fore, I shall approach the whole question in terms of my own contact with our social problems during and after the war, and the reasons why I have devoted my whole energies for the past 3 years toward bringing about what the President has now recommended.

The impact of total war; when I saw and reported the social chaos in our own war centers 3 years ago, I said: "The social impact of total mobilization of the home front is little short of catastrophe not so much for lack of agencies, whether Federal, State, or local, but because of faulty coordination on every level, that results in waste of money and energy while human suffering remains unalleviated." It became painfully clear to me that our social machinery on a local, State, and Federal basis, is not geared to function smoothly and that the Nation can no longer afford an admistrative tangle now wholly inadequate not only to meet a war crisis, but to cope with the mounting complexities of the postwar world.

I was referring to the confusion in our large war centers, the manpower chaos, bad living conditions of war workers, the break-down in local facilities-schools, transportation, housing, health and welfare agencies an unnecessary social chacs that was in sharp contrast to the efficiency of production within the factories. Aside from the migrant labor that had invaded these industrial centers, there were millions of permanent slum dwellers in our cities who are exposed to the same abominable health and living conditions while competing with each other for wages so meager and insecure that they constantly hover on the bring of despair. Meanwhile, an elaborate welfare machinery, both public and private, failed utterly in giving these urban masses the most elementary protection.

The war did not create new social problems. It intensified already existing weaknesses in our social structure of which we had been too unaware. Our industrial development even before the war had been so rapid that our social thinking had not kept pace with the new living conditions that it created both in cities and in agricultural areas. The war emphasized the fact that human beings are now tied to the machine as they were once tied to the land. I became aware as I traveled from city to city that our efforts for social betterment have never reached the mass of our people and that the human agony I witnessed day after day was the penalty for our blunders in time of peace. Postwar problems: Since then, gentlemen, I have seen another Nation-wide panorama of human despair, suffering, and frustration, as well as the dangerous postwar unrest which is their natural result. Recently I traveled through seven Southern States. There the rural areas are almost devoid of the health, education, and welfare facilities which we deem essential to what we so proudly term the American way of life. In the big industrial centers, we have overorganization and maladministration of welfare. In contrast throughout our vast rural areas we have such meager public and private facilities to protect the welfare of human beings that anyone who has the Nation's future at heart, is forced to realize that such injustice cannot be allowed to continue.

We have gone through a dangerous strike-the coal strike-which hinged for the first time upon the demand for a welfare fund. The demand was justified, for we had permitted the mining families in the Appalachian Mountains to sink to a point of human degradation

which my recent articles in the Washington Post understated, in order to remain within the bounds of the credible.

However, I made it clear in those articles that the conditions with which the families in the surrounding mountains contend are just as deplorable and that the rural population has about one-tenth of the average cash income the miners receive. The miners, as well as the mountain people, became in my articles a vivid symbol of our crass indifference and injustice to great regions of our country and to millions of our fellow citizens.

From such impoverished rural areas as surrounded the Appalachian mines comes the vast army of agricultural migrants who wander from State to State in a social no-man's land. The majority of them lead a life that makes even the hard profession of the miners seem a protected occupation. The agricultural worker finds himself beset with all the disadvantages that characterized industrial conditions toward the end of the last century-poor wages and housing, seasonal unemployment, lack of health and welfare provisions, child labor, and so forth.

There is another welfare problem which exists all over our country which is particularly acute in our 10 Southern States. I refer to the major social engineering problem of absorbing some 10,000,000 returned soldiers to a normal different civilian existence. For the veterans who had a start in life before they went to war the GI bill of rights offers educational and economical opportunities. For the majority of boys who are poor, who left grammar school at the sixth grade or earlier, who will not sit in benches with school children, who have no job to come back to and no job in prospect—and especially for most Negroes-the GI bill has no practical answers. They are getting the run-around to such an extent that the lid will blow off this boiling pot unless the Nation faces more realistically the problem of placing returned military personnel in school, a job, and a home.

The problem is so acute throughout the South because we have consistently ignored the health and educational problems of the South. These States want opportunities for their children worthy of our best American traditions. For a multitude of reasons, they have not been able to afford them though the percentage of their education tax rates in some cases are higher than they are in our more prosperous areas. The time has come when we must see not only the stark injustice but the absurdity of denying millions of American children their most elementary birthrights, to become healthy citizens with a basic education.

Conservative of human resources; the military authorities have aroused the whole country with the revelation that 5,000,000 young men in the best age group were found unfit to defend their country for reasons of illiteracy and physical defects. The picture they gave before Senator Pepper's committee of general health conditions of American youth was appalling. Good schools throughout the Nation and enforcement of compulsory school attendance, they declared, would have placed 250 additional divisions between us and our dangerous enemy.

The purely economic argument for child care is equally convincing. Why were the production records higher in the northern shipyards and factories? Because the majority of their workers came from those

areas where we have the best schools, the most developed health and welfare programs. You should have seen the families that emerged from the neglected rural areas throughout the South to work in the Gulf shipyards. The adults were often old, worn-out people at 40; the children undernourished and disease-ridden. As far as production was concerned, these people, according to personnel managers, Iwere of little use. Yet they constituted a fourth of the manpower. These underprivileged masses are a gigantic economic burden upon our industrial society.

But it was not only in the South that these untrained workers could be found. Every large industrial center had an invasion of these underprivileged, uncultivated people. Everywhere I heard the native population exclaim, "These awful war workers, they are ruining our beautiful city." A class warfare existed in these communities between the haves and the have-nots, between the safe and sheltered citizens and the foot-loose multitudes who must seek a precarious livelihood wherever and whenever the machines summon them. It took a total war to teach our prosperous contended Americans that the whole Nation pays the price if we allow millions of children in our slums and agricultural areas to grow up without a chance to become healthy human beings with some kind of basic training.

If we are going to maintain our position, if we can, of industrial leadership in the postwar world, the economic system must serve our total social organization, not merely a favored part of it in either the geographic or the human sense. The ability to produce wealth depends on the proportion of the useful to the nonproductive population. Therefore, the use of the national wealth to improve the quality of our people is the surest method of creating more wealth.

If we have failed to see the handicaps of the South in education, health, and welfare, we can close our eyes to the problem no longer. The veteran, whether he be white or black, who has returned to these miserable living conditions will no longer endure them. The tension between the poor white population and the Negroes is so acute that race riots such as happened recently at Columbia, Tenn., are inevitable unless vocational education is provided for both groups without delay. The fact that many Negroes are migrating to the slums of our northern and western cities will increase the economic rivalry there, without decreasing it sufficiently in the South. I am not given to overstatement, gentlemen. If my factual reports of conditions in the Nation have earned any confidence in your judgment, I appeal to you to believe me when I say that more social and economic justice to the Negro and more practical answers to the needs of veterans are two of our gravest national problems. At present, the jobless veterans with no educational possibilities, none of the health provisions to which military service has accustomed them, no jobs, no sanitary homes, are marking time on their $20 a week unemployment allowance. That is keeping them more or less quiet for the moment. Yet, the situation is so serious that any skilled demagog could set a revolt in motion.

Mr. WHITTINGTON. The things that are directly before us, among others, are the abolition of the United States Unemployment Compensation Commission and the placing of that under the Social Security Board, and I am wondering of you feel that the interest of the

Federal employees, or the other employees, would be adversely affected by that part of the proposed plan.

You were in my State recently and you visited the Hobson plantation in the district I represent.

Mrs. MEYER. They are very brilliant people.

Mr. WHITTINGTON. I recall your article there. I have known your husband for 25 years.

Mrs. MEYER. I do not think it would affect that adversely, because in the Social Security Board are the people who are most versed in insurance problems and I think they would get a lot of help out of it.

In addition, I think the whole trend of Government is to eliminate the numerous commissions that we have that float, so to speak, in the air, because they really put a responsibility on our Chief Executive, that he cannot possibly carry. They are responsible to no one but the President.

Mr. WHITTINGTON. Can you think of any administrator or any board in the Government that handles more claims than the Social Security Board or the administrator that follows?

Mrs. MEYER. No. Therefore, I think they would get an enormous amount of help out of being in the same set-up.

Mr. WHITTINGTON. A great many things have been said about the Employees' Compensation Board as presently constituted, being a bipartisan board. I ask you this question: I personally have never heard of the matter of politics entering into the adjudication of that Board, but the tendency is, in recent years, to establish administrators instead of these so-called bipartisan boards. I am just wondering if you can point out any administrator that adjudicates more claims for more different Republicans and Democrats and nonparty affiliates and others than the Veterans' Administrator, where you have a single administrator?

Mrs. MEYER. I think it is a general conclusion of all people who have studied our administrative problems that a single administrator is always a more effective agency than a board. I think that was one of the reasons why the Federal Security Board was eliminated, because it was found to be not very effective.

Mr. WHITTINGTON. Then, more particularly in the District of Columbia, this proposed plan that you advocate here provides for the abolition of the "Board of Visitors at St. Elizabeths Hospital and its functions are abolished." Are you familiar with that Board?

Mrs. MEYER. I am not familiar with those details. I have never been able to do any work at St. Elizabeths. Therefore, it would be much safer for me not to give my answer.

Mr. WHITTINGTON. I think that is a fair answer.

Mrs. MEYER. May I continue?

The CHAIRMAN. You may continue?

Mrs. MEYER. Child neglect and racial intolerance; but it is the problem of adequate child care that should be our deepest concern since children represent the future of our Nation. More than 5,000,000 children under 17 at present attend no school whatsoever. Wherever the schools are inadequate, health and welfare provisions are poor or nonexistent. Child labor, which had never been sufficiently controlled, has been dangerously stimulated by the war. Malnutrition, delinquency, and crime are the byproducts of our indifference to the educational and

social needs of childhood. We cannot conceal from ourselves, if we are honest, that our concern for the child is largely lip service. We must become more sensitive to human values. We must see our shameful wholesale neglect of childhood for the crime that it is. It will now take great effort and wisdom to overcome the disruptive effects of total war upon the Nation's children and upon family life. Mere preaching concerning the basic importance of family life will have no effect. The family can only be stabilized in a stable society.

I also found in my recent journey that racial and religious intolerance is becoming more acute every day. The causes are not far to seek. Fear of impending change, of sharper competition for jobs and general unrest make us all insecure and sharpen antipathies that had been softened during days of peace and prosperity. We Americans, in spite of all the injustices we have committed, were the world leaders in generous treatment of minorities. We are still a generous people, but when conditions become unsettled we revert easily to the primitive fear of the stranger. If we regain our former security through social solidarity and participation in a meaningful word, our fears, jealousies, and hatred will again be brought under conscious control.

If we think of the enormous problems of the reconversion period, better care of children, justice to our Negro fellow citizens, the readjustment of the war workers and returned veterans to the local community, it becomes obvious that only immediate coordinated planning on a Nation-wide scale between the Federal Government, the States, and the localities can prevent hardship, mass migrations from underprivileged areas, and possible disorder. A social program of such dimensions cannot be handled by the local communities alone, nor yet by the States, least of all by the Federal Government acting as a dictator, but only by the united and streamlined efforts of all three pulling together. Yet from the harmonious interaction of all these gigantic forces, there could arise a new America, a new moral and spiritual power commensurate with the physical grandeur of our vast Nation.

Mr. RICH. May I interrupt you there?

Mrs. MEYER. Yes.

Mr. RICH. I am very much interested in this indictment of the things that seem to be apparent from your visit over the country and I am just wondering if with the conditions as you say exist in sections of this country-I come from Pennsylvania and I live out in the country. I understand you live here in Washington.

Mrs. MEYER. I live here in the winter. I was born and married and brought up my children in Westchester County, just outside of New York City.

Mr. RICH. I am thinking here of the conditions as they exist in the city of Washington. When I travel through some of the streets, when I see where people live, and the housing conditions, I do not think we have in the country up there in Pennsylvania anything that would compare to a lot of the residences of the people that live here in the District.

Mrs. MEYER. Quite right.

Mr. RICH. If you have lived here for many years and the conditions are as bad as you say they are in this indictment that we have now, why would it not be the best thing to start right here in the District