Mr. DENHAM. Yes, sir. I may say it was suggested by the President, through Mr. Steelman, that the resignation would be very welcome. Mr. ARENS. I assume and if I am mistaken, please correct me, that you regarded that as a discharge by the President?

Mr. DENHAM. Practically that; yes.

Mr. ARENS. May I respectfully suggest at this time, if you please, Mr. Chairman, that there be inserted in the record at this point in haec verba, the contents of section 9 (h) of the Taft-Hartley Act, so that this record will reflect the language to which Mr. Denham will allude in his testimony?

Senator BUTLER. It will be so ordered.

(The section referred to follows:)

(h) No investigation shall be made by the Board of any question affecting commerce concerning the representation of employees, raised by a labor organization under subsection (c) of this section, no petition under section 9 (e) (1) shall be entertained, and no complaint shall be issued pursuant to a charge made by a labor organization under subsection (b) of section 10, unless there is on file with the Board an affidavit executed contemporaneously or within the preceding 12-month period by each officer of such labor organization and the officers of any national or international labor organization of which it is an affiliate or constituent unit, that he is not a member of the Communist Party or affiliated with such party, and that he does not believe in, and is not a member of or supports any organization that believes in or teaches, the overthrow of the United States Government by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods. The provisions of section 35A of the Criminal Code shall be applicable in respect to such affidavits.

Mr. ARENS. Mr. Denham, would you kindly tell us on the basis of your background and experience the objective or reason for 9 (h)? What is the problem sought to be attacked by 9 (h) ?

Mr. DENHAM. I can only give you my concept of the legislative mind on that subject as developed from the history and from comments made from some committees in executive sessions in the early days of the act.

Senator BUTLER. And also, Mr. Denham, your connection and association directly with the author of the bill-or did you have such

association?

Mr. DENHAM. I was not very well acquainted with Mr. Taft and Mr. Hartley until after the bill had been passed. I was quite well acquainted with Senator Donnell and was responsible for throwing some thoughts out which may or may not have been passed on by him, but many of which made their appearance in the bill finally.

So that is for just what it may be worth. The thing that we had all complained about, and it was just the rumblings of those who were bitterly opposed to the thing that we call communism, was that we had found an influence in the operation of many of the labor unions. It was very well known that Harry Bridges definitely controlled the longshoremen in San Francisco, and it was pretty well believed that he had been and was a member of the Communist Party, and his handling of that situation indicated that he had very little regard for what we conceive to be the rules of law and order.

I may say that these are my own experiences. When I get to the hearsay part, I will identify that.

We ran into a situation in the Northwest involving the International Woodworkers of America, which at that time had as its president and a couple of its vice presidents men who were well-known or,

definitely, extensively reputed to be members of the Communist Party, and their conduct of their business was exactly the same way.

The general counsel for that organization at that time had been a very well-known member of the IWW, one of their legal lights, in the earlier days. I had had some contacts with IWW in the days preceding the First World War. I had occasion to come very closely in contact with that situation and to observe the communistic tendencies. We were trying to settle a situation involving the Carlisle Lumber Co., in one of the Board's earliest cases. I wanted to put some men back to work and get the lumber mills going. We had it all settled, and this group of international officers came in. If I had had a baseball bat, they would all have been in the hospital.

They then called another meeting of the same group and, if I have ever seen Communist influence in action in the labor unions, I saw it there, because I was invited to attend the meeting.

They finally said "We don't care a blankety-blank about the 275 men who are being thrown out of work in this thing, or will be, or their families. That does not make a bit of difference. What we are going to do is, we are going to close this outfit up. That is all we want to do."

It was just that general, and, incidentally, at that meeting they succeeded in having the crowd completely reverse themselves and go along their line which promised nothing, even though a few days before they had unanimously voted for the settlement. Fortunately, World War II saved them.

As a trial examiner I was called on to hear some cases in Hollywood in 1945. They involved some of the studio workers, the Council for Studio Unions, as they were then known, which included practically all of the employees of the various crafts in these studios.

When I mention "studios" I am speaking of the eight major studios that were in operation in Hollywood at that time.

The controversy that arose was an acute one, although it involved only a very few people, some fifty-odd. An election had been ordered by the Board and every vote cast had been changed.

Incidentally, I point that out as one of the outstanding examples of what can happen when the employees in an economic strike have been replaced but nevertheless are allowed to vote in an election.

The issues there were very acute. I will not describe them unless you want them.

It involved the demands of this Council of Studio Unions, which was headed up by a man named Herbert Sorrell as president and a man named Mussa as vice president.

They very definitely attempted to sabotage the situation in that case by walking out of the hearing that the Board was holding, preliminary to ordering an election, without any cause, and they simply told me when they were on the stand and I asked why they had walked out, they said they had all of these employees signed up to be their members, they were abandoning their old union and going over to the new one. The further answer was, "We weren't going to be delayed by any Labor Board hearings, and things of that sort. We are going to make those again "blankety-blank so-and-so's do business with us." Well, the outcome of that is a matter of history and record in the records of the Board.

I came back and made certain recommendations which would have been very, very obnoxious to Sorrell's outfit, and I may say that Sorrell definitely was a Commie. I have held his card in my hand and seen it. Incidentally he appeared before a congressional committee some several years ago, gave some testimony. His card was put in evidence and was examined by the FBI. He had used a different name, but anyone who had ever seen the signature could not mistake it. He had made a mistake in trying to sign it and then wrote over the mistaken letter anyway. The card was sent to the FBI for verification against authentic signatures by Sorrell. The FBI came back with a report that Sorrell, the witness, and the person who signed this card were the same person. Nothing was ever done about it.

Mr. ARENS. Do you have his full name?

Mr. DENHAM. Herbert Sorrell. He is still out in Los Angeles, and I think he is the business agent for the painters' union in the Hollywood Studios.

Mr. ARENS. In Hollywood itself?

Mr. DENHAM. Yes; the studios there. The painters' union in the studios is a separate organization.

I do not know to what extent this Council of Studio Unions is still functioning but I have been told that they have practically dropped out of existence.

I have also been told that Sorrell still is there and is now in his original job as business agent for the painters' union there.

Those are just three outstanding examples in which I have personally come in contact. There was a real problem and the idea was that the Congress would put a stop to this communistic control and influence in labor organizations. It was pretty well known that there were many organizations in the East which came in the same class. Most of them have now already been found out, been pointed out, and many of them have been disciplined by their own organizations. I am thinking of what the CIO did with some of its organizations when they threw them out.

What they were trying to do was to make it impossible for labor unions to utilize the services of the National Labor Relations Board if they had in their list of officers anyone who could not under oath state that he was not a member of the Communist Party.

Mr. ARENS. Could I at this point ask you, in view of the fact that you have given us a very fine background of the 9 (h) provision, to tell us, on the basis of your experience and intimate knowledge, Mr. Denham, the history. What happened after the passage of 9 (h)?

Mr. DENHAM. It did not take very long. At first the unions that had these background reputations of communism held off. They could not make up their minds just what they wanted to do.

The A. F. of L. led the parade, however. In October 1947, I think it was, following the effective date of the act, the A. F. of L. had its convention out in San Francisco and amended its constitution.

Their constitution provided that they would have a president and secretary and treasurer and 13 or 14 vice presidents, who were the Board of Trustees. They did not change the structure at all. They simply changed the name more than anything else.

That was done because Mr. Lewis was one of those vice presidents, and he had stated that he would not sign such an affidavit regardless,

and, of course, they knew, and they had come to me and asked me if I could not let down the bars, and I would not do it, and said that if they did not have Lewis's signature on there, and he was a vice president, they would simply not be able to function, and none of the A. F. of L. unions could function.

So they changed their constitution and said "We have just two officers. One is the president and the other one is the secretary-treasurer, or whatever it is."

Of course, some time after that there was a question about whether the A. F. of L. had to have any affidavits in there at all.

That was a battle which I fought with the Board for almost 3 years, before we finally got the Supreme Court to tell the Board that the law meant what it said.

Then other unions began making similar changes. They would eliminate a certain office held by somebody who could not sign an affidavit without endangering his liberty and without committing perjury. Those switches were made in a number of organizations. The packing workers did it. The office workers did it.

Mr. ARENS. Was the office workers union the Flaxer union?
Mr. DENHAM. Yes.

Mr. ARENS. That is the one that is Communist controlled. Did the fur workers do it?

Mr. DENHAM. I do not know. The fur workers did not come in until much later.

Mr. ARENS. I see.

Mr. DENHAM. There was not anything that could be done about that at the immediate time.

Subsequently the Board did try to cover that, but not until the other stuff had developed, and we first got an announcement by a man named Perlo, who was an official in the furniture workers union.

Perlo announced that he had been for 10 years an active and ardent member of the Communist Party, that he believed in it, that he was a supporter of it.

I think the Perlo story is pretty well known. He announced that he was going to protect his union by resigning from the Communist Party on one day, and signing the affidavit on the next day, to the effect that he is not, underscoring the word "is", is not a member of the Communist Party and does not support them.

That was the first time that that language of the Act had a focus put on it in that fashion. He signed his affidavit. I knew by reputation much of his background.

I immediately sent the affidavit, within 24 hours, up to the attorney general's office and suggested that they might want to do something about it.

I had some telephone conversations with Alec Campbell. I had many conversations with Alec Campbell about it and he said, "Well, that is just what we want. We are going to do something about it." Nothing happened.

Well, it was not very long before we got some of these affidavits in from others. I had instructed the man in charge of these affidavits that when any suspected one came in-and he knew whose I regarded as suspected ones-to send them immediately to my office.

They came along with Matles, from the United Electrical Workers.

Then came Herbert Sorrell's, this fellow I spoke of. I would shoot them up to Alec Campbell, and I couldn't give you the names of all of them, to save my life. There must have been 50 or 60.

Then they said "Fine, we are working on it." We never got very far.

Then McInerney came in after Campbell resigned, and then came Harry Bridges' affidavit, and then Ben Gold's affidavit, and a few others equally notorious.

So it got to a point where it was quite evident that the Department of Justice was not going to do anything, and when I kept jacking McInerney up he finally came out and said, "Mr. Denham, we simply are not going to make any effort to prosecute any of the people who signed these affidavits."

And I think that was publicly announced.

He said, "because of the language which the affidavits use from the statute."

Mr. ARENS. He meant the language in the present tense?

Mr. DENHAM. Yes; that was the whole thing. He said, "There is nothing to prevent a man from saying he resigned yesterday, and therefore he is not a member."

That was where the weakness developed. I begged and pleaded with him, and I think wrote a letter or two on the subject saying, "For God's sake, the American public is entitled to at least have you try one, and, if the thing is so deficient as all that then, of course, Congress will undoubtedly want to do something about it, but I don't believe that the attorney general is entitled to simply say 'this law is not enforceable and we are not going to do anything about it,' so that a man who commits perjury and knows that he is committing perjury in his heart is allowed to get away with it."

But that made no impression and nothing was done, and more of the affidavits came in after the announcement was made.

Mr. ARENS. Was any test case developed on 9 (h) to your knowledge?

Mr. DENHAM. Later on there were two cases, that I recall. They got one poor little colored business agent in a union of laborers down here in Washington, as I remember, and there was a case that was brought against him. I do not know what happened to it.

Then there was another one which was subsequently reversed by the Supreme Court on jurisdictional grounds, as I recall. That case was brought up in New Jersey. These are the only ones about which I know.

Mr. ARENS. I think the time has arrived, Mr. Denham, for us to ask you what your appraisal is of 9 (h). You have told us about the background and something of the background of 9 (h). What is your appraisal, on the basis of your own experience as an expert, of the efficacy of 9 (h)?

Mr. DENHAM. As it is now written, so that the affidavit is in the present tense in which makes it unusable as the basis for prosecution, then I say that it should be changed; but the theory and doctrine of 9 (h) is one of the most valuable things we have in the law, in its present structure. I feel that if 9 (h) were revamped-and revamped in a way that would not only say "I am not," but "for a considerable time," and I would go back not a year or 2 years, but I would go back 15 years