Pegler: Union menace
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
Up to date in this campaign for the Presidency, neither candidate has expressed any intention to work for legal reforms which would free the American worker from the oppression of the union movement. It has been a long time since Tom Dewey signified that he was even aware of the unions’ menace to individual, human freedom and, thus, to the collective freedom of us all, within our own country.
It may be taken for granted that Mr. Roosevelt will not even mention the subject, for he successfully has ignored it for years and has actively thwarted several attempts by Congress to establish legal standards and restraints with which the unions would have had to comply for the protection of the whole people.
Mr. Dewey operates under a handicap, because the Roosevelt propaganda has created a thoughtless belief, or superstition, among millions of voters, that he is pro-labor, whereas, in fact, he is free labor’s worst enemy. Therefore, Mr. Dewey, or anyone else who would impose on unions fair obligations to the whole community, would be falsely depicted as a man hostile to labor.
That, however, is Mr. Dewey hard luck. It sets for him a test of debate and statesmanship in the campaign which, however, for expediency and votes, he may decide to ignore with a mental reservation that, if elected, he would take it up later in recommendations to Congress.
Immune to legal restraints
Whatever candidates may say, the fact remains that the unions are out of control of their members and immune to legal restraints. They are a powerful anti-labor movement with absolutely no obligation to hold free elections of their officers, or any elections at all, to account for their funds, to limit the salaries and graft of their officials, to admit qualified workers to membership, to limit their activities to collective bargaining or to exclude criminals and alien Communists from official position in their councils.
They have forced unwilling workers to accept representation by henchmen of President Roosevelt’s own political machine in contempt of the Wagner Act, the very law which they hailed as labor’s Magna Carta. By this process, workers by millions have been forced to contribute to the Roosevelt campaign funds through collections taken up by his own political agents under compulsion and threat.
This method is almost identical with that of Benito Mussolini in Italy, and it may be that the workers are too stupid and too emotional in their politics to care even though this is demonstrated to be so.
Mussolini won the Italian workers with the same bait that Mr. Roosevelt has used in chumming up the suckers of American labor, and up to this time the American worker has not shown himself to be any more intelligent or careful of his liberties than his Italian brother who sold out for a little more cheap, paper money and the promise of an old-age pension which is now still pie in the sky.
Right to commit robbery upheld
Roosevelt’s Supreme Court has established for union bosses the right to commit highway robbery in the guise of soliciting employment for their subjects. Highway robbery is a crime which calls for a low, criminal character and it was shown in the Supreme Court case that most of the defendant union men were not workers or chosen labor agents but common, underworld jailbirds.
If a union boss will rob an employer on the highway, he will have no compunction to rob his own subjects in the union through shakedowns or theft of their money from the treasury. Yet, Mr. Roosevelt prevented the adoption of a law to forbid highway robbery in the name of unionism.
Just how far gone is the American worker in his cynicism, political emotion, prejudice, docility and ignorance of his actual condition one can only estimate. At times, he seems to be hopelessly persuaded to Fascism because it doesn’t hurt much, yet. Mr. Roosevelt won’t try to arouse him, for it was he who put the spell on him.
Mr. Dewey might try, but if so he would run the risk of losing the faceless American’s vote and all chance to save him from his own greedy, selfish immediate delight in war wages and the right to tell the boss, but never the union agent, to go to hell.