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and who had no background of union membership, or trade organization, or even of special skills. They'd been farmers, or some kind of auxiliary workers around the community, but they had, as a great many Americans do, that natural handyman's instinct. They can learn how to do almost anything mechanical. The automobile industry was largely filled with people like that.

If you look over the roster, as I did in '33, of people who came to Washington to represent the still unorganized, or partly organized, automobile workers, what you were struck with was the total absence of anything except old American names - old American families of English or Scotch extraction. It was astonishing that so many of them would appear on one list without any of the immigrant extraction populations showing up at all. I remember noting that.

I remember noting also the extreme youth of the automobile workers. I don't mean to say that they were all under age, but there were almost no automobile workers brigaded in with the younger men. I found that the average age was twenty-eight. I looked into that at one time, because it became a matter of interest to me during the automobile strikes. It was my theory that one of the reasons for the extreme recklessness, violence, and utter