Pegler: GOP conference
By Westbrook Pegler
St. Louis, Missouri –
This contribution to American literary treasure and political wisdom is being written under the same roof which covers the deliberations of the 26 Republican governors who are pondering a supplementary party platform under Tom Dewey’s general supervision.
Serious men all, of varying degrees of intelligence and statesmanship, they are meeting in defensive spirit, handcuffed, as it were by the prestige that Frank Roosevelt has assured for himself as a personal chum and easy confidant of Stalin and Churchill, and hushed by their own awe of a native American politician certainly no better than themselves.
This is a political fight between two American candidates for one office. If that office were mayor, sheriff or coroner, the Republicans would be at ease and ready to throw the record at Roosevelt.
If an incumbent sheriff, elected on a crime-must-go platform, had established a flagrant and mocking alliance with the very same sordid gangs, comparable to Ed Kelly’s and Frank Hague’s, that he had affected to despise and promised to destroy, the opposition would disgrace him with proof of his own hypocrisy.
Timid GOP disowns Fish
Yet, these Republicans speak softly and with a respect for the presidential office which no more belongs to Roosevelt as a candidate than it belongs to Dewey in the same status. They have been so dazzled, awed and humbled by Roosevelt’s own propaganda that when Congressman Ham Fish, a Republican, states an indisputable fact, Dewey and the rest of the party disown him.
The truth is that it wasn’t Ham Fish who injected issues of clannishness, religion and race into this campaign but Mr. Roosevelt’s own Communist auxiliary which went underground a few months ago and emerged as the Political Action Committee of the CIO.
Poles, Irish, Catholics, anti-Catholics, Jews, Masons, Protestants and units of labor and business all have voted as blocks in this country, off and on, according to the heat of the moment, for generations.
Mr. Roosevelt, himself, appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court a man of such miserable character that, just to win a cheap, local job as county prosecutor in Birmingham, Alabama, he joined an oath-bound gang of night-riding terrorists whose guiding creed was hatred and persecution of Jews, Catholics and Negroes.
Yet, such is the power of the Roosevelt propaganda and the spell of his New Deal cynicism, that today, there are even Republicans who disown Mr. Fish, not for his infallible oafishness but merely because he remarked that Mr. Roosevelt would command the Jewish vote.
Communists arouse prejudice
Every honest politician and political writer in the United States knows that religious and racial prejudice are political implements of the Communists as well as of the true bigots. Where the bigots arouse such issues in plain, stupid hatred and superstition, the Communists do it for the calculated purpose of causing bloody disorders.
They do it by selecting despicable characters to commit outrageous attacks on the dignity and character of honest, tolerant Americans. For years the Communists of Mr. Roosevelt’s own political auxiliary have been trying the souls of exemplary patriotic men who shed their blood in France in the purest devotion to American ideals, by subjecting them to loathsome abuse.
They call them Nazis and Fascists and, thus, traitors to their country and, for the delivery of these trying provocations they have selected ingrate refugees who not only scuttled out of the American draft in the last war but employed their time in soapbox exhortations to other immigrants to make a revolution here in the absence of the nation’s best fighting men.
That is the Communist way. The Communists all will vote for Mr. Roosevelt.
Yet the Republicans cringe and repudiate Mr. Fish on the very day that Vito Marcantonio, the Communist candidate is renominated for Congress in New York.
Marcantonio openly preaches Communist doctrine and is loyal at once, both to Mr. Roosevelt and to Joseph Stalin who slaughtered more human beings, his fellow Russians, is cold-blooded butchery and calculated famine than the United States has lost in all our wars from the Revolution down to this very day.
Mr. Fish fought bravely in World War I. Marcantonio has never worn a uniform or heard a shot and resisted every effort to arm this nation for its own defense until Hitler attacked Stalin.
And while the Republicans, in pallid voices, dissociate themselves from Mr. Fish, what says Roosevelt about the nomination of Marcantonio? He doesn’t even bother to deny that the Communists are his. The American people don’t even know where he is.