The Pittsburgh Press (August 14, 1944)
Pegler: The Carey letter
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
The national propaganda bureau of the CIO has sent out for circulation among the American fighters a copy of a long letter, written by James B. Carey, the Secretary-Treasurer of CIO, to his brother Joe, a member of the Navy’s Seabees, serving in the South Pacific.
This is a propaganda letter attempting to defend the war record of the union movement, although that record includes more than ten thousand strikes and, at present, is responsible for a shortage of big tires for artillery, bombers and heavy vehicles in the invasion of France.
It contains a great plug for Mr. Carey, himself, who is highly ambitious and often advertises his personal chastity and family felicity, as though the nation owed him a medal for that. And it gets in a fine tribute to Mrs. R. as “that great and gracious lady” by the tortuous process of associating her name with a loathsome rumor concerning the Marines of Guadalcanal and then exonerating her in tone of indignant chivalry.
No such rumor had appreciable circulation at home but the CIO proceeds to circulate it all over the Armed Forces of the United States for the sole purpose of building up an opportunity to deny that the “great and gracious lady” ever said any such thing. I receive just about all the propaganda there is going these days and I never read this one until I saw it in Carey’s letter.
Knowing their ways, my guess is that the Communists themselves invented the dirty slander, then attributed it to Mrs. R. and then followed through with this fine, vehement passage of Carey’s intended to persuade the Marines that someone is an anti-Roosevelt circulated a hideous lie about the Marines, just to make them sore at the “great and gracious lady.”
My idea here is to cause counterpropaganda to be sent out to the troops everywhere that Carey’s letter and other mimeographs of the same kind can do. If Carey’s letter goes up on a bulletin board or from hand to hand, its antidote can reach the same readers and let them know the facts which Carey concealed. Even without such a propaganda organization as the CIO maintains, the millions of individuals who read the newspapers could get the truth to the troops by sending them clippings, such as this.
The soldier who has been away two or three years, may not detect the tricks in Carey’s statement to his brother Joe, whom he does not hesitate to use for a stooge in the promotion of his own political ambitions, safe here at home.
For example, Carey writes Joe a lot of really splendid statistics about our war work production and then says, “85 percent of the equipment was produced by workers covered by collective bargaining contracts with unions.”
The trick here ill that the unions deserved no credit for that production. It was produced by American working men and women, millions of whom were forced to join the unions against their will.
So the weapons which they would have produced were not made. The truth is that the unions actually have decreased production which would have been much greater but for their slowdown rules. Some unions have limits on each person’s daily production so low that they finish their work an hour or 90 minutes before quitting time and loaf until the bell rings.
For every copy of Carey’s letter and of other writs like it, the troops deserve an opportunity to read that the unions are Roosevelt’s political auxiliaries and that all these restrictions are imposed with his consent and by his aid. In return, the unions are collecting thousands of millions of dollars subject to no accounting and are spending as much as they care to for his fourth term.
Mr. Carey tells his brother, Joe, that sinister characters are trying to create among the troops a bitterness against labor at home. This is another familiar trick and the troops might fall for it, if it is not explained that all professional unioneers falsely use “labor” as a synonym for unions.
There certainly is great bitterness against unions among the troops, and on the home front as well, but no bitterness against labor. On the contrary, labor, itself, is growing bitter against the unions. That is why Carey and the CIO are trying to take the heat off by sending out such propaganda. They are afraid of what the troops and labor will do to the union fakers after the war.