Election 1944: Westbrook Pegler columns

[NormanStewart]

Reading Eagle (August 26, 1944)

Pegler: Labor Federation endorsement

By Westbrook Pegler

New York –
The endorsement of Franklin D. Roosevelt for a fourth term by the state convention of the New York Federation of Labor is an appropriate act of homage and appreciation by an organization heavily infested with public enemies. It is, at the same time, a delicate, if unintentional, compliment to Tom Dewey who, in his career as a prosecutor in New York, sent to prison a number of prime dignitaries of this licensed racket. Any other action would have been a shocking violation of the underworld code, and an undeserved smear against a man, who, like Roosevelt, well knows the criminal characters and methods of predatory unionism but, unlike Roosevelt, and to his honor, has never joined in their oppression of the worker or their outrages against the whole public interest.

To ignore or try to dignify the fact that for 12 years the administration has been a helpful partner in the appalling brutalities operated by the American Federation of Labor, is to serve the public ill. The relationship has been shown in the plainest detail and, from early indignation and denial, all parties to the conspiracy have turned to defiant acknowledgment. The fact that the presidency of the last relatively free great nation on earth is involved in this business cannot be remedied by a popular refusal to believe it. To be sure, decent citizens, including millions of workers whom Roosevelt has delivered over bodily to his crooked partners, do wish in their hearts that the highest office within their gift has not been so debased But the remedy is not to cry lèse-majesté at the very truth itself, but to throw out of office the regime which has so debauched free government.

Roosevelt’s Supreme Court has had the cynical effrontery to hold, in sonorous language, that his cohorts in these rackets have a right to bear false witness, that is to slander and injure by deliberate lies, innocent members of the community. It has held that highway robbery is a special right of his partners in the exploitation of the people. His Department of Justice has violated its trust by its tolerance of a national system of loot, operated in many ways and in all communities and his shameless flunkeys on Capitol Hill, by tricky stratagems in committees, have frustrated all proposals to abate the menace.

The rouges’ gallery of criminals exposed by private effort and initiative, mainly that of American journalism, contains the portraits of four presidents of national unions of the American Federation of Labor and of one member of its executive council, the national governing body. It contains pictures of two national treasurers and of innumerable regional and local criminals. Its general counsel, Joseph Padway, the guide and intimate friend of William Green, the president, while posturing before Congress and state legislatures as a friend of labor, has taken the money of union crooks so foul that not even administration patronage could save them from prison. And Roosevelt, nevertheless, sent Padway to England a year ago as a spokesman of American labor, a gesture deliberately insulting to American and British labor.

The basic wrong, the most defiant and tragic offense against the freedom of the American workers, has been Roosevelt’s protection of the system which makes it possible for union racketeers to shake down both workers for jobs and employers for protection against strikes called, not by any vote of the workers, but by order of the criminals. Dictatorships have arisen, notably in the Pacific Northwest where the teamsters’ union, one of Roosevelt’s favorites, established a working model of the Hitlerian scourge and men have been beaten and killed, terrorized and starved, all for the lack of a few fundamentally decent laws to restrict the powers of the goons.

That the New York state organization of this vicious system endorsed for a fourth term the one man who stands between it and the public interest, therefore, is not so much news as scandal.

[NormanStewart]

Reading Eagle (August 28, 1944)

Pegler: Thomas the missionary?

By Westbrook Pegler

New York –
No good purpose could be served by the visit of R. J. Thomas and other American professional unioneers to the zone of war in France and the ulterior purpose is plain.

Certain New Deal gauleiters went abroad to take the heat off the soldiers’ resentment against strikes and slowdowns and the extortion of hundreds of millions of dollars from construction workers. They want those soldier votes for their candidate. They have another purpose – to soften up the soldiers for exploitation by the unions when they come back.

The choice of Thomas as one of the missionaries to an angry fighting army is the most significant selection. This man’s union, the United Auto Workers, having nowadays about one million head within its corrals, 90 percent of them either unwilling or uncomprehending captives, has a particularly bad record. It was the union in the memorable Allis-Chalmers Communist shutdown near Milwaukee in the days of the Hitler-Stalin alliance. Again, it was the union responsible for the North American Aviation blockade at Inglewood, California, which was broken only by troops of the regular Army. Neither one was a membership strike. They were Communist insurrections.

The object in both cases was to prevent the conversion of this nation’s industry from peace to war and thus to assure Britain’s defeat, as she stood alone against the Nazis. The Communists planned the dissolution of the United States into a mobocracy, under external force from triumphant Nazis and internal Communist force. After that Communist dictatorship was to come. The plan changed on June 22, 1941, when Hitler double-crossed his ally and the war became, in the view of Mr. Thomas’ Communist colleagues, a crusade for freedom in which we were welcome to participate. The Communists even berated us for not being able to send equipment to Russia in larger quantities, a failure which was largely their own doing.

The soldiers in France are too busy with more urgent matters to inform themselves that two of the more detestable Communist saboteurs involved in these two jobs have, ever since, enjoyed deferments in the draft on the ground that as professional unioneers they are essential to the war effort on the home front. It is doubtful that Thomas will remember to tell them that, or that he will explain the more spiritual aspect of CIO-unionism as propounded by his valued colleague, one Posner, known as Thomas de Lorenzo, who said that if it came to a question of sacrificing some advantage for Mr. Thomas’ union or sacrificing the life of an American flier, he would let the flier die. The question was one of deliberately retarded production of fighting planes for the Navy. And so deep was the position occupied by Thomas and De Lorenzo, under the political patronage of the Commander in Chief, that even Frank Knox, then secretary of the Navy, kept silent.

They were blasted out only when a subordinate in the Navy department privately appealed to certain members of the press to publicize this sector of labor’s gains under the New Deal. But it is incorrect to say that they were blasted out. The one called De Lorenzo got a vote of confidence from his subjects, who otherwise might have suffered from epidemic broken-leg, and brother Roosevelt’s government, forced to offer some rebuke, chose the mildest possible way. He got 30 days and a $500 fine for giving false data on a government questionnaire, but nothing for the sabotage. He may never serve the 30 days and the union may pay the fine.

This is the boldest political mission yet sent to the troops. The President’s own forays have the color, if not the exact odor, of legitimacy. Mrs. Roosevelt, after all, did go through the masquerade of wearing a Red Cross habit on her roundabout visit to her political protégé, Joe Lash, on Guadalcanal. But the union politicians have no such excuse or disguise for a mission which is purely political. They go as advocates of the fourth term and of all Roosevelt’s works and purposes. The immediate object was to deceive the troops by propaganda to which men so far from home and so preoccupied could not have the answers.

“This strike talk is purely propaganda,” said one of them.

That there have been more than 10,000 strikes in war plants since Pearl Harbor is well known at home, but the troops can’t know that. And even we, at home, can’t know the whole truth, because the Roosevelt Labor Department keeps the statistics and, being an accomplice, naturally will not squeal and implicate itself.

[NormanStewart]

Reading Eagle (August 30, 1944)

Pegler: Free speech for victory

By Westbrook Pegler

New York –
Free speech for victory.

The thing we all love most about the glorious old United States of A.
Is that everybody, regardless of creed or color, is entitled to have their say.
It makes no difference whether you are a member of the wealthy group.
Or if you are so poor all you have for your humble fare is soup.
It is just the same whether you are of socialistic persuasion
Or vegetarian or any other peculiar denomination.
Everybody is entitled to express their opinion in this wonderful free land of ours.
From the rockbound coast of Maine to California’s tropical bowers.

But that does not mean that discordant elements have any right to abuse
The wonderful freedom of speech by telling any lowdown dirty pack of lies they choose
About our wonderful Commander-in-Chief with his firm hand
Or the great and gracious First Lady of the land.
So if it happens that your mother or your teachers forgot
To teach you true patriotism, we true Americans are ready to tell you what.
He came to rule over us when the poor were clamoring for bread.
And millions were so ill-clad they wished they could be dead.
And the first thing he done was he drove the money changers out of the temple.
And why didn’t Herbert Hoover do it, if you think that was so simple.

His heart is overflowing with sympathy for the common man,
Whereas all Thomas E. Dewey ever did was put underprivileged offenders in the can.
Yet, on every hand all we hear is lowdown, underhanded prevarications
About this and that, and all kinds of character assassinations.
When our great President for twelve long years has been striving with might and main
To sweep out the Aegean stables and set us on an even keel again.
So our little children, instead of being always hungry and weak and cold
Can be warmly garbed and do not have to toil before they are even ten years old,
And the bosses do not have power to push the working man around.
And grind you down until finally they put you under the ground.

So, if you are a patriotic American, please get wise
And do not go around repeating anti-fourth-term propaganda lies.
Freedom of speech does not mean the right to spread disunity
When we are all out for victory over the aggressors with impunity.
And meanwhile our President is protecting our beloved home fires
Only to be the target for anti-fourth-term, pro-Nazi liars.
If you didn’t know the true facts you might think he was a worm
Because he obeyed the people’s command to run for a fourth term.
Freedom of speech is our glorious heritage from Plymouth Rock
But those who don’t use it the right way will get a good sock.

So, everybody, all together, let us stop this discordant repining
And when the war is over, we will find the silver lining.

Any resemblance in the foregoing to current New Deal and Communist verse is purely intentional.

[NormanStewart]

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.