peace.

In the period of war we have pressures on the labor market for full employment, and that in itself helps to reduce the discrimination. The Nation needed the contribution of the Negroes in American industry, needed the contribution of American women in American industry, needed the contribution of all the groups, and readily called upon them. Whether or not they are rewarded for that contribution by having to go back to their homes is the question I think that is in their minds. We have a real fear that there will be unemployment. We think perhaps a certain amount of unemployment is inevitable, that is, unemployment during the reconversion period, but certainly they should not use the question of race, or sex, or origin to determine whether this fellow has a better chance for a job than that fellow. It should be based on their contribution over a period of time, what we call seniority, and their ability to perform rather than on the basis of parenthood, national origin or race, or any other question, especially those questions that have to do with natural differences, that are God-made differences, they are the questions that certainly should not be used to place one man on a lower level or in a lower category than someone else.

Senator CHAVEZ. Thank you, Mr. Carey. Have you any questions, Senator Aiken?

Senator AIKEN. No. I want to say I always enjoy discussions with Mr. Carey, because he invariably discusses matters intelligently, and even sometimes when he is on the other side, he is very sincere in the position which he takes.

Senator CHAVEZ. You can never doubt his sincerity of purpose. Senator AIKEN. I appreciate he is one of the most sincere and men among the labor unions today.

Mr. CAREY. Remember, Senator-if I may take the time, Mr. Chairman-the first time we met was in a debate in Williams College in Massachusetts. After I heard Senator Aiken, who was then Governor of Vermont, I believe, I thought it was no wonder that he was elected to his high office, but if he expressed the views in the Republican Club in New York City that he expressed in Williams College, I think he would have been thrown out, he might have been charged with being a C. I. O. man, or something, and that is a lot, Senator.

Senator CHAVEZ. Thank you, Mr. Carey. Professor Sheldon.

STATEMENT OF PROF. JAMES H. SHELDON, CHAIRMAN, NEW YORK METROPOLITAN COUNCIL ON FAIR EMPLOYMENT PRACTICE, NEW YORK, N. Y.

Mr. SHELDON. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for changing my time from yesterday to today. I was sick yesterday and only barely able to get here today.

Senator CHAVEZ. I hope you have improved.

Mr. SHELDON. Thank you very much for the change of schedule. I am appearing here as chairman of the New York Metropolitan Council on Fair Employment Practice for the purpose or recording the Council's strong support of the proposed measure for creating a permanent F. E. P. C. or similar set-up, and for the purpose also of urging that the more quickly such steps can be taken the better.

Senator CHAVEZ. Dr. Sheldon, in your prepared statement do you have an explanation of the council?

Mr. SHELDON. Yes; I have. Shall I go over that now?
Senator CHAVEZ. Yes.

Mr. SHELDON. I will abbreviate it. The New York Metropolitan Council on Fair Employment Practice represents approximately 50 of the leading civic agencies and organizations in New York concerned with employment or placement problems, and with related civic and social questions. It includes Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Negro, labor, interfaith, civic, patriotic, vocational, and other types of groups. I shall not read the entire list of associated groups since a great many of them have already made separate appearances, and because yesterday, in hearing from a corresponding council in Detroit and another in Philadelphia, your committee will have had a pretty good picture of the set-up which has been established among the social agencies, labor and civic groups in several of our leading cities of the country, including the two which I mentioned, and New York. Some of the leading groups in this field affiliated with the council have already appeared here and in the case of the New York Federation of Churches and National Council of Jews and Christians, American Jewish Congress, and so on. Among the other organizations represented in the Council are the New York Urban League, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Greater New York C. I. O. Council, New York Council of Church Women, Loyal Americans of German Descent, City-Wide Citizens Committee for Harlem, Federation Employment Service, Brotherhood of Painters, Common Council for American Unity, Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League, Brotherhood of Railway Carmen of America, Joint Council of Dining Car Employees of New York, the Y. M. C. A., various branches, Y. W. C. A., various branches, National Council of Jewish Women, and many other similar well-established and responsible institutions, including leading employment agencies and vocational counseling groups, as well as civic and religious bodies.

These various organizations got together some 3 years ago, for the purpose of pooling their common information and efforts, in order to make every potential worker in New York available to the war effort, regardless of his religious or racial background and regardless of his previous economic or vocational difficulties. The council has cooperated very closely with official agencies, including the War Manpower Commission, the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice, the Governor's Committee on Discrimination in Employment a New York State agency-the New York State War Council, the Office of Mayor LaGuardia of New York, and other public and private agencies.

I am able to say, as my first point, that the overwhelming majority of thoughtful, well-considered opinion, among people close to employment and vocational problems in New York City, is that the Committee on Fair Employment Practice should be continued as an official agency of the United States Government and should be made permanent. Further, that steps for this continuance should be taken immediately, so as to be effective well before any steps are taken for demobilization of our armed forces now in Europe or for the largescale transfer into peacetime industries of the millions of men and women at present employed in war plants.

Because I know there are Senators on your committee who come from parts of the country with problems radically different from those of New York City, I hope you will let me take a moment to indicate to you some of the unique but vitally important problems of a huge metropolitan community like New York City in relation to this matter before us today.

New York City has a population of just under seven and a half million persons. These seven and a half million are in a very real sense a cross section of all the different kinds of people in the world. When Hitler made war on the democracies, he declared that America would be one of the easiest of all countries to conquer, because, said Hitler, divided against herself in terms of race, religion, and nationality America can be made an easy prey for the divide and conquer propaganda which has been the most effective weapon in the hands of the Nazis all over the world. It is a great tribute to American democracy that our country as a whole and New York City in particular, which is a cross section of all peoples of the world, have stood firm and have been of one purpose during this war, despite the impact of that very cleverly conceived propaganda.

New York City includes amongst her seven and a half million souls so many different groups which Senators from other parts of the country and visitors to New York might call minorities that in New York the minorities are actually the majority. Thus, in New York City there are fully one-half million Negroes. There are more than 2,000,000 adherents to the Jewish faith. There are considerably more than a million persons who are of Italian descent, and our mayor comes from that group. There are almost one-fifth of a million New Yorkers who are of Spanish or other Iberian descent, almost one-fifth of a million, 127,000, who count Spanish as their mother tongue, and if you add the group which falls into the second generation or third generation but still considers itself as of Spanish-American background, it comes to about one-fifth of a million.

I may observe in passing that I had the pleasure the other day of speaking to the Confederated Spanish Societies of New York and happened to mention to one of their officers that I would be here in Washington on this matter, and I was directed to convey to the chairman the hope that he would soon come and speak in New York. I put that in as an aside, not particularly for the record.

In New York there are even enough people of Chinese and Japanese extraction-15,000 of them-to make up a good sized town in a State like my home State of Massachusetts.

So the problem in a place like New York City is to be sure that the old American principle that every man is entitled to a fair chance means even a little more than it does in some other parts of the country, because if people were permitted to discriminate against others because of their skin or religion in a city like New York, the whole structure of life would soon break down. It has been said in a very true sense that the great majority of New Yorkers belong to some minority group or other.

So this is the second point that I want to make to you today: That in an urban area like that for which I speak here, it is more than desirable, it is basically necessary that government should provide safeguards so that all Americans may enjoy equal opportunities regardless of their race or their religious beliefs. In these days I do not

need to labor the point by showing that equal opportunity is a meaningless phrase unless it means equal opportunity to work and to earn one's living.

Now, Mr. Chairman, the groups which make up our council have. followed very closely and with a great deal of interest the activities of the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice. We believe that the methods and purposes of this Committee have, taken in a general sense, justified themselves one hundred percent.

When the F. E. P. C. first came to New York to hold its open hearing there in February 1942, I appeared before the hearing and brought with me the employment forms of a number of concerns which were engaged in making airplanes and bombs and which had their plants in New York City or were recruiting labor there. I have got here photostats of some of the application forms which I presented to this first New York hearing of the F. E. P. C. back in February 1942, at the New York Bar Association Building.

Here, for example, is the application form of the Bell Aircraft Corporation, and if you notice the space I have marked in red, one of the questions which that airplane company, well known to all of you now as the maker of the famous Airacobra and other planes, one of the first questions they put to the prospective employee is: "What is your color?" Another question: "What is your nationality?" That did not mean: Where were you born? But in some cases it meant: Where were your grandparents born? The third question is: "What is your religion?" It is right here, to be filled out in black and white, as the first step of a prospective employee going into their plant. Here is a similar form from another aircraft plant out on Long Island, the Colgate-Larsen Aircraft Co., where the application form states: "Color" and "Religion."

Here is the Fairchild Aviation Corporation, and their application form is more inclusive in its questioning. They inquire as to the descent of the applicant, "For example, English, Scotch, German," and an applicant was told that Jewish was considered in that category. They have an inquiry as to the religion of the applicant, and they inquire as to a number of similar matters, not related to the applicant's mechanical ability.

Here is a similar form for the Glenn L. Martin Co.

Now, Mr. Chairman, the reason I have brought those photostats out of our 2-year-old archives today is this: Yesterday afternoon I thought that before I appeared before you I should see what progress had been made with regard to situations like this in the aircraft industries around New York. I went to the extent of getting a friend of mine to go and actually apply for work yesterday in those plants, and yesterday he was not asked what was his religion, he did not have to make out a blank stating his descent, there was no mark put on his blank as to his color, and the regional office of the F. E. P. C. answered my inquiry on the point by stating that in their opinion the situation among the aircraft plants and related industries in the New York area was satisfactory today. I put this into the record. now because I believe that here is an example of the kind of progi ess which has been made during the last 2 years as the direct result of the work of the F. E. P. C. in our area.

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General MacArthur's brave troops in the Pacific and General Eisenhower's hard-fighting men in France, have never, to my knowledge, sent messages home to the American people saying, "Ship us some more Aryan airplanes or some more Nordic bombs." They have rather called for well-made planes than would go into Tokyo and bring our boys safely back to the base, and for bombs that would destroy the Nazi robot emplacements. In fighting a war of this kind no manufacturer has a right to say to a potential machinist, or even to a prospective janitor, "I will not hire you because I do not like your religion, or because I do not like your color." That is the principle on which the Nazis have been fighting the war, but it is not the principle on which America fights.

Now, on this matter of discrimination in war plants-take the aviation industry around New York as an example the F. E. P. C. has put in a splendid record of performance. They have done a good job and have justified the methods and procedures which they have worked out and enforced. I believe they justified those methods enough to make us draw the conclusion that generally similar approaches to this problem will work in the post-war period, will deal effectively and in a way not calculated to create trouble with these same problems as they arise during the period when our soldiers are coming home.

Last spring the New York Metropolitan Council on Fair Employment Practice held its annual conference, as it does every year, and heard the progress report from a lot of employment agencies and others around New York on this general problem, and as the result of that progress report the New York Times, I think one of the most conservative and generally reliable papers in the country and the most representative of the opinions and needs of the people in the city and State of New York, wrote an editorial, and I quote from the Times editorial of May 3:

More than one employer in the New York region continues to reject job applicants because of their color or creed. The Metropolitan Council of Fair Employment Practice has analyzed 1,094 complaints received in the first 3 months of this year. Every such complaint may not be justified, but there must be many

unrecorded cases.

Negroes are the chief sufferers from refusal to hire, refusal to upgrade to better work and pay, and dismissal on the ground of race. Jewish workers are sometimes victims of various arbitrary devices. Imprints stamped or penciled on their application set them apart as surely as the arm bands which the Nazis compel their fellows in Europe to wear.

Happily, such prejudice, though many instances come to light, does not characterize New York employers in general. Only a few would deny a fellowAmerican the right to earn a living. Only a few are so ignorant or so pervert as to play Hitler's game against the well-being of America. A hopeful sign is that Negroes employed in the Nation's war industries this year make up 7.2 percent of the total, whereas in 1942 their proportion was only 3 percent.

That is the end of my quotation from the Times, and I have inserted it here because I wanted to have in your record a reflection of opinion as to how the F. E. P. C. has functioned in New York from a source which we would all acknowledge as being conservative in the good sense and reliable.

Now, I do not want to go into a lot of details as to whether the particular procedure of the F. E. P. C. in every little case has been good or bad, but the point that I do want to make is this: that this