Pegler: Democratic Convention
By Westbrook Pegler
Chicago, Illinois –
With the presidential nomination disposed of long before the fall of the gavel by Mr. Roosevelt’s grinning acceptance of a fourth nomination, the incongruous and uneasy Democrats at their convention present a new spectacle in the politics of the United States, a strange congress of distrust, resentment, fear and a cynicism such as not even the most sordid Old-Guard Republican ever had the effrontery to express.
Here is idealism of the most pretentious and milky sort, the pious nobility of purpose of the New Deal, fermented and soured into a mesh of underworld politics and European continental trickery, all in the course of 12 years since the faithful went forth from the same hall in 1932, bawling “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
Many old faces are missing now, a few to appear in the following of Tom Dewey, disillusioned, repentant and humbly eager to atone. Many enthusiasts of the early New Deal have gone to their graves. And Jim Farley, standing ears above the crowd and wearing the same smile as of old, but a smile done with the muscles now and not by the impulse of a confident heart, has become a beloved but pathetic has-been, trampled, scuffed and confused, while Sidney Hillman, leader of the CIO-Communist coalition, holds press conferences at a hotel of his own selection, the Sherman House, at the other side of the Loop.
To a degree, it may be said for Jim that he is standing by his principles for he never would court or have any political traffic with Hillman’s aggregation of naturalized but unassimilated Europeans in New York when they called themselves the American Labor Party. Never yet has he compromised his total American devotion by appearing, under any pretext of emergency or wartime unity, on any platform where he could be photographed under the hammer and sickle of the Communist conspiracy.
Yet, although, as an American, he obviously believes the election of President Roosevelt to a fourth term would be a national misfortune, still his deep, personal devotion to the rules of the game will deter him from opposing the ticket.
No longer ambitious for Presidency
Jim is no longer ambitious for the Presidency. He may hope to become Governor of New York two years from now, but even that is a remote and highly speculative possibility and would be a dull climax to the career of a man who, four years ago, had an honest, if naïve, hope of going to the White House.
But boy and man, Jim has been a Democrat, and that perverse loyalty, that spirit of politics as a game, is stronger in Jim and, also, in many others here this week, than the inner whisperings of patriotic judgment.
Many men and women in this convention long ago lost their belief in the President as an idealist, even lost faith in him as a party man as he steadily took over and became, himself, the party, but, in resignation, go along anyway this once more because they don’t know what else to do.
Some feel an obligation to their little followings back home. Some are too proud to make public demonstration of their private fears for the country after four years more of the same. Some are so degraded they would risk it all for the little pay and power the politics gives them.
There are men and women here who hatefully resent Hillman and his small but tireless and clever group of scheming Europeans and fully understand the superior importance of a few hundred thousand New York votes, cast under the influence of European fears and hatreds, as compared with several times the same number of votes cast in their own home states.
Hillman most prominent lay-Democrat
They know the power of such people to pull the switches and throw American cities and factories into darkness and terror for they have seen it demonstrated. They know that, at Hillman’s plea, Charles Poletti, as temporary governor of New York, secretly released from prison a European communist firebug who held office in Hillman’s union and that, nevertheless, if not for this very reason, Poletti was made a full Army colonel and the American Military Governor of Rome.
It was not so much that Hillman and his group demanded Wallace. The humiliation, the startling, disturbing change lay in the fact that they could make any demands on the convention.
Whether or not, Hillman has his way, he becomes, nevertheless, the most prominent lay-Democrat in the party, although not necessarily the most powerful. For Kelly of Chicago and Hague of New Jersey are still in silent, secret action and these tough old brawlers this time are under no cloud of outward disavowal.