Excerpts from the Press Conference

THE PRESIDENT: I have, for quite a long while, been interested in one particular housing program that is very much needed outside the city of Detroit. Out there they have got this new Willow Run bomber plant in Ypsilanti. When it is going full speed, it will probably use 75 to 100 thousand people in it. And there is not enough housing in that area. This is perhaps illustrative of some of the things that are, on a smaller scale, the same kind of problem. And they have been talking two months about meeting some of them. The trouble is that this area includes probably half a dozen communities and three separate counties, and the State of Michigan, and various agencies of the Federal Government. And when you get a situation like that, there is only one thing to do and that is to tie it together under somebody.

I have asked Frederic Delano to assume the job of bringing all these different agencies together—local and county, State and Federal, and get something started. So I have sent him a letter to that effect. We hope to get fairly quick action.

Q. Mr. President, did you see Secretary Wickard's statement that the F.S.A. has not been paying poll taxes?

THE PRESIDENT: I did. . . .

These tenant people, these people who come under Federal grants have a budget which includes everything, every necessity of life. It includes food, includes clothing, includes a bed to sleep in, and it includes taxes of all kinds. And in those budgets they allow people to put down one form of tax, which is a poll tax. . . .

This controversy reminds me of the time seven or eight years ago when there was a drive in this country to prevent anybody on W.P.A. from voting. Now that is an awfully good parallel. Why, there were cheers and yells from a certain type of mind in the country when it was proposed that persons, because they were poor, would have to be cut out from the right to vote.

Q. Mr. President, do you approve of the poll tax in principle? Do you think it's a sound tax, anyway?

THE PRESIDENT: I suppose the best thing to do is quote the war editor of the Montgomery, Alabama, Journal and let him talk to you.

(Reading): "No one questions the wisdom of the Alabama law which prohibits anyone from paying another's poll tax. It might be a good—"

And mind you that is a State tax.

"—it might be a good thing if it were enforced generally in the South, but the law does not forbid a farmer or anyone else to go to his bank and borrow money to pay his taxes—poll taxes or no poll taxes. Why then all the fuss about the F.S.A. which is the only bank available to many farmers?"

Q. Do you think the poll tax in itself, Mr. President, has kept the poor people in the past from voting in the past?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, of course it has.

Q. Do you think that is a good idea?

THE PRESIDENT: No. I have been opposed to a poll tax all my life. . . .

Q. Mr. President, is there any estimate on the number of persons who might thus be diverted from civilian departments to war effort under the directive putting Government agencies on a 44-hour week?

THE PRESIDENT: (interposing) No. Of course, it will depend on what develops. Of course one development is that you can't generalize. And it always rises on these surveys, which of course go on all the time and which aim to cut down certain things not connected with defense, but you have to get Congressional action for it.

Well, let us for example take the case of the bright boys who say you can curtail all of the Federal expenditures. Well, all right. When some bright boy writes that and sobs over it that it hasn't been done, you ask him a question and say, "Where?" He says, "Oh, well—. That's a detail. That has nothing to do with me. I am a leader of public opinion on this thing. I am not supposed to know any details."

I had one of those chaps in the other day. You have read a lot of his stuff, and I said, "Where?" And he couldn't tell me where, that was not his business, where to curtail. So I said, "All right, let's take an example- meat inspection meat inspection. It costs the Federal Government an awful lot every year for the inspection of meat, and to see that it is decent meat for people to eat." I said, "Do you want to curtail that? It is perfectly possible in wartime to curtail that. Absolutely simple. All you have to do is to get the Congress to eliminate or greatly curtail meat inspection. It's a cinch. Why not? It's wartime. Who cares whether we eat diseased meat in wartime? Save money! It will save a few million dollars."

Well now, it's a question. If the Nation wants to stop meat inspection it has an absolute right to do it through its elected officials. And I won't curtail, because the Congress has told the Executive that meat is to be inspected. And, therefore, having put that job on the Executive, the Executive sends to the Congress an estimate, and then the Congress goes over that estimate and tries to find out whether there are too many people for the inspection of meat. And sometimes they cut it down a bit, and I have known them to raise it. And we get inspected meat. Now they can cut that out any old time they want. I can't do it, because they have given me a directive to inspect meat. Well, that's a pretty good example.

You take dozens and dozens of bureaus here in Washington. Your glib boys say, "Oh, cut them all out. Cut them all down." Congress has an absolute right to cut them out, or cut them down. I have a directive. . . .

Q. Mr. President, I am not one of the glib boys. What about the three C's and the N.Y.A.?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, the N.Y.A., just to take an example, is turning out, I think, between eighty and ninety thousand boys who are being trained for defense work, every three months.

Q. Are they being trained for mechanical work?

THE PRESIDENT: For mechanical work, yes. Well, I think that answers your question. There are some boys still in the C.C.C., though a very greatly reduced number. They are very nearly all people who have not reached draft age yet, and some of them are not physically acceptable to the draft. Others, by going through the C.C.C., will be physically satisfactory for the Army or the Navy, when they reach twenty years old.

Q. What about rehabilitating the C.C.C. boys then—boys that are physically unfit?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, yes. They have done a lot of that. A very large number of the C.C.C. boys have been rehabilitated, and been made useful for defense work, where they couldn't go to the front. . . .