stupidity which approaches criminal negligence in protecting the welfare of the people of the United States.

I want to say to you that to my mining people in the West I have time and again said that the failure of the legislative branch of this Government and the executive branch of this Government to meet the necessary requirements of our Nation in a wartime emergency by an adequate and sufficient stock pile of critical and strategic minerals and metals backed by a going mining industry is little less than a criminal irresponsibility with respect to the duty which normally responsible officials are supposed to owe to the people they represent.

I have felt morally sure that the people out in the Nation who have seen us facing one crisis after another since this last World War have been almost totally unaware of the fact that we have really made no substantial effort toward giving them the proper safeguards which they should have in the form of adequate national stock piles and expanded mining industries.

I certainly appreciate the blunt language which you have used in your statement because it is the kind of jarring which we need not only up here on this end of our Government, but also down among the bureaus and the administrative agencies of the Government.

I very much appreciate your testimony.

Mr. WILKEN. If you will permit me I want to give you a concrete example of what this thing needs. We set out in 1946 to build this stock pile. Now, then, to supply the country with about 4,000,000 tons of metallic manganese which is equivalent to about 8,000,000 tons of 48 percent manganese, would cost the Nation about $640,000,000, and it would bring about a permanent sustained manganese industry. Mr. ENGLE. About the cost of one battleship.

Mr. WILKEN. That is right.

Mr. ENGLE. And for the cost of one battleship we leave ourselves at the mercy of Russia. Can you call that anything but stupidity? Mr. WILKEN. No, sir.

Mr. ENGLE. I am certainly in agreement.

Mr. WILKEN. That is why I use the words.

Mr. ENGLE. Mr. Lemke.

Mr. LEMKE. Mr Chairman, I would like to ask the witness a few questions.

First I want to congratulate him because I am happy to know there are still a few individuals who do not blindly accept everything that the Bureau claims is correct, or follow its theory or its policies without investigation and reasoning and doing some thinking of their own.

I think the time has come that the people of America should do more thinking of their own rather than leave it to George, and if not George, perhaps someone from Wall Street somewhere in some position in our Government.

I am in full accord with your views that what we produce, as well as money and material expended within the United States, remains with us. I would like to know what your views are regarding the bills to stimulate the exploration, development, mining, production, and conservation of strategic and critical minerals and metals within the United States and its Territories which are not being considered by this subcommittee.

92987-49-ser. 14- 8

Mr. WILKEN. Well, when I made my statement, I pointed out I did not have any mining properties, was not engaged in mining, did not intend to be, and was not using any of the materials, so my opinion is more or less impartial.

I do not want to get embroiled in any quarrel between different groups, but, to state it frankly, I would think the bill you prepared and the bill by Congressman Mills should be carefully considered by this committee because I do not think the other bill is quite definite enough either in specifications or definite enough in making it mandatory upon these departments to act.

That is your problem to get them to act. They have been side stepping you now ever since 1946. You are not any closer to development of a stock pile now than when you passed the Stock Piling Act.

Mr. ENGLE. I may say to the gentleman that if we could sit down and write just the bill we wanted and which we thought was the best for the industry and the industry thought was best for itself and put it through this Congress and then go down there and hold the President's hand while he signed it, we would not have any trouble at all. The thing we face is a question of legislative feasibility in the final analysis. Sooner or later you get down to the problem of legislative feasibility, and that is the point where we have to start compromising perhaps and doing a little less than the industry might want in one particular and a little less than the Government-that is, the administrative side of the Government-might want in another.

The purpose of this committee, I may say, is to aim at the objective which from the industry standpoint will do the best job and then where we have to, in the face of the objections of administration-we have, after all, the problem of carrying out these pieces of administration-try to make some adjustments to get legislation which can in fact be put on the statute books.

Mr. WILKEN. I am fully aware of that, Mr. Chairman, but I think the time has come when Congress has got to wake up to the seriousness of this thing and rather than being too willing to compromise I think it is about time you are bumping some heads together. Mr. ENGLE. The question is, Whose head gets bumped?

Mr. LEMKE. A bumping of all of them would not hurt anything. Let me ask another question: What has been the attitude of the department of the Federal Government toward the domestic production of materials other than minerals and metals?

Mr. WILKEN. Well, it has been pretty much the same.

You have

a sort of a completion over here in these departments. I do not know where it comes from, they can have high income and low prices all at the same time which they cannot. The other day the Senate debated the matter of fats and oils which is another category of raw materials, of about the same relative importance as minerals. These departments have had full control of these fats and oils for the past 2 or 3 years. They controlled the exports.

In other words they can refuse to export fats and oils, and of course they can permit any amount to come in they wish. I appeared before one of the departments in August 1948 with a survey I had prepared for the western meat packers and pointed out what their operation was going to lead to. In 1948 they permitted the import of 470,000,000 pounds more of fats and oils than they allocated for export.

As a result of that they filled up all our storage here in the United States and they broke the price of lard from 28 cents a pound to 11 cents a pound, cottonseed oil the same way and they really destroyed the foundation for about $10,000,000,000 of income in the United States.

I advised them at that time to allocate another 100,000,000 pounds the third quarter, and increase their allocations in the last quarter materially, but they did not do it, and that was primarily one of the leading causes of the commodity price drop that you had here the past 3 weeks.

Now whether it was through deliberate intent or stupidity I do not know, but there was no reason for it if they had permitted the same amount of allocation for exports that came in. There would not have been any fats and oils problem.

The price would not have dropped and the people in Europe who had to starve for lack of fats and oils would have had some fats and oils. It is almost exactly the same policy as you have right here. They are afraid to pay a price that will permit American production. Mr. LEMKE. Let us be charitable and assume that was because they did not know any better. I want to ask you another question: If we could and did lower the price of all commodities and the cost of living in the United States that would decrease the income tax by billions, would it not?

Mr. WILKEN, Yes.

Mr. LEMKE. Is that not equivalent to committing national suicide and national collapse?

Mr. WILKEN. It would make it absolutely impossible for us to meet the national debt and you would have to repudiate it.

Mr. LEMKE. That would be collapse?

Mr. WILKIN. That is right. That angle is just as dangerous to our future welfare as the fact we do not have any supply of strategic materials.

Mr. ENGLE. Do you have any questions, Mr. Aspinall?

Mr. ASPINALL. I do not have any questions. I am glad to see Mr. Wilken again. He used to be in Colorado with us.

Mr. ENGLE. D'Ewart.

Mr. D'EWART. I would like to have you explain three or four quotations more fully. At the bottom of page 6 you comment on the recent fall in commodity prices and say "unless the prices recover their former level" are you optimistic enough to believe they will?

Mr. WILKEN. There is no particular reason to believe that they will not, providing you get some action over here in these departments to move some of this fats and oils and bring about a balanced situation. Mr. D'EWART. I was thinking of wheat and cattle. That is outside of this committee's concern, perhaps.

Mr. WILKEN. You have already reason to believe your livestock prices should recover. If you will remember about a year ago we had a similar price drop and this associated price index that I mentioned to you which represented 35 leading commodities dropped from 208 to about 180.

Everybody was afraid at that time, but the price leveled off during the latter part of the season, the price went up, and as a result of that our national income in 1948 was considerably more than in 1947.