Pegler: Fellow traveler Frankfurter
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
From time to time, earnest and sincerely puzzled American patriots, who have heard the words “Communist” and “fellow traveler” applied to many individuals in the Roosevelt government, write to inquire what these terms mean. They are loath to believe any President of the United States would knowingly encourage enemies or opponents of the American system of government and the inner security of the nation, or anyone in sympathy with them.
A Communist, of course, is a believer in Communism who proclaims his membership in the movement. The fellow traveler is one who associates with Communists and gives them aid and comfort, but does not join the party in its guise of the moment and declare himself openly. The reasons usually are lack of courage and a selfish unwillingness to donate a private fortune or a large income to the movement. Some, however, remain fellow travelers because they can command more attention and public respect outside the party. In that status, they can pose as “liberals” and “progressives.”
Felix Frankfurter, born in Austria, has been, throughout the New Deal, one of its most influential personalities. As a teacher at Harvard, he impressed his beliefs and ethics on many young American lawyers and many of his more precocious, witty and cunning students soon found their way into influential positions in the New Deal. Largely because of his political beliefs, Franklin D. Roosevelt put him on the Supreme Court.
Complicated details
Back in 1917, Frankfurter was sent to Bisbee, Arizona, with a commission appointed by President Wilson to investigate the forcible mass deportation of more than a thousand men by citizens deputized as sheriffs who loaded them into freight cans and sent them over into New Mexico. The details of the situation are too complicated for a full statement in this space.
Frankfurter denounced the deportation and sympathized with the deportees. Bisbee was producing a large part of the copper which this country and her allies needed for the First World War. The IWW, a Communist organization of terrorists, had been obstructing the war effort in Bisbee and many other places just as their successors did again during our so-called conversion, or tooling-up period in 1940 and 1941, right up to the hour when Hitler attacked Russia. The menacing element included Mexicans, who were believed to be veterans of Pancho Villa’s guerrilla army which earlier had attacked Columbus, New Jersey, and aliens from Europe. All Communists, or “Wobblies” as the Communists then were called, were opposed to this country’s war effort; Russia had quit the war and their mission was to extend the Bolshevik Revolution all over the world.
In December 1917, Theodore Roosevelt, the ex-President, in a letter to Frankfurter, wrote:
You are taking, on behalf of the administration, an attitude which seems to me to be fundamentally that of Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders in Russia.
Roosevelt was referring to Frankfurter’s concealment of the peril of the community which stirred to action the local American citizens, many of whom soon went to the war in person.
Roosevelt wrote Frankfurter:
Your report is as thoroughly misleading a document as could be written on the subject. No official… is to be excused for failure to set forth that the IWW is a criminal organization. To ignore the fact that a movement, such as its members made into Bisbee, is made with criminal intent, is precisely as foolish as for a New York policeman to ignore the fact that when the Whyo gang assembles with guns and knives it is with criminal intent. The President is not to be excused if he ignores the fact, for, of course, he knows all about it. No human being in his senses doubts that the men deported from Bisbee were bent on destruction and murder. [Roosevelt erred here, in that a few of the deportees were not Wobblies but law-abiding local men who resented being rounded up and refused to dissociate themselves from the rest.]
And when the President, personally, or by representative [meaning Frankfurter] rebukes the men who defend themselves from criminal assault, it is necessary sharply to point out that far greater blame attaches to the authorities who fail to give needed protection, and to the investigators [again meaning Frankfurter], who fail to point out the criminal character of the anarchistic organization against which the decent citizens have taken action.
Here again you are engaged in excusing men precisely like the Bolsheviki in Russia who are murderers and encouragers of murder, who are traitors to their allies, to democracy and to civilization as well as to the United States, and whose acts are nevertheless apologized for on grounds substantially like those which you allege.
In times of danger, there is nothing more dangerous than for ordinarily well-meaning men to avoid condemning the criminals by making their entire assault on the shortcomings of the good citizens who have been the victims or opponents of these criminals.