STATEMENT OF RUSSELL SMITH, LEGISLATIVE SECRETARY, NATIONAL FARMERS UNION

Mr. SMITH. I am Russell Smith, national secretary, National Farmers Union. In addition to my own statement, I should like to have permission to insert into the record of the hearing a few statements of officials and State organizations of the Farmers Union.

Chairman WOODRUM. They are not voluminous?

Mr. SMITH. No, sir.

Chairman WOODRUM. Very well, they may be inserted at this point. Mr. SMITH. Thank you very much, sir.

(The matters referred to are as follows:)

NORTH DAKOTA FARMERS UNION BOARD URGES POSTPONED DECISION ON PEACE DRAFT

Postponement of consideration of the universal peacetime military conscription until after the peace is written was urged in a statement issued by the board of directors of the North Dakota Farmers Union, meeting in Jamestown last week. Seven reasons were given for this stand, implementing the previous declarations of the State and national conventions of the Farmers Union, expressing belief that universal peacetime conscription now would indicate that we have lost the peace, that the Dumbarton Oaks proposal may make huge armaments unnecessary, that it would be used to deal with unemployment, that other measures will better prepare for robot warfare, that universal conscription will make us more subject to attack, that it opposed American tradition, and that returning servicemen should have an opportunity to help decide the issue.

THE STATEMENT

Following is the statement in full.

While millions of Americans fight bitterly on for ultimate victory over the forces of totalitarianism, militarism, and aggression, while peace-loving peoples of the United Nations prepare to set up international organization to achieve a durable peace, a concerted effort is being made to rush permanent universal peacetime military conscription, through Congress and to use war hysteria to whip up support among the people.

In conformity with the declaration of the Farmers Union in State and national conventions that "we oppose any attempt to establish permanent peacetime conscription while plans are being formulated for a decent peace that will make nationalistic militarism unnecessary," the North Dakota Farmers Union board of directors, meeting at Jamestown, January 5, protest the hasty consideration of House bill 3, introduced by Congressman May, providing universal peacetime military conscription, and urge that consideraiton be postponed until the peace is made and returning veterans have an opportunity to express themselves on an issue which directly opposes American democratic tradition of over 150 years.

ALINED WITH OTHER GROUPS

In taking this position, the Farmers Union is proud to aline itself with millions of patriotic American citizens as represented by such organizations as the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, the Council of Catholic Bishops, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ, the American Federation of Labor, and many others.

THE REASONS

We oppose adoption of compulsory peacetime conscription at this time be

cause:

1. It would be an admission that we have already lost the peace. There can be no hope for any workable world peace organization while nations race to arm against each other.

2. If the Dumbarton Oaks proposals for the United Nations are effectuated, each nation will maintain an armed force to be used in concert with other nations to prevent aggression, making huge armaments unnecessary and undesirable.

3. It would further be an admission of defeat in the struggle for full production and full employment. Conscription is a historic form of dealing with unemployment and weakening the organizations of labor and other people's movements.

4. If, despite world organization, another war appears probable within the next 20 or 30 years, modern robot-bomb warfare demands that we prepare by research, education, and health programs and by decentralizing other metropolitan centers, and preparing vast underground production facilities. A year's military training, under conditions in which the next war will be fought, would be largely wasted, except insofar as it creates a psychological acceptance of the need and desirability of future wars.

5. Peacetime military conscription will make us more subject to attack. Europe's experience with conscription demonstrates that compulsory military training is no insurance against war. On the contrary, an armed nation more readily resorts to arms to achieve its ends.

6. It is a denial of democracy and a step backward from traditional American freedom. It would result in a regimentation that is threat to responsible citizenship.

7. Such important legislation should not under any circumstances be passed during wartime, under pressure of wartime hysteria and in the absence of the men and women now serving overseas, who should have a voice in so important a reversal of America's policy.

We oppose any attempt to establish permanent peacetime conscription while plans are being formulated for a decent peace that will make nationalistic militarism unnecessary.

We are opposed to making a military camp of the United States. That was what Germany had. Furthermore, any action on peacetime conscription should be postponed until our boys and girls are home and can vote on the question. No country governed as a democracy can long endure when it turns that country into a military camp.

TOM W. CHEEK,

President, Oklahoma Farmers Union and

Chairman, Board of Directors, National Farmers Union.

I am expressing the sentiments of the National Farmers Union in opposing action on peacetime conscription. Not only did the delegates, elected from the grass roots membership to the national convention in November of 1944, write their opposition into the 1945 program of action for the Farmers Union, but State, county, and local organizations of the Farmers Union have taken like action.

We believe that making so drastic a change in the democratic tradition of American life will prove that we have no faith in the attempt to make a just and lasting peace through a council of nations. It will be a direct repudiation of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals for world security through arbitration and peaceful settlements of disputes between nations. It will admit that we have no intention of dealing positively with the problem of postwar unemployment, but intend instead to put our youth through the same kind of militaristic conditioning which has made the ideology of Germany and Japan a menace to the world.

Peacetime conscription solves no problems. It makes new ones. Health standards are not raised by military training, since a year or 2 years in training, after the age of 16 or 18 cannot cure the diseases of poverty and malnutrition developed in childhood. This demands an adequate health program for all, with public funds spent in prevention during childhood rather than in military camps in later years.

Military training does not prevent war, as witness the countries of Germany and Japan where it is part of the national life. Compulsory conscription will not make us prepared for defense in another war, since science develops new techniques in destruction so rapidly that a man must be a part of a military force all of his life if his training is to be up to date in warfare. This has been amply demonstrated in the changes made during the 3 years of the present conflict.

Peacetime conscription is an insidious poison which conditions those subjected to it to a militaristic attitude in dealing with all problems-national and international-and thus becomes a grave menace to the democratic rights of groups, political, industrial, labor or agricultural, within the Nation.

The controversy over compulsory peacetime conscription is a struggle between the militaristic elements in America, abetted by those who have been stampeded by fear during this war, on the one hand, and those groups which have the longtime program of educating for peace and democracy as their permanent goal, on the other hand. These groups include the National Farmers Union, the Farm Bureau Federation, the National PTA, the American Education Association, the AFL the Railway Brotherhood, the American Rabbinical Assembly, the Churches of Christ in America, Bishops and Archbishops of the Catholic Church.

NATIONAL FARMERS UNION,

(Mrs.) GLADYS TALBOTT EDWARDS, Director of Education.

Mr. SMITH. The National Farmers Union opposes H. R. 515 and any similar bills to provide for compulsory peacetime military training. Our people always have opposed such measures, believing them contrary to American experience and tradition. They believe even more strongly that such a departure from what they feel is democratic precedent and practice, is illadvised and dangerous. We oppose the bill on the following principal grounds:

First. Peacetime conscription always has been repugnant to the American people. Forced military service, quartering of British troops on civilians, and other practices associated with militarism played a considerable part in creating the tensions that finally erupted into the American Revolution. On the other hand, that war and all of our wars have been fought, on our side, by citizen soldiers.

We believe that World War II has simply reinforced the argument for continuing this practice. We have been unable to discover any evidence that those countries where universal military service was in force were superior from a military standpoint to those countries which relied upon citizen soldiers. At all times those armies that fought from free devotion to their cause have been superior material for war, and we believe that history shows they have triumphed in all instances where other factors were equal.

Our faith is that democracy is superior to all other political systems in drawing forth the virtues of self-reliance, of initiative, of disciplined yet independent action, and our faith in democracy extends also to its ability to defend itself against other systems.

Second. We believe, moreover, that peacetime conscription will tend inevitably toward the strengthening of militarism as a threat to democratic peacetime ways of life. The inevitable tendency of the military bureaucracy is to entrench itself more and more deeply. The stake of officers in ever larger armies and navies, in ever larger appropriations, in ever larger authority, is such that we believe establishment of compulsory military training would set up a continuing conflict between the military and civilian establishments that would be extremely unfortunate.

The presence of large bodies of troops also is a standing invitation to their use in times of domestic stress, as was proved during the dark days of 1929-32. None of us can forget the driving of the veterans from Anacostia flats by troops, and our people well remember that the widespread suffering and unrest among farmers in those days might have brought troops down upon them if the United States had

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been a militaristic nation. We dislike the thought of troops being called out against workers, whether on factory or farm, and we believe that the permanent retention of the large military establishment that would be required with the adoption of peacetime conscription would be a constant threat to peaceable resolution of economic differences.

Third. Compulsory military training is antidemocratic also in that it tends to provide a refuge from the hard thought and action that a democracy requires of its citizens in the solution of their problems. In other words, permanent military training tends toward the regimentation of the mind as well as the body, an exceedingly dangerous thing in a democracy that depends upon the wisdom of the great masses of the people for its successful functioning.

Furthermore, such a program of expenditures offers a specious way out of the hard necessity that confronts us as a nation of finding ways of achieving prosperity and full employment without infringement of those personal liberties that always have been the foundation of the American kind of life.

Compulsory military training will not solve this problem, and, indeed, to the extent that it is offered as a substitute for a smoothly functioning economic system, its adoption would be an active handicap to the achievement of that kind of system.

At the same time a large standing army-which is what universal military training in effect means-is also a provocation to any national administration to embark upon foreign war as a means of solving pressing domestic issues. Historically, that has been the resort of governments that found themselves unable to cope domestically with domestic troubles. We do not believe the American people want their sons offered up in battle for any such reason as that.

Fourth. Preparation for another war-and that is what peacetime conscription means-in the midst of our efforts to exert world leadership for permanent peace, is a contradiction that cannot be explained. away. We do not see how the other nations of the world can be expected to take literally our protestations of peaceful intent if at the same time that we are making them we embark upon the greatest program of preparation for war that we have ever embarked upon in time of peace. If, despite sincere efforts, it proves impossible in the postwar period

Mr. Chairman, there seems to have been a sentenced dropped at this point, so I will just eliminate that.

But the stakes are too high for us to take any step now that imperils the possibility of lasting peace. It is possible that our whole civilization is at stake. Certainly the country at large is not prepared to act now in such a way as to cast doubt upon the firmness of our conviction that a workable peace structure is possible of achievement. Fifth. Finally, we believe that compulsory military training would defeat the ends even of those who advocate it. We are as strongly for the security of the United States from military aggression as any of the proponents of peacetime conscription. But we believe that it would be a grave mistake for the Nation to adopt a law such as is proposed, then to relapse into a blind self-satisfaction in the belief that it was secure. This war has shown us conclusively that the decisive factor in modern war is industrial power and technological dexterity. It would be idle to try to fight a war 10 or 20 years from now with

the airplanes, the tanks, the flame throwers, and the other weapons of today, just as it would have been disastrous had we tried to fight this war with the weapons of 1917.

The best way of assuring success if another war comes-and we earnestly pray that it will not come-is simply by being the most prosperous, the most advanced, and the most skilled nation in the world in peace. Our successes in this war have been due to the industrial miracle that we have worked. We have a splendidly trained army, trained without peacetime conscription, but if it had been trained in the use of obsolete weapons it would have been gravely, perhaps fatally, handicapped. An industry made up of modern plant, manned by skilled and healthy workers, equipped with the best brains that science can afford, managed efficiently-and decentralized so as to be as nearly invulnerable to air attack as possible-this is the guaranty of that production that is indispensable to the waging of successful war in our times. Moreover, the speed with which weapons become obsolete makes it wasteful and ineffective to train large bodies of men to their use. Rather, modern war calls for a small, highly skilled corps of expert technicians prepared at all times to train large bodies of troops in the use of weapons when they need to be used and when they are still the best available.

Peacetime conscription, by offering a substitute for that kind of program, deludes us and actually works against effective prepared

ness.

This is not to say that we would oppose a youth-training program, combining the features of the former Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, and other civilian agencies. We believe in the principles of cooperation, and a program of that kind simply extends to the Nation as a community the principle of cooperation and good neighborliness of a community. We believe that all men have obligations to their neighbors, and we can see much good from a consciously democratic, cooperative training program of that kind. But we must oppose any such military program as those that have been proposed in H. R. 515 and similar measures. Chairman WOODRUM. Thank you, Mr. Smith.

Mr. SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman WoODRUM. Our next witness will be Mr. Homer E. Woodbridge, representing the Middletown, Conn., Committee Against Wartime Passage of Peacetime Conscription. Will you proceed, please?

STATEMENT OF HOMER E. WOODBRIDGE, REPRESENTING MIDDLETOWN COMMITTEE AGAINST WARTIME PASSAGE OF PEACETIME

CONSCRIPTION

Mr. WOODBRIDGE. My full name is Homer E. Woodbridge, 178 Cross Street, Middletown, Conn.

Chairman WOODRUM. Very well. The committee will hear you. Mr. WOODBRIDGE. The group for whom I am speaking includes representatives of various occupations and professions and of different shades of political opinion, but we are entirely agreed in opposing the adoption in wartime of any policy involving universal military service in time of peace.