view that the avenues of diplomatic conversation between the Soviet Union and the United States should be kept open and used. Such action as may be taken by the Senate on the pact should not be allowed to close the doors of direct negotiation with the Soviet Union. II. The churches related to the Federal Council supported Senate ratification of the Charter of the United Nations in the conviction that the security of our Nation was to be derived from a system of collective security embracing all nations. They still hold to this view. If, as a result of such action as may be taken by the Senate on the pact, the interest of the American people in supporting and strengthening the United Nations were to be diminished, the consequences might well be inimical to the peace ot the world. III. In the event the pact is ratified by the Senate, many people of our churches would desire that it be so implemented as to give impetus to those acts of government by which the conditions of peace with justice can be established. The Federal Council believes that "if our Nation's leadership is to be worthy, it must develop constructive and creative programs that will capture the imagination and enlist the support of the multitudes whose interest in battling political, economic, and racial injustice is greater than their interest in defending such injustice merely because communism attacks it." The North Atlantic Pact may conceivably act as a deterrent to the more violent acts of Communist aggression by the Soviet state. However, the ideological thrust of communism cannot effectively be countered by defensive measures. What is required is the transcending of communism by enlarging the areas of political and spiritual freedom and economic well-being throughout the world. Accordingly, we believe the implementation of the pact, if ratified, should be of such a kind as not to imperil the success of those recovery and reconstructive programs to which our Government is or may hereafter be committed. Senate support of authorization of the funds required to assure the continuous success of the European recovery program is very heartening in this respect. IV. In the event the pact is ratified by the Senate, the people of our churches would desire that this regional arrangement be not used as a pretext for unduly expanding the influence of the military in the formulation of foreign policy. The Federal Council's executive committee has expressed the view that "If * our national power is to serve the ends of peace, our basic national strategy should be made by persons who have faith in the achievability of peace and who are qualified by experience and training to use and to evaluate the great possibilities for peace that reside in moral and economic force in organizations like the United Nations and the World Court and in the resources of diplomacy and conciliation." We recognize that under pacts of the kind now being discussed our military leaders have their necessary place. Foreign policy, however, far from being accommodated to the views of the military should remain, as heretofore, the prerogative of the President and the Congress. V. In view of the foregoing, we venture to raise the question as to whether it would be appropriate for the Senate, in the event that body votes to ratify the pact, to accompany the instrument of ratification with a clarifying resolution in which the sense of the Senate would be expressed along such lines as the following: (a) Ratification of the pact is not construed by the Senate as closing the avenues of diplomatic conversation with the Soviet Union; (b) Ratification of the pact is not construed by the Senate as equivalent of or as a substitute for a universal system of collective security; (c) Ratification of the pact is not construed by the Senate as the equivalent of or as a substitute for those curative and creative efforts of government through which it is sought to promote economic recovery, to strengthen the institutions of democracy, and to advance the political and social well-being of subject and dependent peoples; (d) Ratification of the pact is not construed by the Senate as compromising in any way the prior responsibility of the President and the Congress in the shaping of American foreign policy. Faithfully yours, WILLIAM SCARLETT, Chairman. Senator Toм CONNALLY, [Telegram] BENSON, MINN., May 14, 1949. Chairman, Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Senate Office Building, Washington, D. C.: Will be unable to appear before your committee Monday as scheduled. I want to express my opposition to the proposed Atlantic military alliance and to the gigantic rearmament program to follow. The American people have had enough of the discredited Winston Churchill dictating our foreign policy to us. We cannot afford the cost of buying a gold brick in the form of bankrupt British and Dutch empires. This foreign policy is costing us our entire New Deal program because we cannot have money and materials for war and still have housing, electrification, education, and a real farm program. We pay for this foreign policy by sacrificing our democratic heritage for a mad spree of hysteria against co-ops, labor, farmers, liberals, and minorities. We ordinary people do the paying while militarists and munitions moguls grow fat abroad. This wasteful program of dollar diplomacy to bolster corrupt reactionary governments against the demands of the common people everywhere for New Deal reforms is morally wrong. It has already failed in Greece and China. Can we not learn from experience that the extension of our present foreign policy into new areas can only result in more colossal failures and in world hatred for America? JAMES M. YOUNGDALE, Nominee for Congress, 1948, Seventh District, Minnesota. Hon. TOM CONNALLY, HOTEL AND RESTAURANT EMPLOYEES AND Chairman, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Senate Office Building, Washington 25, D. C. MY DEAR SENATOR: I am the international representative for the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union. We are affiliated with the American Federation of Labor and with the Railway Labor Executives Association. We have more than 425,000 members in the States and Territories in our 800 local unions. Please be advised that the convention of our international union which concluded their deliberations in Chicago, April 30, 1949, as a result of a resolution introduced, discussed the North Atlantic Treaty and after discussion voted by an overwhelming vote to endorse same and urge that the Senate raitfy. It is an extreme pleasure for me as per instructions to add the name of our great international union to those endorsing and urging the ratification. Very truly yours, CHAS. E. SANDS, International Representative. NATIONAL RELIGION AND LABOR FOUNDATION, Hon. Toм CONNALLY, Chairman, Foreign Relations Committee, United States Senate, Washington, D. C. DEAR SENATOR CONNALLY: I send you herewith a copy of the official publication of the National Religion and Labor Foundation which reports the opposition of our annual conference in Cincinnati, March 28 to 30, to the North Atlantic Pact. Our conference held that peace "will not come by military alliances which further split our world and further weaken the United Nations and contribute to the polarization of power at the expense of the little countries caught be tween the United States and Russia." It held that "it [peace] will not come by Atlantic, Mediterranean, or Pacific power pacts, or by intensification of the already ominous armaments race." Our conference insisted that "the architects of our Government's foreign policy bring it into conformity with our prophetic and democratic faith.” We believe our alternative program for peace outlined on page 2 comes more nearly being based on our religious and democratic heritage and will do more for peace than the North Atlantic Pact. We spend 1,000 times more for wars annually-past, present, and future-than we do on United Nations. We shall probably be spending 100 times more on the military implementation of the North Atlantic Pact than upon United Nations. We do not believe this is proof of sincerity, when we say we work for peace. We sincerely hope that the Senate will not take action until after the Council of Foreign Ministers has met. Sincerely yours, WILLARD UPHAUS, [From the Economic Justice (Bulletin of the National Religion and Labor Foundation), May 1949] THE GREATEST TASK OF OUR GENERATION IS TO END DRIFT TO WAR, CINCINNATI RLF CONFERENCE DELEGATES TOLD-COMMISSION ON THE WORLD SCENE DECLARED THAT PEACE WILL NOT COME BY ATLANTIC PACT, OMINOUS ARMAMENT RACE, OR BY ALLIANCES WITH REACTIONARY REGIMES-ALTERNATIVE PROGRAM OFFERED [Text of report] We have met here under the auspices of the Religion and Labor Foundation— mindful of our prophetic Judeo-Christian heritage and its impact on American democracy. We have met as citizens of the Nation which gave the world the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the free public-school system, the Emancipation Proclamation, the economic Bill of Rights, labor's Magna Charta-the Wagner Act. We have met in the country where the United Nations was born. We seek to follow the great Hebrew prophets and Jesus--who demanded justice for the poor, liberation for the oppressed, new wine skins for new wine, new attitudes and motives for new ways of life, "new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness." We seek to follow Thomas Jefferson, who declared in the very launching of our Nation "That all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." We believe this Declaration and know it applies to all peoples-to the Indonesian and other colonial people struggling for democratic independence today, as much as to our colonial forefathers. We insist that the architects of our Government's foreign policy bring it into conformity with our prophetic and democratic faith. Let it once again champion the cause of independence for colonial peoples, and justice for the poor and oppressed in America and around the world. Specifically, let us champion the right to independence of dependent peoples, not merely by good words, but by refusing to arm and aid the colonial regimes which use violent aggression to prevent liberation-in defiance of the United Nations. Our plea is that foreign policy decisions be determined by our loyalty to democracy and not by strategic or power advantages. Let us end the color line both at home and in our foreign policy. In colonial and semifeudal lands the time is at hand for fundamental reforms, bringing independence to peoples, and giving land and economic opportunity to exploited peasants, following the example set by the agricultural reforms in Japan. The people in the vast areas involved demand these changes. Let an America which fought a revolution against colonialism and feudalism heed these popular and justified demands and ally itself with them. Let America meet the challenge of world revolution by being true to our own revolutionary past. Wet meet in the atomic age and in the midst of an ever hotter, ever tougher cold war, in a time when armament is challenging armament, belligerence challenging belligerence. We do not like the fruits of that cold war-on either side of the battle lines. We are aghast at the present trend toward war, definitely influenced by military and financial interests. Unless that trend is checked, it will lead us and the peoples of the world into the greatest holocaust in history. It is folly to talk of anyone's winning a third world war, atomic scientists tell Humanity must lose it. All peoples of the world want peace. The drift in our world it toward war. The greatest task of our generation is to end that drift, and secure the peace for which the world yearns and prays. We deny that war is inevitable, affirm that peace is necessary and possible, and that the desire for peace is not the monopoly of any people. us. The last war brought death to many of America's finest boys-and devastation and death on a far larger scale to other invaded nations. A war between the United States and the Soviet Union would be insane and suicidal for the Soviet Union-no less insane and suicidal for the United States. The time has come to seek with Isaiah and Micah that day when the nations shall "beat their swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, when every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and when none shall be afraid." This will not come by military alliances which further split our world and further weaken the United Nations and contribute to the polarization of power at the expense of the little countries caught between the United States and Russia. It will not come by Atlantic, Mediterranean, or Pacific power pacts or by intensification of the already ominous armaments race. It will not come by the suppression of democracy anywhere in the world-or by alliances with reaction as in Portugal, Greece, Spain, China, and Argentina. We have an alternative program to offer. We covet for our Nation the historic glory of taking the initiative on that program's behalf. We know that there is much suspicion, fear, and mistrust in the Soviet Union of moves initiated by the United States, and equal mistrust in the United States of the moves initiated by the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the initiative must be taken. There fore, we call on our Government to: AN ALTERNATIVE PROGRAM FOR PEACE 1. Advocate now a definite and specific program of world disarmament through the United Nations, especially on the part of the great powers from whom comes the threat of global war. We do so because armament expenditures are now so heavy throughout the world that they deprive the peoples of the world of needed consumer goods, housing, health, aid to education, and other socially beneficial economic programs. Men in armed forces are not men who can participate in economically beneficial production. Since voluntary enlistments are more than meeting the quotas set by the armed forces themselves, and since peacetime conscription is an unjustified departure from American tradition and contributes by design to a militaristic spirit alien to America's democratic heritage, we should immediately repeal the unnecessary and costly draft. With the coming of multilateral disarmament and demilitarization, the economic resources and production now devoted to war preparation must be devoted to serving the crying and as yet unmet peacetime humn needs to a great program of slum clearance and housing, to a program of national medical care and hospitalization opportunity for all, to a program to save and expand our schools, to develop our river valleys, to produce ever more consumer goods and to secure for the people who need them the necessary purchasing power. Thus will we strengthen basic American institutions. 2. Strengthen and build the United Nations, and develop government under law for all the world. Work for a United Nations police force, stronger than the armed forces of either the United States or Russia. Make the United Nations so strong that the sovereignty of all nations will be respected against any act of aggression by any nation. We believe that the United Nations should be transformed into a federal world government, acceptable to the United States and Russia, with powers adequate to insure peace. Such a government would (a) be constituted of representatives elected directly by the people, (b) be able to act directly upon individuals in the maintenance of peace, (c) have authority to pass laws that are binding upon its members, (d) possess sufficient power to enforce its laws, and (e) have powers of taxation adequate to insure its own maintenance. 3. Seize every single opportunity for consultation through the UN with Soviet leaders in the interest of facing and resolving the problem and tensions which so ominously threaten the peace. Promote contact and understanding, not only between government leaders, but between the peoples of our great nations. 4. Return to the American democratic tradition under which foreign policy is under civilian and not military control. (We commend the President for the beginning recently made in this direction.) See that the American people as a whole are considered, consulted, and involved in the making of fundamental foreign policy. For example, assure that they are given adequate time, even yet, for careful deliberation and consideration of the serious implications of the Atlantic Pact (which our State Department has brought to its present stage largely without the participation of the people). We believe there is no emergency justifying adoption of any legislation without congressional knowledge or debate of that legislation's specific contents, as was done by the House in the case of the Espionage Act. 5. Dedicate the unmatched economic resources of the United States to the meeting of human needs everywhere, returning to the spirit and program of UNRRA, in which nations cooperated under and through the United Nations in a great program for all the devastated peoples. Expand and implement the splendid suggestion made by President Truman that there be cooperation by all nations through the United Nations for the development of industrially undeveloped areas. We affirm here the basic worth of human beings wherever they live and under whatever creed. No nation, including our own, should play politics with food or with the lives of little children. We are impressed with the record of UNRRA and seek a return to its universal and humanitarian principles. We are impressed also by the testimony of the Brethren, Friends, and other religious groups who are conducting a splendid program of relief and rehabilitation in various areas of the world, and who are distributing aid on the ethically and religiously valid basis of need, regardless of political belief. 6. Implement the commendable support given by our Government to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights by applying it at home through that change in Senate rules necessary to make possible the adoption by this Congress of the President's civil-rights program. 7. Build here at home a democracy which is not afraid of itself or of the bill of rights which is at its roots-a democracy which practices before an observant world equality and fraternity as well as liberty for all—the kind of democracy in which both freedom and security will be guaranteed. 8. Open the doors of immigration to all peoples without discrimination. An America which recaptures its revolutionary democratic faith and which applies it in every corner of our land will be a united America, a morally strong America, and an America which need not and will not be afraid. Senator Tom CONNALLY, [Telegram] NEW YORK, N. Y., May 19, 1949. Chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senate Office Building, Washington, D. C.: Furriers joint council of New York representing 15,000 fur workers opposes ratification of North Atlantic war pact. Urge conferences be initiated with Soviet Union for settlement of differences. We feel that certainly no decision should be made until Council of Foreign Ministers have completed their May 23 meeting in Paris. SOL OAKLANDER, Secretary, Furriers Joint Council of New York. FARMERS EDUCATIONAL AND COOPERATIVE UNION OF AMERICA Senator TOM CONNALLY, WASHINGTON, D. C., May 10, 1949. Chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senate Office Building, Washington, D. C. DEAR SENATOR CONNALLY: With this I am enclosing a copy of a resolution adopted by the board of directors of the National Farmers Union, March 19, 1949, with respect to United States foreign policy and in particular with respect to such regional agreements as the North Atlantic Treaty now pending before the Foreign Relations Committee. It should be observed that the board of directors of the National Farmers Union is composed of all State presidents of our organization and is not a select group. Hence the attitude adopted by the board on March 19, on foreign policy may unquestionably be taken as fully representative of the rank-and-file membership of the organization. I should appreciate it very much if you would see to it that this letter and the board statements are made a part of the record of the hearings on the North Atlantic Treaty. Sincerely, JAMES G. PATTON, President. |