3 Under the Federal law, hospitals, public eating places, charitable, religious and other institutions, which buy and color margarine served as a spread, must pay a yearly manufacturers' license fee of $600 plus an excise tax of 10 cents on each pound so colored.

Hotel or restaurant, $25; boarding house, bakery, and confectionery, $5.

- With 2 other States in public eating places only.

Mr. ANDRESEN. Did you send out any information like that to the States of Colorado and Idaho?

Mr. TRUITT. It covers every State in the Union.

Mr. ANDRESEN. The State of Illinois?

Mr. TRUITT. Every one.

Mr. ANDRESEN. And the State of Indiana?

Mr. TRUITT. Yes.

Mr. PACE. Pardon me. It is not clear to me what is the charge. Mr. ANDRESEN. There is no charge. I am just asking him what information they sent out, as to whether or not they advised the people that yellow-colored oleomargarine could not be sold in those States without having a change in the State law.

Mr. PACE. What do you contend, that they should have done it, or should not have done it?

Mr. ANDRESEN. Most of the people have an idea that if we pass one of these laws that we are considering here that they will be able to buy yellow-colored oleomargarine.

Mr. TRUITT. I have noticed that the question has arisen on the Republican side of the aisle time and time again during these hearings, but if you say that our efforts have been somewhat successful in telling the public the story about this situation, you must certainly agree that they understand that fact also, because that has always been a part and a parcel of the story.

Mr. ANDRESEN. I am afraid you have misled the public in that respect. They will be very much disappointed.

Mr. TRUITT. I can assure you that we have no intention of misleading the public.

Mr. ANDRESEN. I am glad to hear that you had no intention of doing so, but unfortunately a good many have been misled because, as in my State, they feel as though if we pass this law they can buy the yellow-colored oleo.

Mr. PACE. Where is the evidence of the misleading?

Mr. ANDRESEN. I am asking him to submit what he said, what he

sent out.

Mr. TRUITT. I will send it up.

Mr. ANDRESEN. And he is going to submit that for the record. Now, did you see the editorial that appeared in Life magazine of March 8?

Mr. TRUITT. Yes, I did.

Mr. ANDRESEN. I quote only from a part of it, and we will put the rest of it in the record:

The country would also save 52,000,000 bushels of grain which could be exported to a hungry world instead of being fed to cows and churned into butter. At least, that is what the makers of oleomargarine figure.

That is not a

Mr. TRUITT. I did not go along with that statement. true representation. As a matter of fact, I cannot see how that would be exactly true. I called that to the attention of the magazine, and I am not aware of the source of their information.

Mr. ANDRESEN. If it were true, that would necessarily follow that some of the milk cows would have to be removed so that they would not eat the grain; is that not correct?

Mr. TRUITT. Well, we have to feed the grain to no animals at all to save it. If you are going to feed it to animals, you cannot save it. Where you make the saving, I do not know. I think the point is really not supported very well.

Mr. ANDRESEN. You would not support that view, then?
Mr. TRUITT. No.

Mr. ANDRESEN. And when they state in the editorial that that is what the oleomargarine industry says, that is an erroneous statement? Mr. TRUITT. I would agree with that. Otherwise, I think it is a very fine editorial and I especially think it is strong in that it calls on the housewives to become informed on this thing and express their views. I think the point is very well taken.

Mr. ANDRESEN. Your are unable, you say, to give the committee any figures on how much Best Foods contributed to this campaign; that is, not to your organization, you understand, but to the campaign as a whole, and what their expenditures were?

Mr. TRUITT. I am not. I am not in a position to make any statements about what any company did on that score, because a number of the companies in the business do not belong to this association, but they are very active in helping to correct this evil.

In other words, only 12 out of the total number of manufacturers belong to the association. We have about 65 percent of the total tonnage in the industry in the association. I cannot speak for nor do I have information about some of the activities of the nonmembers, of which the Best Foods Co. is one.

Mr. ANDRESEN. So this campaign has not been conducted from one unit that you have had direct charge of?

Mr. TRUITT. No sir; this campaign is a broad cross section of public expression. There are all sorts of people interested in this campaign, and if that were not true you would not see all the editorials and all the news items. My heavens, one small group of people cannot go out and do a job like that on the pin money that we used, at any rate.

Mr. ANDRESEN. On the basis of your statement, or the information that you sent out, I do not think you overlooked many people in the country in trying to get information to them, and that is why I compliment you on the type of work you have done. It is an exceptional work and your publicity staff up there in New York should be commended, too.

Mr. TRUITT. Yes, sir.

Mr. ANDRESEN. Why is it that the margarine institute wants to use the color of yellow in coloring their product when they can use any other color?

Mr. TRUITT. We want to use that because that is what the housewife expects and that is the characteristic color of fat, and there is no law against it, and we have every right to do it. Now, I do not know what else I can say.

Mr. ANDRESEN What kind of fat?

Mr. TRUITT. All kinds of fat. Did you see the display down in the lobby?

Mr. ANDRESEN. You mean because it looks like butter, is that not true?

Mr. TRUITT. No, I do not mean that. That is just an unhappy coincidence because maybe some day margarine will be better than butter. I mean 93 score butter. I travel around the country a good deal and I eat on a lot of diners and in a lot of hotels and a lot of public places, and I will just tell you that you know it as well as I dothere is a lot of very bad butter in this United States, and we do not want to be mixed up with bad butter, because we think we have a right good product.

Mr. ANDRESEN. All you want to do is take its place?

Mr. TRUITT. Well, I am not saying that I want to take the place of butter, because I think quite honestly that the spread market in the United States shows ample room for both products. That has been our point of view consistently for some time, and you are familiar with the figures, and you know what the consumption is, and the production, and all those things. I do not think we need go into that. Mr. ANDRESEN. Since you went on the job certainly production has gone up tremendously for oleomargarine.

I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Mr. MURRAY. I would like to have it appear in the record as to who backed this Chicago experiment in the orphanages.

Mr. TRUITT. I will disagree with your description, and then I will tell you that the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers made a grant for this work. The work took about 24 or 25 months,

and it was paid for by our association with the understanding that the results could be published, irrespective of what they might turn out to be.

Mr. MURRAY. Were you here this afternoon to hear Dr. Sommer's analysis of the experiments?

Mr. TRUITT. I heard most of it.

Mr. MURRAY. I got in trouble the other day trying to say something about Mr. Deuel's experiment, as you noticed. I got chastised by our chairman. The Deuel presentation was just as fallacious as was the phony experiment held in Chicago, and if that is all the doctors can give the American public, that phony Chicago experiment, I do not want you to get behind such an experiment again. I have known you a good many years. I do not want to see you have anything more to do with that kind of an experiment.

Mr. TRUITT. I would admit to a pleasant relationship with the gentleman, and I will also admit that I am not qualified to discuss either Dr. Sommers' or Dr. Deuel's work. I will have to pass that on. Mr. ANDRESEN. What bill do you particularly favor?

Mr. TRUITT. That question has come up several times, and unfortunately from our point of view some information was kicked around among the women's organizations and some of the other organizations about what our views were or were not. I think I can best answer your question by reading a portion of a letter. I will read the whole letter if you like. I happened to write it on February 29 to Miss Farris of the League of Women Voters because she had raised the question, "What do you prefer?"

This is what I said to her:

We are going to state without equivocation that, one, the margarine laws are unjust, unfair, unsound, and uneconomic. Two, we have always been opposed to these margarine laws. Three, we have always worked for the repeal of these margarine laws. Four, we urge the House Committee on Agriculture to act accordingly in this instance.

Mr. ANDRESEN. Then you favor all of the bills?

Mr. TRUITT. No; I favor repeal of the present margarine law, and the witness for the manufacturers, Mr. Betzold, would have stated, as you will see in his testimony, that fact.

Mr. ANDRESEN. Would that include the Corbett bill which still leaves the tax on margarine made out of coconut oil?

Mr. TRUITT. Well, if you cannot have a full loaf you take what you can get in this business. We have been asking the Congress for a long time to repeal the laws. We have had full-dress hearings in which the gentlemen has participated in the past, and the matter has always been bottled up.

Now, I will go this far with you, that if the committee votes the Corbett bill out we will certainly support it with all the vigor and skill which the gentleman so kindly attributes to us.

Mr. ANDRESEN. I am trying to be very fair, as you understand, Mr. Truitt. I do not want to embarrass you with any questions, and I am sorry I did not get a chance to meet you before. We might have put you on the staff up here with the kind of work you are doing.

That is all, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Any further questions of Mr. Truitt?
We thank you very much, Mr. Truitt.

Mr. TRUITT. Thank you.

The CHAIRMAN. Is Mr. Gilbert of Best Foods here?

Mr. COOLEY. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire how long we expect to go this afternoon?

The CHAIRMAN. The Chair does not know a bit more about it than the gentleman from North Carolina.

Mr. COOLEY. Is it your purpose to conclude the hearings today? The CHAIRMAN. I hope we can; yes. The Chair understands Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Holman are the only remaining witnesses.

STATEMENT OF MR. GILBERT, BEST FOODS, INC.

The CHAIRMAN. Would you care to make a statement at this time?. Mr. GILBERT. I did not come to testify in these hearings or to make a statement. I was asked the other day whether a representative of the Best Foods was here, and I presented myself. If there are any proper questions to be presented to me, Best Foods is certainly not hesitant to answer them.

The CHAIRMAN. I think Mr. Andresen has a question.

Mr. ANDRESEN. Mr. Gilbert, you heard the statement made by the gentleman who invented the oleo package, that he had heard rumors that your company had contributed $50,000 toward his campaign? Mr. GILBERT. I also read that in the Dairy Record. It was attributed to Mr. Holman, too, in the Dairy Record.

Mr. ANDRESEN. I think it has been common knowledge, and of course we would like to have that information.

Mr. GILBERT. It has been a common rumor, and my very statement, Mr. Andresen, tells you that that, like a lot of other rumors, is entirely incorrect.

Mr. ANDRESEN. Well, how much has your company put into this campaign?

Mr. GILBERT. What do you call this campaign?

Mr. ANDRESEN. The campaign to have these laws repealed on oleomargarine.

Mr. GILBERT. Well, I would say that it is practically nothing in direct expense. We have not contributed to any legislative fund of the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers. The various people in our company naturally are interested in this. As they go around and they talk to people, I assume that they tell people how they feel about it. That is no expense, certainly.

The position of our company has been well known for many years. I think that as a Member of the Senate once said, these laws are a legislative crime.

Mr. ANDRESEN. I do not think you need to be ashamed, as a company, to put on a campaign to repeal laws that might be objectionable to your company.

Mr. GILBERT. Your question was the expense. We are certainly not ashamed of our position. We think our position is the right position and we hope that eventually right will prevail.

Mr. ANDRESEN. I understand that your company is one of the good food companies of the United States.

Mr. GILBERT. Notwithstanding the remark about Best Foods or "worst foods," Mr. Andresen, my company makes several

Mr. ANDRESEN. I did not say that, myself.

Mr. GILBERT. I think the record will show that.