Reading Eagle (August 31, 1944)
Pegler: Slavery
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
You know how it is when you go to the library to look up one subject and get lost in another.
I never did get what I went for and almost forgot what it was I wanted, digging into old debates on Negro slavery.
These wrangles were only a hundred years ago, which is only twice your age when you are 50, and not such a formidable stretch of time as it seems when you are younger, and yet, in England, there was great agitation for the abolition of the slave trade from Africa and of slavery in the United States by men who were, in practical manner of speaking, slaveholders themselves, in their own country. This point was brought out in one document by a man who was interested in the preservation of slavery and though I tried to chase it down I never found the reply, much less a refutation.
He said a certain noble lord who was agitating himself with humane tremors over a problem which many Americans held to be strictly our own affair, was actually holding white English workers in bondage in his coal mines, while living on the fat of the land himself. The mines then. at least, were not equipped for ventilation or fire-prevention and the occupational risk of the miners was great, what with asphyxiation, explosions and fires. Moreover, the men worked a 12-hour day, which meant that for about eight months of the year they never did see daylight, except on Sunday, and were becoming purblind like the ponies they worked with, or a deepwater fish. Their wages were peanuts although there might be some margin in the fact that, even down to 1914, a shot of Scotch in an ordinary London bar cost only four cents, and other necessaries of life were proportionately cheap, and it seems that they couldn’t lay up a cent for depression periods which came unexpectedly. My Uncle George, who seems to have been a Methodist clergyman and abolitionist of some importance in this country along toward the ‘60s, related in his life and times, published by the Wesleyan Methodist Publishing House, of Syracuse, in 1879, that this old man had two wives (consecutively, of course) and 25 children, of whom Uncle George never saw more than 15 at a time, and that he went to work helping his mother spin hemp in his dad’s rope-walk in London when he was only four years old. Then he ran away to sea at the age of eight and he tells of some prodigious swimming around Bermuda when a small boat broke loose and he had to go after it; so I have sometimes suspected that Uncle George was a bit of a liar around the edges because you don’t learn swimming in a rope-walk or working as a ship’s boy. I don’t mean he actually was my uncle, but, with that name, he couldn’t have been far removed.
This Englishman in the slavery debate insisted that the slaves in Jamaica, where his interests were, were better off than the white men in this noble lord’s mines because they were fed enough to keep them in fair shape as property, whereas the miner had to feed himself and, when he went on relief in slack times, got only four cents a day. I gather that this four cents was for the whole family, not per head, and moreover, this mine owner didn’t pay it, nor the government, but the parish or church.
Then, he said, this lord had the gall to propose that during depressions the husbands should be sent elsewhere, away from their wives, so that they wouldn’t beget more children to grow up and complicate the problems of unemployment and overpopulation; and even to try to impose a rule forbidding men to marry before the age of 35, for the same reason. If a man did marry prematurely, he was blackballed from the mines.
Of course, this was strictly counterpunching, which is not the war to win a fight, and England continued to agitate against slavery in our country, a precedent for some of our later intrusion in certain affairs of European nations, while white Englishmen in their own country actually were much worse off than many of the Negro slaves. Here we are again, for example, running a terrible force over ghettos in Europe as though we had no ghettos of our own. And, for another thing, like the noble English lord, here we are hollering down fascism, with our professional unioneers leading the chorus, while many of the loudest and angriest crusaders against the foul philosophy, notable Mr. Roosevelt and Sidney Hillman, are imposing on our country regulations and restrictions straight out of the book of Benito Il Bum.