they feel that they cannot build the Nurses Corps if at the end of it it is conscription, and, therefore, it will defeat its own end.

They feel, and our committee feels, that the demand for nurses is probably going to increase, not end with the end of the war but grow greater as the casualty list grows longer. Therefore, it is essential to keep up the volunteer nurses corps and keep it voluntary if we are to get the type of nurses and the quantity of nurses they want. They feel that the character of the nursing profession will be changed if it is made a conscription service.

Thirdly, our committee is very much disturbed by the marked increase in this country of giving the Government the right to answer any problem by force. We feel that this is one of the problems which can and should be solved by getting together the leaders and by appealing to the people now in schools and colleges and putting it up to them in such a way that it can be solved voluntarily; that merely because a problem is difficult does not involve the necessity of passing a law to answer it. You cannot by law answer all problems. You have a great tendency on the part of the military, and on the part of the Government officials, whenever a thing is difficult, to simply say, "Let us pass a law and take care of it on that basis."

Fourth, we feel it is very clear that if we draft nurses we are beginning for the first time in American history the draft of women, that this is the opening wedge which will make it possible to extend the draft to all groups of women.

The Congress has had before it, for something over 2 years past, a proposal which would draft women for war work, and we were very happy that Congress wisely decided not to extend that draft to women.

Now, we feel that this is another way of approaching exactly the same problem, and once the door is opened to conscript women it will not be stopped by the conscription of nurses.

Fifth, we feel that in drafting nurses the Congress would be; for the first time in American history, establishing the right to draft by groups of labor. If you can conscript nurses, why not conscript plumbers or carpenters or lawyers? Any particular group within the community may thereby be made subject to a draft, and we do not feel that we can logically open the door to drafting one group of citizens, by trade or profession, and not at the same time extend it to others.

There is, as you doubtless know, a great deal of feeling among the nurses that they are being discriminated against, that they are being picked out and discriminated against in saying that they are the only classification being drafted.

And finally, our committee finds from its contacts, by letter, mail, personal visits, group visits around the country, that instead of building morale it is very likely to interfere with morale on the home front.

I don't know whether the members of this committee are aware of the extent to which there is a rapidly growing uneasiness in the country about the governmental developments. They see us winning a successful war. They see that the war is approaching a conclusion in Europe, according to our military leaders, and yet they see the military not decreasing and the Government not decreasing its controls over the people, but increasing the controls, and there is a

great suspicion around the country that controls are being prepared to extend far beyond the end of this war.

I know I belong to another generation, and it is said again and again that it is the duty of the wives and mothers of the soldiers to see that nurses are provided for care of the soldiers, and, therefore, I want to ask if part of the time allowed to our committee could be given to a wife of a soldier. We get quantities of correspondence, not only from men in the service but from their families who transmit to us letters from the men in the service saying how disturbed they are about any proposal to draft women.

I would like to introduce to you Mrs. Gordon Smith, if I may. (Senator Thomas being obliged to leave the hearing in order to attend another meeting, Senator Maybank presided.)

Senator MAYBANK. We will be glad to hear from Mrs. Smith.

STATEMENT OF MRS. GORDON SMITH

Mrs. SMITH. I am an Army wife whose husband has been overseas for 2 years last Sunday. We want to do everything that is possible to bring our men home safely and we want to do everything possible to make the things that those men are fighting for come true.

As far as I can see, this nursing bill will very much defeat the latter, and it is very much against the things our men are fighting for. It is more regimentation; it is more out of line with what American people have always wanted; and it is something that our servicemen aren't approving.

I got a letter the other day from a friend of mine. He said, "Are you working on a committee to oppose conseion"? He said, "My girl friend is a nurse and she is going to j in and she doesn't want to be conscripted. Will you please help her not to be conscripted"? I was very much interested in the fact that he was so much concerned about his fiancée being drafted.

I can't see the need of this bill. If adjustments are made our men will be getting the care that they need. As you know, the Army has misjudged its needs. They have admitted that they have misjudged, and now they have turned to legislation to try to correct their past false optimism.

It seems to me the recruiting system has worked so well that if it is heightened we will get what we want. As I understand, there are about 150,000 available nurses in this country and of those 81,000 have volunteered.

It seems to me if the physical requirements were lowered somewhat, as we have done with our men, that we would have an increased number of nurses.

Then, as I understand it, there are some 8,000 male nurses in this country that we haven't been using, and of those there are 2,500 in the armed forces and they haven't been used as nurses. If a need for nurses is so great, I don't see why at the present time they couldn't be used.

Then there is always the sore subject of Negro nurses. Of the 8,000 Negro nurses we have, there are now 330 in the armed services, in spite of the fact that a large number have applied and been accepted but never given appointments. Of the 1,200 Negro cadet nurses in New York City only 86 have been assigned. If our men needs nurses,

then, it seems to me, that nurses should be used according to their qualifications as nurses, and there we have a large quantity of unused nurses that we can use.

Then there is the point that at the present time in our civilian hospitals we try to have a ratio of something like 1 nurse for every 25 patients, but in our overseas and military hospitals they have asked for a ratio of 1 to 12 or 1 to 15. I am perfectly willing to agree that probably military hospitals have a larger number of cases needing expert nursing than you will find in civilian hospitals, but it seems to me there are so many other things that other people other than nurses could do. They could use your WAC Medical Corps people and your Army Medical Corps people. It seems that the Army might well be able to reallot their nurses and use a civilian standard of 1 to 25.

A great deal of red tape has been cut. The Army has done a great many things. For instance, formerly the Red Cross was doing the recruiting of nurses, and they were doing it on a voluntary method with a volunteer staff, and of course that is always a haphazard way of doing things. They have changed their policy and the Army has taken over the program, but it has been very recent and I don't think they have had enough time to actually accomplish the results that will be accomplished later.

Then in some areas there was only 1 day a month in which nurses could make application. This too has been corrected. Then applications were taking so long to be accepted, in many cases 7 and 8 months. I understand that General Kirk has said this has now been cut down to 2 weeks, and this is all for the good.

There are other things that I can't understand. For instance, Camp Barkley, in Texas, which is the largest Medical Corps camp in the country, has been closed, and this doesn't seem compatible with the fact that they are needing people to take care of our wounded.

One of the things that I think has kept the recruiting of nurses down is the letters that the nurses in the armed forces are writing home. I have a number of friends among nurses and they are getting letters saying one of two things: "We are either doing administrative work that anyone who is trained in the administration field can do or we are doing work that any Medical Corps man could do." They want to do nursing. They do not want to do administrative work. These two things are keeping people in civilian hospitals. Civilian nurses are saying, "Why should I enlist? Apparently, the need isn't so great." I am perfectly aware of the fact that under any set-up you are going to run into difficulties. I realize that you are going to have nurses writing home unfavorably, but it seems to me it is out of proportion to the numbers it ought to be.

I very much hope that we are going to find a way out of this other than conscription, because I don't think conscription is the answer. I don't think it is the fastest thing. I think recruiting by voluntary method can be put into operation and can be run so much more quickly than a drafting system can be set up.

I feel the Nation is going to find a way out of this and that the nurses are going to come through and such a bill as this isn't going to have to be passed at all.

Senator MAYBANK. We thank you very much.

STATEMENT OF MISS ELIZABETH A. SMART, NATIONAL WOMAN'S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION

Miss SMART. I am Elizabeth A. Smart, representing the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union. My address is 100 Maryland Avenue NE., Washington, D. C.

The organization which I represent is 98 percent wives and mothers-the home women of America. The men in the armed forces are their sons. Certainly we are vitally interested in securing for them prompt and adequate care.

But there are a number of things about the situation which we fail to understand. Testimony before the House Military Affairs Committee brought out the statement that 11 hospital units had been sent overseas without their complement of nurses. Yet Mrs. Maybelle K. Staupers, executive secretary, National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, testified that out of some 2,000 colored registered nurses who were available for service only 308 had been accepted. If these nurses were available, why were these hospital units permitted to sail without nurses? We feel that this is something that should not have been permitted to occur.

We would like to call to your attention also that immediately following testimony before the House Committee that would seem to indicate an adequate available supply of nurses without resorting to the drastic step of a draft, the Army suddenly announced in the committee hearing an increase in the required number of from 50,000 to 60,000. This was some little time after the increase in casualties had taken place and as we understand calculations are based on so many nurses to estimated Army personnel, it seems a little strange the correct number had not been calculated before this time.

Although there was testimony that nurses were not volunteering in sufficient numbers, it was shown that over 10,000 had immediately responded to the President's call. It also appeared that it had been necessary to discontinue the campaign for volunteers originally begun because 37,000 had already volunteered when the Army suddenly lowered its requirement from 50,000 to 40,000 and, there was danger of too many, rather than too few, volunteers.

It would also appear that these sudden changes of policy, the length of time elapsing between applications and assignments to duty, and the allowance of an insufficient amount of time after the announcement of the increase in quota for the nurses to readjust themselves to the idea that they were really needed, were factors in the failure to get enough volunteers immediately to fill the new quotas.

Even here before your committee, the testimony of Mrs. Bolton showed a sudden jump in the figures released on the number of volunteers of some five thousand from Saturday to Monday-that is, the number still required to fill the Army's quota had decreased from 14,000 to 9,000. And the campaign for volunteers had only gotten under way on February 27.

So, there would seem good reason to believe that what has always held true in the past, still holds true that you don't have to draft

nurses.

The nursing profession is an honored one. They are rightly jealous of their standing in the community. I think the community would

be inclined to resent an implication that a nurse had to be dragged to her duty, unless the necessity could be pretty clearly proven, and it does not seem to us that the Army has made out its case, at least as yet.

There is another aspect of this matter, and that is, that this war is being fought on two fronts. It would be a tragedy too deep for tears, if we were to win on the foreign front our battle to preserve the rights of the individual and then lose it on the home front. The monstrous crimes against humanity we have been viewing with horrified eyes, as the liberated territories have disclosed them one after the other, were made possible because an entire nation had been dehumanized by regimentation.

Do not let us lose the lesson of it here. People lose the saving milk of human kindness when you make them into automatons. England has been forced by having a war on her doorstep to a high measure of regimentation. But Winston Churchill, England's Prime Minister, who was forced by dire necessity to apply those controls, has said:

No restriction upon well-established liberties that is not proved indispensable to the prosecution of the war and the transition from war to peace can be tolerated.

It is dangerous to extend the precedents for conscripting and regimenting people. No nation until Britain's present dilemma has conscripted its women. The reason for this is very clear. No nation can survive, as a civilized nation, that enslaves its women, because no nation rises much higher than the ideals of its mothers. It would, in our judgment, be most unfortunate for the sake of acquiring a few hundred or a couple of thousand nurses to break the unwritten prohibition against the conscription of women. We would strongly urge upon your distinguished committee not to do this if you can at all avoid it.

An amendment to this bill was offered on the floor of the House by Representative Ivor D. Fenton of Pennsylvania which we would command to your consideration as a feasible solution. It failed of passage there by only six votes.

It was as follows:

SEC. 6. No individual shall be inducted into the land or naval forces under this Act for 30 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, or thereafter so long as the number of volunteer qualified (graduate registered professional) nurses declared available for services in the armed forces by the Nursing Division of the Procurement and Assignment Service of the War Manpower Commission and certified by the Red Cross is equal at least to the number of nurses declared by the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy to be required for the land and naval forces. The Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy are directed for a period of 30 days after the enactment of this Act to conduct an intensive campaign to recruit the additional nursing personnel required for the armed forces.

Senator MAYBANK. Thank you very much.

(Miss Smart later added the following:)

Miss SMART. May I add something to my statement, Mr. Chair

man?

Senator MAYBANK. Yes.