us against any and all who might seek to challenge the supremacy of the greatest nation in the world.

Chairman WOODRUM. Thank you very much, Mr. Hines. We are very glad to have had you, sir.

Mrs. Mary Farquharson, representing the Women's International League, the Oregon State Committee Opposing Peacetime Conscription, the Washington State Committee Opposing Peacetime Conscription. Mrs. Farquharson is a former State senator of Washington. We are very glad to have you, Mrs. Farquharson.

STATEMENT OF MRS. MARY FARQUHARSON, REPRESENTING THE WOMEN'S INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE AND THE OREGON AND WASHINGTON STATE COMMITTEES OPPOSING PEACETIME CONSCRIPTION

Mrs. FARQUHARSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I should like to ask permission to put into the record, in addition to the statement I am about to make, some additional material in connection with an international resolution doing away with conscription. This is the idea which the groups I represent, three of them, two State committees, in addition to the Women's International League-this is the idea all of those groups are most interested in, but since I have been attending the San Francisco Conference I did not have time to prepare properly this material in advance. So, if I have your permission, I should like to add that to the statement I shall make. Thank you very much.

Mr. Chairman, I speak today as a representative of three organizations: the Women's International League, the Oregon State Committee Opposing Peacetime Conscription, and the Washington State Committee Opposing Peacetime Conscription. The Women's International League is associated with the honored name of its great founder, Jane Addams, and since the First World War has included in its membership women leaders in many countries. Some of these women were sent to concentration camps in the countries of Europe where totalitarian government-partly an outgrowth of militarismcould not tolerate citizens who believed that ultimate authority is in the people and that all government should be directly responsible to them. Some of our members we know paid with their lives for daring to resists fascism.

Both the Oregon and Washington Committees Opposing Peacetime Conscription are made up of ordinary citizens-none of them very wealthy or very powerful-who believe that the degree of democracy in this or any other country is in inverse ratio to the influence that military leaders have in government. These committees have been organized solely because their members are alarmed at the threat of a conscriptive system in America in peacetime, which would, they are convinced, be a long step away from the policies which have built our democratic society. Dr. Norman Coleman, formerly president of Reed College, in Portland, is chairman of the Oregon committee, and Prof. F. B. Farquharson, professor of engineering and director of research at the University of Washington, is chairman of the Washington committee. In every way possible these committees have encouraged public discussion of the issues involved through the distri

bution of literature and discussion on public platforms. They believe that if there is time for full information concerning the forces that are spearheading the drive for conscription, as well as time for a sober analysis of its alleged benefits, there is no question as to how the American public will react. This conviction has been strengthened by our experience in Washington State where the committee has sponsored approximately 70 debates, mostly in Seattle, before community clubs of various kinds. We would be willing to rest our case on the verdict of the members of those clubs.

We are aware that one of the big reasons behind a drive for conscription is the realization that mass unemployment in this country would be disastrous throughout the world. And very few leaders seem to have a solution for the unemployment dilemma except the fatal path of armaments and conscription. We are also aware of the fact that vested interests are at stake in the form of continuing jobs and promotions for officer personnel, as well as tremendous financial profits for many economic barons. A survey of the business connections of officers and members of the Citizens' Committee for Military Training, Inc., leaves no room for doubt at this point. However, we are convinced that for the large body of citizens the main appeal in this drive to depart radically from American traditional policy is fear of the future, and a rather desperate searching for security.

But a number of secondary values are attributed to peacetime military conscription of its proponents which might be grouped under a heading of health and character building. It is strange that these advantages have only recently been realized by leaders of American thought, and on the other hand have frequently been advanced by apologists for dictatorial, militarized societies. The Des Moines Tribune on October 10, 1929, quoted ex-Kaiser Wilhelm:

Compulsory military service was the best school for the physical and mental toughening of our people. It created for us freemen who knew their own value.

Volumes have been written to this effect by Prussian military leaders. Gen. Friederich von Bernhardi, in Germany and the Next War, said: Military training produces intellectual and moral forces which richly repay the time spent, and have their real value in subsequent life * * the money so spent serves social and educational ends, and raises the nation spiritually and morally.

* * *

Admirers of the Japanese social order have been equally enthusiastic regarding the strengthening of democracy which comes from compulsory army training. Capt. Elbridge Colby, writing in the Infantry Journal, volume 34, February 1929, said:

*

Japan's universal service law has abolished classes and clans. * A semiskeleton army, like that of Japan, with a peace strength of 210,000, a war strength of over 1,000,000, and preconscription training for nearly 1,000,000 boys, close to the people, is a formidable machine; but it is also a democratic machine. One of the commonest arguments formerly advanced by advocates of German nazism's new order is being repeated frequently now. Youth from all classes of society will be thrown together on equal terms, we are told, and they will come to understand each other better, and thus class distinctions will be abolished. But military conscription does not work in the direction of equality because a military hierarchy is based on a caste system. It intensifies and exaggerates social classes in every phase of the training.

Discipline and responsibility to the community are other virtues frequently claimed now for a conscription program in this country, as they formerly were in Hitler's Germany. That the youth of this country-as well as the rest of us-need to learn the values of selfimposed discipline as well as to assume more fully the obligations of community living, we would not deny. It is a job for all of us to work on in schools, labor groups, churches, homes, and community organizations of many kinds. But a forced descipline imposed from without does not make for citizens who will assume initiative and leadership in helping to solve the appalling problems of the world. Neither does it make for the assumption of responsibility. When we want to describe a person who refuses to take responsibility and who is doing just enough to get by, and no more, we frequently describe him as "soldering" on the job. To learn to obey and not to think is the rule of the army, but it is a fatal rule for citizens of a country whose duty it is to think freely and to express their thoughts and to help determine policies of government.

Without question the main appeal in the proposal for military conscription is its alleged guarantee of security against the future. As the realization sinks in that we human beings have perfected the technical means for destroying ourselves, we begin to realize that we don't know what's going to stop us from doing it. In a wild search for safety we turn toward methods which have been proved beyond all question completely self-defeating. Not a single country has been saved from the ravages of war because of its huge military machine.

No matter what the motives are in building up military power, its very presence affects relationships with all other countries in the world as well as changing the thinking of its own citizens. President Wilson, speaking to soldiers and sailors on July 4, 1919, put it this

way:

Nobody who really knew anything about history supposed that Germany could build up a great military machine as she did and refrain from using it. They were constantly talking about it as a guarantee of peace, but every man in his senses knew that it was a threat of war.

The time has come to realize that our only security lies in facing realistically the causes of war--the devil theory of "bad" groups-aggressors-attacking "good" groups out of a clear sky is a form of fooling ourselves which we can no longer afford. "War is the transfer to the battlefield of our peacetime poliiies." If we want security we can help change those policies. We can change the pattern of aggression which expresses itself in empire and in arrogant nationalism which says that what we do is nobody's business but our own. Groups of people in local communities have peace and security because they have built up a real feeling of community interest, and on the same basis the world can have security also. For either we believe that people in every country of the world are people like ourselves, or else we believe in some variation of the "master race" theory. And if other people in the world are like ourselves we know that they will cease being aggressive when they have "status" equal to the rest of us and an equal measure of physical and economic well-being.

The United Nations have started the building of a world community by working out a form of world organization. Surely now is the time for America to take the lead in urging the world organization to adopt an international convention for the abolition of conscription.

It is recorded that President Wilson in his first draft of the Covenant of the League proposed to make military training illegal for all affiliated nations. Lloyd George, following the last war, made a fight for such an international convention, and General Smuts in 1919 said: I look upon conscription as the taproot of miiltarism; unless that is cut, all our labors will eventually be in vain.

The Soviet Government, during the disarmament conference in Geneva, called for such abolition as a part of the most comprehensive plan for disarmament which has ever been offered to nations. In the Soviet Declaration of November 30, 1927, six detailed proposals are made. If the present policy of the Soviet Union is in the opposite direction, may it not be because the pattern of armaments, and conscription, throughout the world-in spite of the fact that German militarism is crushed and Japanese militarism is on its way out-shows signs of becoming entrenched and extended? An international convention now abolishing peacetime conscription would be the first step. in changing the pattern and in easing the crushing burdens of armaments-not only crushing from an economic standpoint but because of the horrible fear that goes with them, and which increases as they increase. Never before in history has this country had an opportunity to make such a decisive move in the direction of a real world community. In this direction lies the only security for us or for any peoples in the world. The other direction means calamity.

other

Chairman WOODRUM. Thank you very much, Mrs. Farquharson. The next witness is Mr. Loren Grey. I understand this is the statement of Mr. R. J. Thomas, president of the International Union, United Automobile, Aircraft, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, that you are about to read, Mr. Grey.

Mr. GREY. Yes.

STATEMENT OF R. J. THOMAS, PRESIDENT OF UNITED AUTOMOBILE WORKERS OF AMERICA, AS READ BY LOREN GREY

Mr. GREY. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, my name is Loren Grey, a resident of Los Angeles and a member of the UAW veterans committee. I am testifying for Mr. R. J. Thomas. Our union is affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the union more commonly known as UAW-CIO. Our union has a membership of well over a million workers, nearly all of them engaged in war work in the industries listed in the name of the union.

Approximately 150,000 members of our organization are veterans of World War I. Some 400,000 are in service or have returned from service in World War II.

I am testifying here today as a representative of the union. Nearly 6 months ago our international executive board, composed of members democratically elected to represent the membership in various geographical regions of the United States, passed a resolution stating the opposition of our organization specifically to the bills pending in Congress providing for peacetime conscription and generally to any action or even consideration of peacetime conscription proposals at all until the present war has ended.

This resolution which our board passed was first submitted to it by the National UAW-CIO War Veterans Committee. This national 73951-45-pt. 1-27

committee, composed entirely of veterans of the two World Wars, was elected at a national conference of veterans who are union members called by our international union in Washington a year ago last April. The resolution, before submission to the executive board, had been adopted unanimously by the veterans committee.

I shall not read here the entire resolution but I shall file a copy of it with the clerk of the committee. I would like to read, however, several pertinent passages from it, and I quote:

Those bills (referring to those pending in Congress) are undemocratic and un-American, a direct contradiction of our tradition of freedom.

The present war has demonstrated clearly that the nations best equipped to defend themselves against aggression are those most advanced technologically. America's best defense against future aggressions is therefore the development of our national resources and our technical know-how through a program of full employment and prosperity.

From any point of view, it is premature to pass legislation calling for peacetime conscription before we know what kind of world organization will follow the war. The establishment by the United Nations of effective machinery to keep the peace can and should make peacetime conscription unnecessary.

I think this committee and Congress and the American people as a whole should carefully consider the statement already made before you by a gallant young soldier, representing veterans of World War II, Lt. Charles G. Bolté, who said, in effect that the purpose of conscription is not to prevent war, but its purpose is rather to win war. I think that statement is true, and I think that the only possible excuse for universal peacetime conscription is the threat of immediate or inevitable acts of aggression against us by enemy nations.

The only nations in the world whom we know to be our enemies today are either already defeated or about to be defeated. Certainly, unless we intend to accuse one of our allies of treachery in this moment of victory, there is no immediate threat of aggression.

Some will ask, of course, what about an inevitable threat of aggression?

We are now engaged in a great conflict in which the lives of millions of Americans and of our allies are being sacrificed. At the very outset of this conflict, we pledged ourselves that we and all the peaceloving peoples of the world would build on the wreckage and ruin of this struggle an enduring peace. Now that victory is near, we are taking the first steps toward building that peace.

Do we now, at this significant point in history, declare to the world and admit to ourselves that we have no faith in the ability of the nations to form a world organization that will preserve peace? That is what we shall do if Congress moves now to legislate the peacetime conscription of our youth. We shall be abandoning our hopes for peace and we shall be double-crossing our soldiers who are still fighting, the many who have already given their lives or sustained wounds and the civilians who have been bereft of their loved ones-all on the promise that this war would cleanse the world of war.

I have said that possibly the threat of aggression, immediate or inevitable, is an excuse for peacetime conscription-possibly it is.

In my own mind, I have to qualify that statement in at least two respects.

In the first place: If peacetime conscription is an essential in winning a war we may be engaged in, it is not the only nor the most important essential in modern warfare. Honest advocates of effi