State of the Union | Page 8

citizen of our country will follow with understanding your
progress in this work. The welfare of all of us is involved.
Especially must we remember that the institutions of trade unionism
and collective bargaining are monuments to the freedom that must
prevail in our industrial life. They have a century of honorable
achievement behind them. Our faith in them is proven, firm, and final.
Government can do a great deal to aid the settlement of labor disputes
without allowing itself to be employed as an ally of either side. Its
proper role in industrial strife is to encourage the processes of
mediation and conciliation. These processes can successfully be
directed only by a government free from the taint of any suspicion that
it is partial or punitive.
The administration intends to strengthen and to improve the services
which the Department of Labor can render to the worker and to the
whole national community. This Department was created--just 40 years
ago--to serve the entire Nation. It must aid, for example, employers and
employees alike in improving training programs that will develop
skilled and competent workers. It must enjoy the confidence and
respect of labor and industry in order to play a significant role in the
planning of America's economic future. To that end, I am authorizing
the Department of Labor to establish promptly a tripartite advisory
committee consisting of representatives of employers, labor, and the
public. X.
Our civil and social rights form a central part of the heritage we are
striving to defend on all fronts and with all our strength. I believe with
all my heart that our vigilant guarding of these rights is a sacred
obligation binding upon every citizen. To be true to one's own freedom
is, in essence, to honor and respect the freedom of all others.
A cardinal ideal in this heritage we cherish is the equality of rights of
all citizens of every race and color and creed.
We know that discrimination against minorities persists despite our
allegiance to this ideal. Such discrimination--confined to no one section

of the Nation--is but the outward testimony to the persistence of
distrust and of fear in the hearts of men.
This fact makes all the more vital the fighting of these wrongs by each
individual, in every station of life, in his every deed.
Much of the answer lies in the power of fact, fully publicized; of
persuasion, honestly pressed; and of conscience, justly aroused. These
are methods familiar to our way of life, tested and proven wise.
I propose to use whatever authority exists in the office of the President
to end segregation in the District of Columbia, including the Federal
Government, and any segregation in the Armed Forces.
Here in the District of Columbia, serious attention should be given to
the proposal to develop and authorize, through legislation, a system to
provide an effective voice in local self-government. While
consideration of this proceeds, I recommend an immediate increase of
two in the number of District Commissioners to broaden representation
of all elements of our local population. This will be a first step toward
insuring that this Capital provide an honored example to all
communities of our Nation.
In this manner, and by the leadership of the office of the President
exercised through friendly conferences with those in authority in our
States and cities, we expect to make true and rapid progress in civil
rights and equality of employment opportunity.
There is one sphere in which civil rights are inevitably involved in
Federal legislation. This is the sphere of immigration.
It is a manifest right of our Government to limit the number of
immigrants our Nation can absorb. It is also a manifest right of our
Government to set reasonable requirements on the character and the
numbers of the people who come to share our land and our freedom.
It is well for us, however, to remind ourselves occasionally of an
equally manifest fact: we are--one and all--immigrants or sons and
daughters of immigrants.
Existing legislation contains injustices. It does, in fact, discriminate. I
am informed by Members of the Congress that it was realized, at the
time of its enactment, that future study of the basis of determining
quotas would be necessary.
I am therefore requesting the Congress to review this legislation and to
enact a statute that will at one and the same time guard our legitimate

national interests and be faithful to our basic ideas of freedom and
fairness to all.
In another but related area--that of social rights--we see most clearly
the new application of old ideas of freedom.
This administration is profoundly aware of two great needs born of our
living in a complex industrial economy. First, the individual citizen
must have safeguards against personal disaster inflicted by forces
beyond his control; second,