The Ohio Daily Express

Tuesday, July 26, 1949

Democracy And Discrimination

By Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey

If Americans could develop the kind of economy that would allow them to think more of enjoying the product of their labor and less of the fearful need of keeping their jobs, we would do away with most discrimination in employment.

Everybody believes that we can produce more when each man and woman is doing the job he is best suited to do. And if we could all think first of making the most of our resources for the greatest enjoyment of what we produce--there would be little drive to discriminate.

Our economy problems are difficult. We can't solve them overnight either by revolution, as the Russians have learned, or by some panacea or other. We cannot, overnight, produce the kind of economy that will distribute both jobs and goods according to justice so that every worker can be concerned with the optimum production knowing he won't work himself out of a job and knowing that he will benefit by that production.

While working toward an economy like that, we cannot simply pass over the problem of job discrimination, saying it will be solved when the economy is perfected. The problem of discrimination is a grievous one now, and must be solved now.

It is more than the loss of production that we must fear from unfair employment practices. It is a poison more deadly than decreased production.

This foul practice of refusing jobs to minority group members who are completely capable of doing the work is a practice which weakens the entire moral fibre of the community. It weakens all of democracy.

Our morality, our very democracy, is based on the dignity, the importance of the individual.

When we begin rationalizing this basic tenet excusing discrimination, finding a reason why the individual should not be treated as equal, we weaken--utterly destroy--the very basis of our whole civilization. We become prey to all the rotten rationalizations that have destroyed democracy in other nations of the world. Hitler rationalized away the importance of the Jew as a human being. And the German lost all of his human values as well.

We must beware of making loopholes in our basic creed lest we all slip through and become lost in the fallacy of a rationalization.

Among the issues at the very heart of the fight for civil rights is the fight for fair employment practices. The right to work. The right to spend the many hours at work in a job that uses one's full ability.

These proposed civil rights laws are not only for the benefit of minority groups who stand, now at a disadvantage in finding work. Establishing equal rights will raise majority groups as well to a level of human dignity and decency that can only be achieved when there is no loophole in the moral structure, when all men are accepted in the community as equals.