies and defeat without them.

II. BECAUSE SENATE ALLOWS ITSELF TO REMAIN TRAPPED IN DEAD END OF FILIBUSTER ALLEY ISSUES OF FEPC AND MAJORITY RULE MUST BE APPEALED FROM CONGRESS TO THE PEO LE IN THE 1952 POLITICAL CAMPAIGN

We shall present facts again bringing the story of discrimination in employment up to date. We did so in 1947. We did so last October in appearing before the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration in support of proposals to change the unconstitutional rule 22 so as to make it possible to break by majority vote a filibuster against FEPC, other civil-rights bills or other vital legislation. But to limit our testimony today to a recital, for the third time, of the need for long overdue FEPC legislation would be worse than unrealistic. To do that and nothing more would be to raise cruelly false hopes that an effective FEPC with enforcement power can be expected to result this year from the action of this subcommittee, the full Labor and Public Welfare Committee of the Senate or the pro-FEPC majority in the present Senate.

To discuss the need for FEPC in a legislative vacuum would be to engage in transparent political paperhanging in an election year. It would not fool any considerable number of the more than 20 million American workers and their families who suffer the daily injustice of discrimination in employment. They know that the reason why they continue to suffer such discrimination is not because this committee has not acted on these two FEPC bills until now. They know it is because majority rule, necessary to get to a Senate roll-call vote on FEPC itself, is strangled by Senate rule 22.

And the realization is growing that, by making a Senate vote on FEPC and other vital legislation less likely than in the past, rule 22 has converted a chronic legislative malady into an acute constitutional crisis that is a threat to the Nation's welfare and security.

As the majority leader stated on May 19, 1950, immediately after a cloture petition to break a filibuster against FEPC had failed-despite a vote of 52 to 32 to break the filibuster-rule 22 is an "attempt to nail the Senate's feet to the floor for a thousand years." (Record, vol. 96, p. 7301.)

Senate rule 22 is the real issue, the real roadblock to FEPC and other civilrights legislation. It is the roadblock to the promotion of economic, social, and political justice through Federal legislation. As a people and a Nation, we shall continue to enjoy the poor health of economic and political chills and fever until the American people rid themselves of this impediment to the orderly democratic implementation by the Senate and the Congress of the people's will to meet their needs through majority rule as intended and provided by the Constitution.

Rule 22 is no longer just a legislative issue. Because the present Senate will not strike down this presumptuous, antidemocratic, arrogant, and unconstitutional rule sought to be imposed by the dead hand of an earlier Senate. Rule 22 has become a political issue. An appeal must be taken from a Senate that chooses to remain in bondage to rule by filibuster. Such an appeal, under the Constitution, is to the American people, in the 1952 Congressional, Presidential, and Vice Presidential elections. As such a political issue, rule 22 must be explained and debated in political meetings, discussions, conventions, campaigns and, finally, used as a measure in voting on election day. FEPC is possible whenever Senate adopts majority rule

The American people can have FEPC, antipoll tax, antilynch, and other civilrights legislation whenever they elect, or convert, 49 Senators and a Vice President who will use majority rule to do away with rule 22 and substitute majority rule as the normal practice in doing Senate business, including the breaking of filibusters. This, of course, would not affect the five exceptions set down in the Constitution in which a larger than majority vote is required.

This fact about rule 22, based on each new Senate's constitutional rule-making power and addressed to present-day legislative and political realities, is the most important fact about FEPC. To face up to it is more to the point than to limit ourselves to crying out year after year, and particularly in election years,

against the immoral, costly, and dangerous injustice of discrimination in employment.

To stress this issue of majority rule in the Senate is to identify and direct attention to the real target, to the inescapable prerequisite action necessary for relief, for escape from the present antidemocratic dead end in which liberal Members of the Senate and the American people-find themselves caught, unable to limit the talk and start the voting on FEPC.

Because we are on the eve of a political campaign in which civil rights, notably FEPC, will be a major issue, it is important that these hearings and your committee put the blame for 5 years of inaction where it belongs, not on the failure to enact FEPC but on the reason for that failure, upon the bipartisan conspiracy's continued defeat of majority rule by the veto power of the filibuster. The history of this bipartisan conspiracy is brought up to date by pointing out that on January 29, 1952, in executive session and by unrecorded secret votes, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration voted down the Morse-Humphrey and Lehman resolutions that would have reduced the votes necessary to break a filibuster from the present 64 to a majority of those voting and likewise defeated the Ives-Lodge resolution proposing that filibusters be breakable by a majority of the Senate membership.

Having defeated these three substitutes for rule 22, the bipartisan group within the Rules Committee then proceeded to vote out the Wherry-DirksenJenner amendment. In pretending to meet valid objections to rule 22, this amendment to which Senators Stennis (Democrat, Mississippi) and Russell (Democrat, Georgia) have little objection, offers instead of rule 22 a fake and fraud that would not molest at all the provision in rule 22's section 3 that Senate rules can only be changed after the last filibustering Senator objecting to the change has subsided into silence, that is changed only by unanimous consent.

It is important that sincere believers in civil rights, including FEPC and the whole democratic method of majority rule, get across to the American people the enormity of the crimes that are committed under rule 22 and would be continued under the Wherry-Dirksen-Jenner amendment. This must be done in order to show the necessity for doing away with that evil rule. Political strength to break rule 22 must be mobilized in 1952 elections

It is also important to demonstrate that although section 3, if accepted as law equal in force to the Constitution itself, would make impossible for practical purposes a change to permit the breaking of filibusters by majority vote, the entire rule can and must be challenged and broken by demonstrating its flagrant violation of the Constittuion itself and by mobilizing the political strength to make that challenge successfully when the new Eighty-third Senate meets on January 3, 1953.

The way to do that is not by trying to make the filibusterers talk around the clock and around the calendar, as is frequently proposed. That procedure is far more deadly to the friends than to the enemies of majority rule. Enemies of the filibuster must maintain a quorum within call; friends of the filibuster need only provide a few talking Senators a day to keep democracy away.

There is a feasible, practical way to abolish rule 22. We believe the method and means we propose are legal and constitutional for the reasons set forth in a legal brief we presented to the Senate Rules Committee October 3, 1951 (hearings, pp. 147-158). Copies are being furnished the committee.

We propose the bold use of majority rule to win majority rule. The try must be made the moment after the new Senate is convened and new members are sworn. They can try and will succeed if the Vice President and a majority of the Senators then on the floor are prepared to stand up and be counted in support of this single proposition; that the Eighty-third Senate is a new Senate, with the same full power under the Constitution to write its own rules that was enjoyed and exercised by the First Senate.

For this attempt to free the Senate from rule by filibuster, the American people must have elected in 1952 a Vice President who will entertain a motion and uphold an argument that the Senate of the Eighty-third Congress has and should exercise the power to adopt its own rules, including a new rule 22 that will provide that a filibuster on any business before the Senate may be broken by a majority of those present and voting. This gives the 1952 Vice Presidential candidates a new and greater importance than they have had. The Vice President elected in 1952 will have life or death power over:

(1) The establishment of majority rule in the Senate of the United States; (2) The opening of the legislative highway to enactment of FEPC and other civil-rights legislation.

Bipartisan enemies of majority rule would shield people "from own harmful

intentions"

Except by possible agreement between southern Democrats and northern Republicans who share the fear of democracy expressed by Senators Jenner and Russell, the Wherry-Jenner-Dirksen change in rule 22 cannot get past a southern Democratic filibuster to come to floor debate and vote, assuming it is even called up before adjournment.

The Jenner report, in our opinion, marks a new low in party irresponsibility and bipartisan willingness to gang up against democracy.

In testifying before the Rules Committee in support of the Wherry resolution, Senator Jenner sang a close harmony duet' with Senator Stennis (Democrat, Mississippi.)

"Mr. STENNIS. Mr. Chairman, may I ask Senator Jenner just two or three friendly questions, if he is not in too big a hurry?

"Senator JENNER. I am now 30 minutes late.

"Senator STENNIS. There is no one here opposed to the change at all. Senator Jenner, you have a very fine statement there. I do not agree with all the points, but you do favor the two-thirds of those present and voting invoking cloture, that is your position?

"Senator JENNER. I think that is the only practical, adequate, and safe cloture

rule.

"Senator STENNIS. So you want at least that much power for a minority left in the Senate rules. You think it is necessary, do you not? "Senator JENNER. Well, you can put it that way.

"Senator STENNIS. You think it is one of the remaining checks and balances that is left in our Government, do you not?

"Senator JENNER. That is right.

"Senator STENNIS. And you would not want

"Senator JENNER. This is the only free parlimentary body left in the world. "Senator STENNIS. That is right.

"Senator JENNER. And in our form of government—I do not believe the premise, the ideals of our forefathers, were laid down on majority rule.

"Senator STENNIS. I thought that was your position."

In his majority report, Senator Jenner relied principally upon testimony by Senate Rules Commitee Chairman Hayden (Democrat, Arizona), coauthor of rule 22 and an opponent of majority rule, and Senator Richard B. Russell (Democrat, Georgia), the plumed knight of southern Democratic opposition who refers to FEPC as part of "the civil-wrongs program."

Senator Jenner should achieve immortality for the following frank statement of the philosophy and purpose of the present rule 22 and of the virtually meaningless and fraudulent amendment recommended in his report for the Senate Rules Committee:

"On issues that are vital to the liberties of the American people, the Senate, functioning as a deliberative and unmolested body, will better serve the welfare of the people of the United States by shielding them from their own harmful intentions."

This remarkable sentence should be taken apart and diagramed on the blackboard of every school, high school, and university in the United States. It should be analyzed on every platform and street corner during the 1952 political campaign. It should be charged not only to Senator Jenner, but also to the northern Republicans who voted with Senator Jenner and the southern Democrats and their border State sympathizers against majority rule and for continued rule by a filibustering minority.

For our part, we propose to take it apart and to analyze it here and throughout the United States, within our local unions, and in communities where we have membership or can get a hearing.

It should be noticed that Senator Jenner limits his dictum to "issues that are vital to the liberties of the American people." If there be other issues, issues that are not vital to our liberties, presumably Senator Jenner is willing that they be decided by majority rule. He is willing to overlook the legislative chicken

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