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They obviously hadn't had any long preparation for this. They were totally unschooled as to what they wanted. I came to the conclusion that they were a truly spontaneous group. Nobody had put them up to it. They said, no, they hadn't talked to their employers.

I asked if they had a union. They said, no, they didn't have a union regularly, but that they were all automobile workers, knew each other, lived around Detroit, had a kind of an organization that they had fixed up recently. That organization had passed the hat and raised the money to pay the railroad fares of this group to Washington. Some of them were unemployed. Most of them were underemployed. That is, the factories were only working a few days a week. That was their great complaint. They couldn't get enough work. What they took home wasn't sufficient to live on. Of course, there had been a great exodus from the automobile industry. A great many people had no work at all. Well, did they represent them? Well, no, they couldn't say they did.

A man named Richard Byrd was not the spokesman, because there was no spokesman, but he spoke up much more often than the others did and had enough of an education so that he spoke well and clearly. But even he didn't seem