Ray Stannard Baker

McClure’s/January, 1899

II. A Voyage on the Bottom of the Sea

SIMON LAKE planned an excursion on the bottom of the sea for October 12th. His strange amphibian craft, the “Argonaut,” about which we had been hearing so many marvels, lay off the pier at Atlantic Highlands. Before we were near enough to make out her hulk, we saw a great black letter A, framed of heavy gas-pipe, rising forty feet above the water. A flag rippled from its summit. As we drew nearer, we discovered that there really wasn’t any hulk to make out—only a small oblong deck shouldering deep in the water and supporting a slightly higher platform, from which rose what seemed to be a squatty funnel. A moment later we saw that the funnel was provided with a cap somewhat resembling a tall silk hat, the crown of which was represented by a brass binnacle. This cap was tilted back, and as we ran alongside, a man stuck his head up over the rim and sang out, “Ahoy there!”

A considerable sea was running, but I observed that the “Argonaut” was planted as firmly in the water as a stone pillar, the big waves splitting over her without imparting any perceptible motion.

“She weighs fifty-seven tons,” said Mr. Lake, “and there are only two or three tons above water. I never have seen the time when she rolled.”

We scrambled up on the little platform, and peered down through the open conning tower, which we had taken for a funnel, into the depths of the ship below. Wilson had started his gasoline engine, and I was wondering what became of the exhaust, which I heard rattling in the pipes, when I saw a white plume of steam rising from the very summit of the gas-pipe frame above us. “This leg of the A,” explained Mr. Lake, “carries off the burnt gases, and this one brings in the fresh air while we are submerged. You see the pipes are tall enough, so that we can use them until we are more than fifty feet under water. Below that, we have to depend on the compressed air in our tanks, or on a hose reaching from the upper end of the pipe to a buoy on the surface.” Mr. Lake had taken his place at the wheel, and we were going ahead slowly, steering straight across the bay toward Sandy Hook and deeper water. The “ Argonaut” makes about five knots an hour on the surface, but when she gets deep down on the sea bottom, where she belongs, she can spin along more rapidly.

“Are you ready to go down?” asked Mr. Lake. The waves were already washing entirely over the lower platform, and occasionally breaking around our feet, but we both nodded solemnly.

“Open the center compartments,” Mr. Lake shouted down the conning-tower. “I’m flooding the ballast compartments,” he explained. “Usually we submerge by letting down two half-ton iron weights, and then, after admitting enough water to overcome our buoyancy, we can

readily pull the boat to the bottom by winding in on the weight cables. Unfortunately, we have lost one of the weights, and so we have to depend entirely on the compartments.”

The “Argonaut” was slowly sinking under the water. We became momentarily more impressed with the extreme smallness of the craft to which we were trusting our lives. The little platform around the conning-tower on which we stood—in reality the top of the gasoline tank was scarcely a half dozen feet across, and the “Argonaut” herself was only thirty-six feet long. Her sides had already faded out of sight, but not before we had seen how solidly they were built—all of steel, riveted and reinforced, so that the wonder grew how such a tremendous weight, when submerged, could ever again be raised.

“We had to give her immense strength,” said Mr. Lake, “to resist the water pressure at great depths. She is built of the same thickness of steel as the government used for the 2,000-ton cruisers ‘Detroit’ and ‘Montgomery.’ She’ll stand a hundred feet, although we never took her deeper than fifty. We like to keep our margins safe.”

I think we made some inquiries about the safety of submarine boats in general. Other water compartments had been flooded, and we had settled so far down that the waves dashed repeatedly over the platform on which we stood—and the conning-tower was still wide open, inviting a sudden engulfing rush of water.

“You mustn’t confuse the ‘Argonaut’ with ordinary submarine boats,” said Mr. Lake. “She is quite different and much safer.”

He explained that the “Argonaut” was not only a submarine boat, but much besides. She not only swims either on the surface or beneath it, but she adds to this accomplishment the extraordinary power of diving deep and rolling along the bottom of the sea on wheels. No machine ever before did that. Indeed, the “Argonaut” is more properly a “sea motorcycle” than a “boat.” In its invention Mr. Lake elaborated an idea which the United States Patent Office has decided to be absolutely original.

“I think we better go below,” said Mr. Lake, with a trace of haste in his voice. I went first, slipping hand over hand down the ladder. Mr. Stevens followed, and a great wave came slapping in after him, sousing down over his shoulders. Mr. Lake quickly shut down the conning- tower cap and screwed it fast over its rubber rims.

We found ourselves in a long, narrow compartment, dimply illuminated by yellowish- green light from the little, round, glass windows. The stern was filled with Wilson’s gasoline engine and the electric motor, and in front of us, toward the bow, we could see through the heavy steel doorways of the diver’s compartment into the lookout room, where the was a single round eye of light.

“She’s almost under,” said Mr. Lake.

I climbed up the latter of the conning-tower and looked out through one of the glass ports. My eyes were just even with the surface of the water. In the trough of the waves I could catch a glimpse of the distant sunny shores of New Jersey, and here and there, off toward Staten Island, the bright sails of oyster smacks. Then, the next wave came driving and foaming entirely over the top of the vessel, and I could see the curiously beautiful sheen of the bright summit of the water above us. It was a most impressive sight. Not many people ever have had the opportunity of looking calmly upon the surface of the sea from below. Mr. Lake told me that in very clear water it was difficult to tell just where the air left off and the water began; but in the muddy bay where we were going down the surface looked like a peculiarly clear, greenish pane of glass moving straight up and down, not forward, as the waves appear to move when looked at from above.

Now we were entirely under water. The ripping noises that the waves had made in beating against the upper structure of the boat had ceased. As I looked through the thick glass port, the water was only three inches from my eyes, and I could see thousands of dainty, semi- translucent jelly-fish floating about as lightly as thistle-down. They gathered in the eddy behind the conning-tower in great numbers, bumping up sociably against one another and darting up and down with each gentle movement of the water. And I realized that we were in the domain of the fishes.

I returned to the bottom of the boat, to find that it was brilliantly lighted by electricity, and to have my ears pain me sharply.

“You see the air is beginning to come down,” said Jim, the first mate, “and we are getting a little pressure.”

I held up my hand, and felt the strong gust which was being drawn down through the tail air-pipe above us. It was comforting to know that the air arrangements were in working order.

Mr. Lake now hung a small mirror at an angle of forty-five degrees just at the bottom of the conning-tower, and stepped back to the steering-wheel. Upon looking into the mirror, he could see the reflection of the compass, which is placed at the very highest tip of the brass binnacle that crowns the conning tower. “We can’t use a compass down here,” said he, “because there is too much machinery and steel.” He has found by repeated experiments that the compass points as accurately under water as on the surface.

Jim brought the government chart, and Mr. Lake announced that we were heading directly for Sandy Hook and the open ocean. But we had not yet reached the bottom, and John was busily opening valves and letting in more water. I went forward to the little steel cubbyhole in the extreme prow of the boat, and looked out through the watch-port. The water had grown denser and yellower, and I could not see much beyond the dim outlines of the ship’s spar reaching out forward. Jim said that he had often seen fishes come swimming up wonderingly to gaze into the port. They would remain quite motionless until he stirred his head, and then they vanished instantly. Mr. Lake has a remarkable photograph which he took of a visiting fish, and Wilson tells of nurturing a queer flat crab for days in the crevice of one of the viewholes.

As I turned from the watchport, my eye fell on an everyday-looking telephone, with the receiver hung up next the steel walls.

“Oh, yes,” said Jim, “we have all the modern conveniences. That’s for telephoning to the main part of the boat when the diver’s compartment is closed and we can’t get through.”

He also showed me a complex system of call bells, by means of which the man at the lookout could direct the engineer. “When we are down in unknown waters,” he said, “ we have a big electric searchlight which points out the way.”

At that moment, I felt a faint jolt, and Mr. Lake said that we were on the bottom of the sea. “The bottom here is very muddy,” he said, “and we are only resting a few hundred pounds’ weight on our wheels. By taking in or pumping out water, we can press downward like a locomotive or like a feather. Where we have good hard sand to run on, we use our wheels for driving the boat; but in mud like this, where there’s nothing to get hold of, we make our propeller do the work.”

Here we were running as comfortably along the bottom of Sandy Hook Bay as we would ride in a Broadway car, and with quite as much safety. Wilson, who was of a musical turn, was whistling “Down Went McGinty,” and Mr. Lake, with his hands on the pilot-wheel, put in an occasional word about his marvelous invention. On the wall opposite, there was a row of dials which told automatically every fact about our condition that the most nervous of men could wish

to know. One of them shows the pressure of air in the main compartment of the boat, another registers vacuum, and when both are at zero, Mr. Lake knows that the pressure of the air is normal, the same as it is on the surface, and he tries to maintain it in this condition. There are also a cyclometer, not unlike those used on bicycles, to show how far the boat travels on its wheels; a depth gauge, which keeps us accurately informed as to the depth of the boat in the water, and a declension indicator. By the long finger of the declension dial we could tell whether we were going up hill or down. Once while we were out, there was a sudden, sharp shock, the pointer leaped back, and then quivered steady again. Mr. Lake said that we had probably struck a bit of wreckage or an embankment, but the “Argonaut” was running so lightly that she had leaped up jauntily and slid over the obstruction.

Strange things has Mr. Lake discovered about the bottom of the sea. He has found that nearly all sea roads are level, a fact of great importance to sea-carriages like the “Argonaut.”

“People get the impression from the sea-bottom contours,” he says, “ that the ocean is filled with vast mountain ranges and deep valleys. As a matter of fact, these contours, in representing thousands of miles of width on a printed page, greatly exaggerate the depth, which at its greatest is only a few thousand feet, thus giving a very false idea. Some shores slope more than others, but I venture to say that there are few spots on the bottom of the Atlantic that would not be called level if they were bare of water.”

We had been keeping our eyes on the depth dial, the most fascinating and interesting of any of the number. It showed that we were going down, down, down, literally down to the sea in a ship. When we had been submerged for more than an hour, and there was thirty feet of yellowish-green ocean over our heads, Mr. Lake suddenly ordered the machinery stopped. The clacking noises of the dynamo ceased, and the electric lights blinked out, leaving us at once in almost absolute darkness and silence. Before this, we had found it hard to realize that we were on the bottom of the ocean; now it came upon us suddenly and not without a touch of awe. This absence of sound and light, this unchanging motionlessness and coolness, this absolute negation—this was the bottom of the sea. It lasted only a moment, but in that moment we realized acutely the meaning and joy of sunshine and moving winds, trees, and the world of men.

A minute light twinkled out like a star, and then another and another, until the boat was bright again, and we knew that among the other wonders of this most astonishing of inventions there was storage electricity which would keep the boat illuminated for hours, without so much as a single turn of the dynamo. With the stopping of the engine, the air supply from above had ceased; but Mr. Lake laid his hand on the steel wall above us, where he said there was enough air compressed to last us all for two days, should anything happen. The possibility of “something happening” had been lurking in our minds ever since we started. “What if your engine should break down, so that you couldn’t pump the water out of the water compartments?” I asked.

“Here we have hand pumps,” said Mr. Lake promptly; “and if those failed, a single touch of this lever would release our iron keel, which weighs 4,000 pounds, and up we would go like a rocket.”

I questioned further, only to find that every imaginable contingency, and some that were not at all imaginable to the uninitiated, had been absolutely provided against by the genius of the inventor. And everything from the gasoline engine to the hand-pump was as compact and ingenious as the mechanism of a watch. Moreover, the boat was not crowded; we had plenty of room to move around and to sleep, if we wished, to say nothing of eating. As for eating, John had brought out the kerosene stove and was making coffee, while Jim cut the pumpkin pie.

“This isn’t Delmonico’s,” said Jim, “but we’re serving a lunch that Delmonico’s couldn’t serve–a submarine lunch.”

By this time the novelty was wearing off and we sat there, at the bottom of the sea, drinking our coffee with as much unconcern as though we were in an uptown restaurant. For the first time since we started, Mr. Lake sat down, and we had an opportunity of talking with him at leisure. He is a stout-shouldered, powerfully built man, in the prime of life—a man of cool common sense, a practical man, who is also an inventor. And he talks frankly and convincingly, and yet modestly, of his accomplishment.

“When I was ten years old,” he said, “I read Jules Verne’s ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea,’ and I have been working on submarine boats ever since.” At seventeen he invented a mechanical movement, at twenty he was selling a steering-gear which he had just patented. In 1894 he began to build his first submarine boat, the “Argonaut, Jr.,” and for more than four years he has been slowly perfecting, patenting, and financing his invention.

Having finished our lunch, Mr. Lake prepared to show us something about the practical operations of the “Argonaut.” It had been a good deal of a mystery to us how workmen penned up in a submarine boat could expect to recover gold from wrecks in the water outside, or to place torpedoes, or to pick up cables.

“We simply open the door, and the diver steps out on the bottom of the sea,” Mr. Lake said, quite as if he was conveying the most ordinary information.

At first it seemed incredible, but Mr. Lake showed us the heavy, riveted door in the bottom of the diver’s compartment. Then he invited us inside with Wilson, who, besides being an engineer, is also an expert diver. The massive steel doors of the little room were closed and barred, and then Mr. Lake turned a cock, and the air rushed in under high pressure. At once our ears began to throb, and it seemed as if the drums would burst inward.

“Keep swallowing,” said Wilson the diver.

As soon as we applied this remedy, the pain was relieved, but the general sensation of increased air pressure, while exhilarating, was still most uncomfortable. The finger on the pressure dial kept creeping up and up, until it showed that the air pressure inside of the compartment was nearly equal to the water pressure without. Then Wilson opened a cock in the door. Instantly the water gushed in, and for a single instant we expected to be drowned there like rats in a trap,

“This is really very simple,” Mr. Lake was saying calmly. “When the pressure within is the same as that without, no water can enter.”

With that, Wilson dropped the iron door, and there was the water and the muddy bottom of the sea within touch of a man’s hand. It was all easy enough to understand, and yet it seemed impossible, even as we saw it with our own eyes.

Mr. Lake stooped down, and picked up a wooden rod having a sharp hook at the end.

This he pulled along the bottom. “You see how easily we can pick up a cable and cut it,” he said. “Why, we could crawl along from here and cut all the submarine cables and mine wires connecting with New York in half a day, and no one ever would be the wiser. More than that, if the ‘Argonaut’ had been at Santiago, we could have cleared the harbor of Spanish mines within forty-eight hours. Then we could have crept under the Spanish fleet, where our divers would have stepped out and deliberately set mines or even fastened torpedoes to the bottoms of the ships. When the work was done, we could have backed away, until we were well out of reach of the effects of an explosion. And then, a connection of the wires, and Sampson would have been saved the trouble of smashing Cervera!”

Indeed, it seemed the simplest thing in the world. But the “Argonaut’s” most serious work is in wrecking. Mr. Lake explained how difficult it is for divers to go down to wrecks from the surface, owing to the great weight of air-tubing and lifeline which they are compelled to drag and the unsteadiness of the attendants’ boat. In great depths the diver cannot stay submerged more than an hour at most, and three-quarters of the time is frequently spent in getting up and down.

“You see we are at the bottom all the time,” said Mr. Lake; “we just push our nose up into the wreck, the diver steps out with a short air-tube, and works right in the path of our searchlight. He can come back in a minute for tools, or to rest, and go out again without delay, no matter how high the waves are running on the surface.”

As we came up, Mr. Lake told us of his plan to build at once a 100-foot boat for practical work, the “Argonaut” being regarded more as an experiment.

We were now rising again to the surface, after being submerged for more than three hours. I climbed into the conning-tower and watched for the first glimpse of the sunlight. There was a sudden fluff of foam, the ragged edge of a wave, and then I saw, not more than a hundred feet away, a smack bound toward New York under full sail. Her rigging was full of men, gazing curiously in our direction, no doubt wondering what strange monster of the sea was coming forth for a breath of air.

Ray Stannard Baker

McClure’s/November, 1900

THREE words, the facets of the same idea, will express the national atmosphere of Germany: order, system, discipline. From the moment one sets foot on the soil of the Fatherland, particularly if he enters by way of the French border, he feels this atmosphere. It radiates from the soldierly railroad guard who stands sharply at attention at the crossing as the train rushes past; he feels it in the forests all planted properly in rows, and in the neatly kept railroad grounds and rights of way; he feels it in the policeman who demands his address, his nationality, his business, and how long he is going to stay, so that he may be properly tagged and pigeon-holed; and, above all, he feels it in the endless system—and it is nothing short of a system—of military and civil uniforms, which quite relieves him of the responsibility of being a judge of character, for every man wears his character on his back.

And this national atmosphere of Germany is, in reality, the atmosphere of the military camp, as the spirit of the government is the military spirit. Indeed, every German is a soldier. I do not mean, of course, that the German actually drills and studies the tactics of war every year, but until he is beyond the years of military service he is always on call, and he looks upon himself as a soldier of the Empire. Indeed, after the German has finished his regular compulsory service, he is called back from time to time for a few weeks to keep him in training, to drill him in the new formations, or to give him a clear understanding of new arms and ammunition. His life is divided into exact periods—the actual service period, the reserve period, the landwehr period, and the landsturm period; and the military authorities always know just where to find him and at what call he must shoulder arms. As he grows older, there is less likelihood that the government will put its finger on him; but in cases of great danger, even the old landsturm must march forth.

Every boy is born a soldier; his birth is registered with the authorities, and twenty years later, with automatic precision, he is called upon to do duty. As a consequence, when one speaks of the making of a German soldier, he deals to a large extent, at least, with the greater subject of the making of a German citizen, and indeed with the making of the German nation.

Germany has no regular army in the sense in which that term is used in America and in England. There are no regular soldiers who enlist for long periods of time and make soldiery a business. Germany is wholly without a counterpart of that picturesque character Tommy Atkins, who has served everywhere in the world, and who knows no life outside of the army; nor has she any type corresponding to our own hard-riding, daredevil regulars. Although a country of soldiers, it is a curious fact that Germany has produced little or no soldier-boy literature—literature in which the English language is so rich. There is no glamour in soldier life to the German, no heroes adorn the service; soldiery is simply one of the plain duties of life—if pleasant, to be enjoyed; if disagreeable, to be endured. And so, although Germany is a nation of soldiers, the soldier does not exist. Even the non-commissioned officers, although they serve for longer terms than the privates, and learn more of the business of soldiery, do it not so much for the love of the service or because it has irresistible attraction for them, as in the case of the English or the American “noncom,” but with the definite purpose of making it a step to better things in civil life. For after all is said, the German hasn’t a drop of Irish blood in him; he is not a natural-born soldier, and he doesn’t like fighting. And yet he does his duty in his German way with absolute faithfulness, serves his time, and is proud of it afterward. But because he does not become intoxicated with the military life, like the Frenchman, there is no reason why he should not be a good fighter.

It is curious that a nation thus deficient in military enthusiasm should become, by common consent, the greatest of military powers, with the most perfectly organized fighting system and the most perfectly trained individual soldier.

The German army, like the German nation, has been squeezed into existence. Germany, open on every side to attack, has been the great battle-ground of Europe through all the centuries; and by constant pressure within and without, the army has had its growth. It was the result of stern necessity for defense. It was defense or death; and that, in spite of the commonly reported military aspirations of the German Kaiser, is the keynote of the system. The army must be made powerful enough to defend the country from the attacks of any one power or all of them together. If it is necessary to march into France in the course of such a war, well and good; but that is not the fundamental purpose of the army.

And this idea of defending the Fatherland is, significantly enough, the idea which animates every citizen German. In France, the popular attitude is just the reverse. There an army is for attack, it is a weapon for offense, and whenever the army becomes about so strong or when an ambitious officer arises, immediately there is talk of war with England, or Germany, or some other nation. There have been signs recently that the attitude of Germany, in high official circles at least, was changing, that a new spirit of conquest and extension had been born; but, if that is so, it has not yet affected the German citizen soldier.

To the old “inevitables,” death and taxes, the German adds a third, military service. From the time he is old enough to go to school, he looks forward and plans for it. It is said that the first great event in the life of a German boy is his confirmation, and the second his first week as a soldier. A huge red placard appears one day on the billposting tower so familiar to German towns. It contains a list of the names of all the young men in the district who have reached military age, and his is among them. He has been expecting it, and he knows that the authorities never forget. Already he and his parents have decided one important question regarding his service, and that is, whether he shall enter as a freiwillige, or volunteer to serve for one year only, or whether he must take the full service of two years. It is safe to say that every German boy has an ambition to be a freiwillige, but with the greater majority of them it is an impossibility. For a freiwillige must have had a certain amount of schooling, or his mental training must be sufficient to enable him to pass a specified examination; and then, more difficult still, his parents must be financially able to support him while he is in the service, even to the extent of paying for his board and clothing. It is the demand of the government that every boy must serve, be his family rich or poor, noble or common; but the government assumes that the bright, capable boy will learn the drill and the instructions more quickly than the dull peasant boy, and, besides, the freiwillige system relieves the government of the support of a large number of soldiers, and, as I shall show later, economy is a cardinal virtue in the German military system.

The physicians reject great numbers of the boys the first year, because they are not yet large or strong enough to bear the rigors of the service, and they are called again the next year. Boys with serious physical defects, such as the loss of the trigger finger, or color blindness, or curvature of the spine, are rejected entirely, usually to their keen regret. A few others also escape—cases in which a boy is the sole support of a widowed mother and in similar instances, but the authorities always keep a jealous eye on those who slip through, and should their conditions of life permit, within a reasonable number of years, they must do their service with the others. So few Germans escape service entirely that it is a matter for mild suspicion and inquiry when a man says he has not served. The first question the would-be employer asks a man is, “Have you done your service and where?” If the answer is in the negative, the next question is, “Why not?” for it is argued that if this man escaped he must have some grave physical defect, or else he must be cumbered with a family to support.

Under certain conditions, the freiwillige men, and sometimes the two-year men, may choose the regiments in which they wish to serve, for some regiments are more aristocratic than others; and they may sometimes select the branch of the service which they prefer, whether infantry, cavalry, artillery, or engineers, although the great proportion of the men are assigned at the will of the officers. Service in the cavalry and artillery requires three years, but there are men who are fond of horses, and who choose the cavalry because it is schneidig, a word best translated in English slang as “tony,” although the work in the cavalry is more severe.

A regiment is never made up entirely of new men. In the first place, there is the skeleton framework of the non-commissioned officers (I am not considering here the commissioned officers), and usually a large residue of men who have already served one year. To these the new draft, awkward, callow, apparently hopelessly stupid, is added; and the officers are confronted with the discouraging task, as old as armies, of beating this raw material into shape. The new recruit spends his first few weeks pretty closely in barracks. His old suit of clothes is packed up, labeled, and stored away, to be kept and returned to him when he finishes his service. He is fitted from among the oldest uniforms in the possession of the regiment, and he is set to such dispiriting tasks as cleaning barracks, blacking the officers’ boots, and other duties quite as disagreeable. To a boy who has been brought up in fairly good surroundings, such tasks as these are anything but a pleasant introduction to military life; but here comes in the national spirit of order and obedience to authority, and he obeys. The greatest man in the world to him just now is his corporal, whose business it is to knock off his rough corners, and none too gently. His first sergeant, the “mother of the regiment,” is a planet as yet a little out of his orbit, and his captain is a fixed and distant star to be looked upon with awe and wonder. One of his first duties is to learn the “soldier marks”—the distinguishing uniform of his officers and how he must salute his superiors. In Germany, the code of etiquette, as between officers and men, is very rigid. The private is taught that he must obey every order of a superior absolutely and unquestioningly, and that he must invariably salute in exactly the proper way. Anyone who visits Germany will see this saluting process on any corner. A sentinel comes to “present arms” and follows his officer with his eyes, like a faithful dog, until he is out of sight. A marching squad goes through that difficult and, to the uninitiated, that amusing performance known in older times as the goose-step. Each man in the line raises his leg, thrusts out his foot vigorously in front, and brings it down with a sharp stroke on the pavement. And thus, “goose-stepping,” he marches until the officer has disappeared. The recruit is also taught the purpose of each article in his uniform and how it must be kept, and what is more, he is held strictly responsible for every damage. Every button is looked after in a way which would astonish an American regular, who, by the way, is the most costly soldier in the world, as the German is the cheapest. One has only to watch a coat or boot inspection, which sometimes lasts for an hour, and to see the officers examine every seam and wrinkle, to be persuaded of the care taken. Not only are there regular regimental tailors and shoemakers detailed from among the men of those trades, but each young soldier is taught how to mend his clothing and to patch his boots, so that they always look well. Many regimental commanders take so keen a pride in preserving the uniforms of their men that they pile up great stocks of clothing in store. I heard of one regiment that possessed six complete uniforms for every man. As a consequence of this rigid supervision, there is no soldier who looks neater and cleaner on all occasions than the German; and I think it has had a profound effect on the whole German nation, for it is rare in German to see a ragged, untidy, and dirty man, however poor, whereas such specimens swarm the poorer districts of London and New York.

After the recruit has become familiar with his barracks, his uniforms, and his officers, he is ready to begin active drilling, at first without a rifle. And this is hard work. Many of the boys are fresh from farm labor, and are already more or less stiff and awkward; and frequently those from the cities, while more active, are not so strong. The exercises consist in throwing back the arms violently, expanding the chest, lowering and elevating the body by bending the knees, and many similar movements calculated to strengthen and render supple all the muscles of the body. Then there is the famous “long step.” A whole company may be seen strutting across the parade-ground, rising on one foot, and balancing there with the other leg extended until the order comes. Then down with the suspended foot in as long a step as possible, and up with the other. This seems simple enough, but when a recruit has been at it half an hour or more he wishes devoutly for something else. The long step is said to make the Germans good marchers, to assist in giving them that quality of strength and endurance which, during the Franco-Prussian war, “marched the French to death.” It is a favorite punishment for petty misdemeanors to force a soldier to go through these exercises for so many minutes or hours.

A little later, and, indeed, all through the service of the German soldier, there is constant drilling in all manner of athletic feats, particularly in jumping and climbing. I saw a squad of recruits practicing the running high jump. They were all clad in old canvas uniforms of cheap make, their working clothes, and they stood in a line and jumped at the order of the officer. Every one of them was a strapping, round-faced fellow of evident strength, and yet some of them actually could not jump over a string two feet high. They had had no training, and they possessed no idea of how to utilize their muscles. But with a year or two of steady training they make good jumpers. More advanced squads are set to work on the horizontal bar; the work here is very practical, with little attempt to teach the high swings and fancy movements. Then there are vaulting exercises, and scaling exercises in which a squad of men are sent charging at a sheer board wall fifteen or twenty feet high, made to represent a fort, and up they go on one another’s knees and backs, rifles and all, until every man is on top; and it is astonishing to see how well and how quickly it is all done. In watching these men at their work, one is impressed with the sober earnestness with which every task is performed. There is rarely a smile, never anything like a cheer, and no apparent appreciation of the fact that these exercises are sometimes practiced as sport. To these men it is a serious duty, not especially enjoyable, but endurable. No recruits in the world are worked so hard as the Germans; for hours they are kept at this physical training, one exercise after another. Some men it has killed by its severity, but most of them thrive under it, so that at the end of a year many a frail stripling of a lad has become a brawny, bronzed-faced soldier, able to stand any hardship. There can be no doubt that this vigorous military training has had a profound effect on the German people. The German is by nature physically indolent; he has no love for violent sports such as the Englishman and the American enjoy; he prefers to sit quietly in some little back-yard forest of evergreens growing in tubs and sip his beer. The military training in a measure stirs him out of this lethargy, and gives him the physical strength that he needs.

After several weeks of preliminary training, the recruit is given his rifle. He is required to learn everything about it, the purpose of each part, and how it should be cleaned and kept. Then begins the long training in the manual of arms, a branch in which the Germans are especially proficient. The drill is carried even to practice with the bayonet and bayonet tournaments, the bayonets, of course, being rendered harmless by a clot of cloth wound around the point. I have seen two men, shielded with breastpadding and cage-masks, fight with much vigor and precision, and give each other some pretty vigorous thrusts. If a modern battle should by any remote possibility reach the point of a face-to-face bayonet struggle, these big German soldiers, trained as they are, would unquestionably make short work of their adversaries.

And now comes the drill in formation, which is not unlike that in other countries, except, probably, in its minute thoroughness. Indeed, thoroughness is the very essence of the German training. Not long ago I read a criticism in an English paper, anent the South African war, to the effect that the English commissioned officers left too much of the preliminary training, and indeed of regular drill work, to their subordinates, the sergeants and the corporals. In the German army this is not the case; the commissioned officer is never far off, and he is constantly at work with his men, teaching and training them. A familiar sight on a German drill ground is a captain or a lieutenant talking to his company to the length almost of a lecture, advising and instructing. The casual visitor in a German city, who sees the German officers strolling about of an afternoon in their fine uniforms, with their saber scabbards mirror-bright in the sunshine and their spurs clinking, is quite likely to set these men down as “tin soldiers,” rich men’s sons who have found an easy and showy career in the army. But if this visitor takes pains to inquire, he will find that most of these officers were out at five o’clock in the morning or before, and that by the time the ordinary citizen is out of bed, they have done a half day’s hard work.

Indeed, it is the principle of the German military system to work its men hard, to inure them to all the hardships of war, so that in case they are called suddenly into the field, a forced march will not send them all to hospital. On a hot June day last spring I saw several companies go charging across a drill ground in heavy marching order. They were clad in blue flannel, with metal helmets, and they must have carried at least fifty pounds each on their backs. Every man was dripping with perspiration and choking with dust, but no mercy was shown. They were carrying every pound that would have been carried in a campaign, and they were being trained by hard service to stand it.

Besides the company, battalion, and regimental drill, which is kept up constantly during the entire time of the soldier’s service, there are, every year, and sometimes oftener, great gatherings of soldiers from all parts of the Empire, at what is known as the spring or fall maneuvers. The Kaiser himself, than whom there is no more enthusiastic soldier in the Empire, is fond of the pageantry of these great gatherings. Here the men are trained as though on an active campaign, maneuvered in divisions and brigades, often in sham battle, some fighting from trenches, some skirmishing in the open, others bridging rivers and effecting crossings as if under fire. The three arms of the service are trained together, so that the infantry will work in perfect harmony with the cavalry and the cavalry with the artillery. In no other army in the world, perhaps, is so much attention paid to training the men, and especially the officers, in these great and necessary evolutions. Many officers can handle a regiment perfectly, but when it comes to disposing a division in a masterly manner they fall short. And in the German army the ideal soldier is Von Moltke, “the battle thinker,” the man who can dispose great forces with wisdom, not the daring hero who rides recklessly at the head of his men and foolishly risks his life. In this respect the Germans are totally different from the French or the Anglo-Saxons, who dearly love the hero, the man of great personal bravery, and who are quite likely to clamor that such a man be rewarded with a high command, regardless of his fitness as a “battle thinker.”

It has been said by critics that the weakest point in the German army is its marksmanship. Thousands of German boys entering service, perhaps a majority of them, have never touched a rifle until it is placed in their hands for drilling. In general, a German is not born with the love of a gun, like an American, and he rarely has an opportunity to use a rifle outside of the service. In America, every farmer’s boy begins to shoot rabbits as soon as he can hold the old shot-gun without wobbling; and as he grows older the love of shooting grows with him. But in Germany there is no such natural training, and the military training is naturally limited, owing to the great cost of ammunition. Still, the German soldier does much target-shooting. He begins with a specially made rifle, in weight and general appearance exactly like the Mauser, but so arranged that it fires a small cartridge having a bullet hardly larger than a pea. A miniature target is set up only ten to twenty feet away from the firer, and here he practices aiming, setting the sight, holding the gun steadily, and so on, thereby saving the waste of larger ammunition. After he has become proficient in this work, he goes to the regular shooting ranges, and is there required to fire a little each week, until he can make a certain score. But it is probable that many German soldiers never come to really familiar shooting relations with their rifles.

With all this physical training and drill, the intellectual development of the man also goes forward apace. There are regular classes in which instruction is given, not in the familiar branches of the schools, for every German soldier knows how to read and write before he enters the service, but in broader subjects. The soldier is instructed as to who is his Emperor, who his king, and what his duties are to each; he is given lessons in history in so far as they relate to military affairs, and in the geography of Germany, with an idea of the military defense of the nation, of its power and its future. Strange as it may seem, there are men who enter the army with the haziest idea of their Kaiser, some, even, who have never heard of him.

Germany is said to manage its military system more cheaply than any other nation. The whole vast army of Germany does not cost the government as much each year as the United States pays in pensions. Rigid economy is the watchword of the entire system. Only a rich man may become an officer, for to a large extent he must pay his own way, a major-general receiving a salary of barely $185 a month from the government, while a second lieutenant gets only about $20 a month, or about the pay of an American sergeant. As for the common soldiers, their pay and board are so meager that it seems all but impossible that grown men, and hard-working men at that, should subsist and thrive on so little. The pay of an ordinary private is about nine cents a day, but out of this he must pay two and one-half cents for his dinner, leaving him in cash only about six and one-half cents a day, and in almost every case this small wage must be spent entirely for food. For the only free ration of a German soldier is a huge, thick loaf of black bread, very nutritious, but monotonous when eaten for every meal, and coffee or soup. The bread ration is issued every three or four days; and upon this and the coffee, with a possible dish of soup in the morning, the soldier must exist, unless he has means of his own, so far as free rations are concerned. At noon, however, he is provided with a sort of meat stew—in America it would be called an Irish stew—which is warm, nutritious, and palatable. This costs ten pfennigs (two and one-half cents), and by piecing out with his black bread the soldier makes a very good meal.

Small as is the wage received by the soldier, yet the army regulations guard it jealously, for frugality is part of the training. Each soldier places his money in a little bag suspended from a string around his neck. At any time during inspection the officer may demand to have the bags opened, and if it is found that any soldier spends his six cents a day wages too rapidly—think of the wild dissipation which might be had for six cents a day—he is reprimanded and punished. He must make his wages, small as they are, cover his expenses; he must not spend them instantly for beer.

Furthermore, it is a very rare thing to see a drunken German soldier; and as for fighting, a single Irish regiment would keep the whole German army well supplied and have a good many broken heads left over. The fact is, the German soldier is worked up to the limit of his strength, and when he has finished a day’s exercises he is quite willing to roll into his bunk. Most of the soldiers are poor, with no money to spend on dissipation, and all of them have their ambitions for a civil career as soon as they are through with their service. Moreover, it is not in the nature of the German to go to wild excesses in anything. As a consequence, wherever you find him, the German soldier is well-behaved, and apparently always under discipline.

The German soldier frequently has an hour to himself, and after chapel service he is usually free on Sunday; and you see him, neat and clean, though often awkward and clumsy, parading about the streets, frequently holding the hand of a rosy-cheeked girl or sitting in the park, unabashed, with his arm round her. He lacks the inimitable jauntiness of the English redcoat, with his little cap cocked over his ear, and he has none of the activity and sprightliness of the gayly-clad French soldier; but there he stands solidly in his big coarse boots, a serious and simple-minded fellow intent on doing his duty, slow and clumsy, it is true, but with strength and patience—a soldier, every inch of him. He is not good in initiatives; his whole training, indeed the whole life of the German Empire, tends to crush out individuality, to train him that he is nothing, and that his company and his regiment and his Emperor are everything, that he must obey implicitly.

The present Kaiser, in an address to his soldiers, once said:

“The soldier should not have a will of his own, but all of you should have one will, and that is my will. There exists only one law, and that is my law; and now go and do your duty, and be obedient to your superiors.”

So the German soldier waits patiently for orders, and when they come, he obeys, no matter what obstacle lies in the way. And in the next European war he will be next to invincible if he is well led.

Westbrook Pegler

The Dothan Eagle/December 21, 1950

NEW YORK When that great patriot, James Kevin McGuinness, died a little while ago, I reported that he had been whispered out of the motion picture industry as punishment for giving testimony against the Communist treachery at the 1947 hearings of the Committee on Un-American Activities. Jim never knew whose hand plunged the knife into his back. He was tried in absentia, knowing neither the charge nor the name of his accuser, and, after some remote negotiations with the secret terror, contact was broken and he was done for. Meanwhile, actors, writers, producers and others implicated in the treason have gone on to greater wealth and renown. The motion picture industry professes to have cleaned house, but has done nothing of the kind.

Jim was an active leader of the American Legion’s fight against treason, having resumed his dormant membership a few years ago when he decided that organization was necessary to wage the counter-attack. Previously he had dropped out as a silent objection to the shameful misconduct of legionnaires at some of the national conventions in the ’20’s. But he always believed in the original principles of the Legion and so, when he realized that the motion picture industry was infested with actual traitors who were trying to betray his country to Soviet Russia, Jim went back into the fold. During the same period, Jim also lagged in his religious devoirs. I would not presume to discuss this phase of his life except to make the point that when the issue was joined, Jim fought as a Christian crusader and a gallant gentleman. He was deeply religious now, and, in his dying moment, called to his wife, “Lucie, I am dying! Hand me my prayer-book!”

Jim was a fine man, a martyr worthy of the same respect that is due the young men who gave their lives in Korea. He fought in the same cause. Had he been 21 or 25 when this war came, and not 57, he undoubtedly would have joined up as he did in 1917 when he fought in France as an infantry lieutenant.

I recently mentioned a beautiful patriotic pageant which Jim wrote for the national convention of the American Legion which was held in Hollywood under a promise by the movie industry to finance a great show in the Hollywood Bowl. Jim was a political outcast of the movie industry and his script was ruled out. One man even had the effrontery to propose that Edward G. Robinson, the movie actor who had been so mockingly defiant when Jim was fighting the Reds, should be selected for a leading part in the patriotic production under Legion auspices. He was told, however, that Robinson never would be allowed to use the Legion to clear his skirts.

You might savor the beauty of Jim’s devotion to his country by reading these few samples of an oration written by Jim and delivered at the pageant by Father Edward Carney, of Lawrence, Mass., the national chaplain of the Legion:

“Humbly reverent, we lay the wreath of sweet remembrance before those, our comrades, who made the last the utmost payment to establish and preserve the freedom they bequeathed to us as the greatest gift of comradeship and love. We are alive because they are dead. We taste each day the luscious fruits of their sublime generosity. We know each day the brightness of the returning sun; walking in the free breeze of a land still free because of those Who fell so that we might stand erect, owing no man anything but affection freely given. We see each night the silent brilliance of the stars with their promise of eternity; finding sleep in calm surety that no tyrant can shatter our rest by violent intrusions of our homes and seizures of our persons.

“Because of them, the fallen, we are the living. Because of them, the fallen, we are the free. Because of them we are now able to face the foul tyranny now enslaving half the world and say, clearly and without falter: ‘That which was preserved for us by the blood of our brothers is God’s gift to His sons. To fail freedom would be to deny divine grace; to betray our country and to foul the memories of our magnificent dead. Confronting the power your evil has assembled, we are unafraid. Freedom is of God and must endure. Tyranny and evil shall perish . . .’

“The scowling, cynical intellectuals of the left having cautiously evaded the tumult and the agony of battle are our enemies no less than the booted hordes who have trampled down the ideals and the goodness of Christian civilization everywhere they have marched. In the service of hatred they have murdered love. And their agents are many among us. I quote from Archbishop Ireland’s address on patriotism: ‘This country is America; only those who are loyal to her can be allowed to live under her flag; and they who are loyal to her may enjoy her liberties and rights. If that allegiance is not plenary and supreme, he is false to the profession of allegiance; if it is, he is an American.’

“Yes, we have a duty toward our traitors. In our hands is the bright sword of truth. It was put into our hands by those who died for truth. The blood of our heroic comrades has seeped into the earth of every continent and stained the waters of every sea. We are the guardians of a nationhood which has never taken up arms in aggression but only in defense.

“For life and death, for the body and the eternal soul, the war is upon us the war forced by men who want for themselves the powers that belong to God alone.

“In memory of that great and gallant army which poured out the rich, red wine of youth to keep us free, we pledge ourselves to be worthy of their sacrifices and to cherish the duty they so richly performed.

“May Almighty God bless our cause and may He make us truly the sons of His freedom.”

For those sentiments, Jim McGuinness was whispered out of the motion picture industry in his own country, which he had served in battle in France.

Westbrook Pegler

The Dothan Eagle/December 20, 1950

NEW YORK Happy Chandler’s curbstone opinion that baseball might fold up for the duration of the war between the two worlds was the honest, brave expression of a patriot. Whatever Happy may have done in the past, and I do not forget his acceptance of a swimming pool as a personal gift from a contractor, this was a rallying cry comparable to Governor Dewey’s great speech which came several days later. The Governor called on us to give up all frivolity and luxury and get ready to fight with all our might for survival.

Happy Chandler, an old-time, routine Democratic hack who had served both as Governor of Kentucky and as United States Senator, rose to a height that, frankly, I never expected him to reach. I should have known better, for I faintly recall his having faced Franklin D. Roosevelt across his desk in the White House to tell him that no man could forbid Happy Chandler to run for any office. Roosevelt had an imperious way of deciding such matters as head of the Democratic party. Almost any other Democrat would have mumbled, “Yes, sir,” and slunk away.

I met Happy in the great plaza in front of the Capitol and asked him what had happened? I didn’t expect the truth except, perhaps, “off the record,” nor did I anticipate the brash candor of Happy’s challenge to the Great Man. Happy said Roosevelt had called him in to admonish him, in that supercilious, patronizing way, to be a good boy, and bide his time in which case, of course, he would be taken care of. For the time being, Alben Barkley had to be the people’s choice. Barkley, who later was to show a spark of manhood and resign the leadership only to tuck his tail between his legs and come to heel at a snap of the master’s fingers.

Happy said he had looked Roosevelt in the eye and told him to mind his own business. The quote that I remember, perhaps with a slight inaccuracy of phrase, was: “Mr. President, neither you nor any other man can tell Happy Chandler not to run for any office. I done made my way so far and if I can’t go any farther without asking your permission I won’t go any farther. But I will still be Happy Chandler.”

Roosevelt couldn’t stand back-talk from anyone. Only Huey Long had ever talked back to him before. He had threatened to cut off Huey’s patronage and Louisiana’s share of the disgraceful graft that was being sluiced out of the national treasury to the devouring Democratic machines all over the country to build concrete roads paralleling concrete roads already in existence, to build the Quoddy dam and tailored stone walls along the property of local leaders. Satan took Huey to the mountain top and Huey, out of no virtue but by force of his mischievous spunk, told him to go to hell. He would start his own dictatorship with his own WPA and his own FBI and carry the fight back to Roosevelt. He did and he was gaining and he would have beaten Roosevelt surely in 1940 if his own thug-men, as he called them, had not cut him down in a mysterious assassination which was not explained by the brutal murder of Doctor Weiss, the innocent scapegoat and sacrifice.

Remembering this and the off-with-his-head dismissal of Admiral Richardson for telling the great sissy naval expert that it was suicidal to anchor the fleet in rows at Pearl Harbor, one comes to an appreciation of Happy Chandler’s fibre. Happy was no man to keep his mouth shut about a flagrant case of organized slackerism just to keep his job, if the crisis was as bad as everyone thought it was. . . ,

Knowing some of the current owners of major league ball-clubs and knowing the magnate type of old, I bespeak patience and kind judgment for them in this bad mistake of theirs. They are not less patriotic than other men. But they have put themselves in a very bad light by firing their “commissioner” for contemplating the possibility that war this time will need all our might and a great spiritual and psychological concentration, and that organized baseball would have to fold up without date. They sometimes forget that their industry is not a national institution but a trust of sixteen commercial corporations fostered by a naively cooperative press and supported by a public whose intelligence in this regard, frankly, is not a compliment to the American breed of cats.

The obsession of thousands of qualified voters with absurd trivialities of baseball is not a dignified expression of the American mind and character. The continued absurd over-emphasis on trades of players from one corporation to another during the terrible sacrifice of American soldiers in Korea has put baseball in a bad light, although the editorial judgment of the press may be excused as a concession to habit and public curiosity.

Westbrook Pegler

The Dothan Eagle/December 19, 1950

NEW YORK Last August 1 my daily piece proposed that the United States should save as many men and as much equipment as possible and get out of Korea. On August 14, a propaganda mill called the Friends of Democracy, run by a preacher named Leon M. Birkhead, issued a “press release” demanding that the Attorney General prosecute me for sedition. Within the last three weeks the wisdom of my proposal has become apparent to President Truman, Congress, many editors and most of the people. The withdrawal now comes only after the worst military disaster in the history of this nation, including the loss of a war, and most of our standing army and casualties beyond our knowledge.

The futile sacrifice was magnified many times after I had the foresight to write: “For God’s sake, why doesn’t some leader, some Republican or even a Democrat, summon the courage to warn us that we can’t beat Russia in a war in which Russia always has the initiative and has, in addition to a new industrial and mechanical genius, literally millions of dark people to throw onto our bayonets until we are simply overwhelmed?”

I do not rejoice in my vision, and the occasion for this article is to call attention to Birkhead, his Friends of Democracy, and other matters.

Birkhead’s open letter to Howard McGrath, the Attorney General, said the effect of my counsel on the parents of the soldiers and on the young men then being recruited “to fight in Korea” would seem to be disastrous. Accordingly he wanted McGrath to prosecute. The sedition act provides a fine of $10,000, ten years in prison and civil disqualification for five years.

This may seem to have been a cheap gesture by a faker, but Birkhead and his Friends of Democracy are in league with other terroristic propaganda groups, two of them dominated by Isidore Lipschutz, the emigre diamond dealer from Belgium. A loyal American may oppose them only at serious risk of prosecution, whether by the abuse of due process or otherwise. A common method is moral blackmail through the infliction of overwhelming costs on the offending patriot plus prolonged harassment through lawsuits. Another one is indictment on trumped-up charges which conceal the fact that the actual offense may consist of irreverence toward the late Roosevelt and his pestiferous wife, “isolationism,” or opposition to the personal foreign policy of Isidore Lipschutz.

I have undertaken to expose Lipschutz and the stealthy works of his Society for the Prevention of World War III and his Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League. I have already revealed that this impudent man has had the effrontery to maintain through his League a pack of sneaks to spy on law-abiding citizens because their opinions conflict with his. I shall now begin to develop Birkhead’s character and methods and his association with Lipschutz.

According to John T. Flynn, an excellent reporter and a very aggressive pro-American propagandist, Birkhead worked both sides of the street in Kansas City by preaching in All Souls’ Unitarian Church and writing anti-religious copy for a magazine called The Militant Atheist. Flynn presented the following quotation from Birkhead’s work: “Religious people are ordinarily narrow, petty, trivial. How could they be otherwise when they are the victims of narrow and. intolerant intellects? Most people who make any pretense of being religious would be better off without any religion.”

“Birkhead has one further grouch about the Christians,” Mr. Flynn writes further. ”They are meddlers, he says, in other people’s affairs. He quotes Wendell Phillips’ sneer that the Christian idea of hell was a place where everyone had to mind bis own business. Yet, we behold his Friends of Democracy hiring snoopers and informers to pry into other men’s lives; ransack their offices and generally meddle in their affairs on a scale no normal meddler ever dreams of.”

This refers to Avedis Boghus Derounian, alias John Roy Carlson, a perpetually frightened professional sneak and notorious liar of whom Judge John P. Barnes, of the United States court, said that he was unworthy of belief on oath. Derounian wrote a book which was found to be false in three formal trials, in a fourth lawsuit he escaped judgment by retracting. This book was “Under Cover,” a lying smear text which received hysterical advertisement for many weeks and absurd approval from The Herald Tribune. Carlson wrote grateful acknowledgment to Birkhead for the use of his “files” and said he had been employed for five years by the Friends of Democracy.

I have no real fear of any of these, concerns, but I do acknowledge the constant danger to pro-Americans of a serious threat of imprisonment. Several other men have been indicted for opposing Lipschutz. Flynn reports that Rex Stout, one of the founders of the Communist magazine New Masses, exhorted the Overseas Press Club to “get” all unrepentant “non-interventionists,” demanding that they be charged with subversive activities and violation of the Mann Act and the income tax law. He reports that Stout proposed a letter campaign to editors to “get” Pegler. Dorothy Thompson reports that such a letter campaign did “get” her.

Stout and Birkhead are on the “advisory council” of Lipschutz’s Society for the Prevention of World War III, although several of the founders got out because they believed it was improperly conducted as a political agency for Lipschutz in our foreign affairs. He wasn’t even a citizen at that time. Circumstantial evidence indicates that the Friends of Democracy acted as a front for a stronger and more highly secretive power in the smear terror. (C-1950).

Westbrook Pegler

The Dothan Eagle/December 18, 1950

NEW YORK–President Truman’s threatening letter to a professional critic who had been unable to praise his daughter’s singing is not an isolated offense. It is one of several outbreaks which prove that the President is an unstable man of brutal nature who has no personal respect for law or the “freedoms” which his party has exploited at the polls and flouted almost everywhere else. In 1948, he wrote a vicious personal attack on Bernard Baruch, including a side-long swipe at Baruch’s brother, and permitted, or caused, it to leak out. Knowledge of it became current and Mr. Baruch privately admitted to confidants in the newspaper business that he had received the letter and that it was shockingly undignified coming from a President.

My knowledge came a roundabout way from the White House. Baruch refused to disclose the text to these friends, but when he refused to tell me what the letter said I countered by telling him with slight reservations. He confirmed my version of the scurrility which the President had heaped on him for refusing to perform a political service in the Presidential campaign. In closing, Baruch added that he never had been fooled by President Truman and bantered me because I had overrated him for a short time. “He is a rude, uncouth, ignorant man,” Mr. Baruch said.

The next day, Mr. Baruch, who works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, regretted his candor. He did not repudiate his words nor did he charge that his confidence had been violated. He did say, however, that he had not authorized anyone “to speak for” him and this had the effect of a crawl. I have been given to understand that Mr. Baruch did this because he was very badly worried lest the nation lose the benefit of his advice to Mr. Truman. He thought Truman needed wise counsel more than any other President in our time if not in all our history. Efforts to re-establish relations have failed as Baruch should have foreseen that they would, so he might as well have stood his ground.

The President also wrote a letter to his friend and counsellor, Arthur Krock, The New York Times correspondent, which was so bad that Mr. Krock personally carried it back and advised the President to destroy it. Arthur held that such a letter, written by a President, should not be permitted to exist. The abuse in this letter was not directed at Krock but at other persons. When he writes such letters and how he gets them past his secretaries are matters of speculation in Washington. Krock is one of the few persons in Truman’s official and social orbit with the instincts of a gentleman. Boors and white-collar riff-raff predominate, maintaining the standard of the long Roosevelt regime.

One may wish to say that this flurry was much ado about nothing. Unfortunately, that is not so. The judgment which prompted the letter to Paul Hume, the writer who correctly belittled Margaret Truman’s voice, is the same judgment which controls the lives of millions of Americans and the destiny of our nation and western civilization. The letter bespoke a brutal, vicious, lawless nature. These characteristics are plainly seen in the threat to commit a felony, to maim Hume and to deny him his Constitutional freedom of reasonable expression. But even more frightening is the fact that the President committed an act of stupidity as bad as his failure to insist on access to Berlin. His intention was to redress an imaginary wrong against his daughter. But the result was that, whereas only a few thousand persons who had attended her concerts had known that she was not a good singer, her father broadcast the bad news all over the world. Now everybody knows it, thanks to Harry S. Truman. She can never live that down.

This young woman’s career has been a minor scandal for a long time. One night the Associated Press wire began a review which politely hinted that Miss Truman’s voice was not up to the professional standard. Then the story broke and an excited service message said: “Bust this. Bust this. Bust this. Sub coming.”

The substitute item was a discreet compromise.

On Nov. 11, following Margaret’s performance in Springfield, Mass., Harley Rudkin, of The Springfield News, wrote that her voice was not up to the standard of the concert stage and “would probably be more at home within the smaller confines of the family parlor.”

Mr. Rudkin said Margaret could not stay on pitch, which was one of Hume’s observations, and that “the basic requirements for bigtime singing do not seem to be among Miss Truman’s equipment.” He moved to the back of the hall, seeking better perspective. From there he went to the balcony and he wound up his research verifying something he already knew, namely “that the  acoustics of the auditorium are excellent.”

The letter insulting the Marines at a time of tragic sacrifice by that magnificent corps of patriots is another written in this series, and on the very day that the Hume letter became public, Congressman Hebert, of New Orleans, received a missive which would have aroused public disgust except that the Hume letter topped it.

Truman simply is not a gentleman. His threat to unman Hume–and that was the plain intent of his language–reflected the nature of a mucker who never can rise above his ordained station. This is not abusive comment but sober appraisal of the man who publicly insulted Mrs. Strom Thurmond in the 1948 inaugural parade and threatened to maim a citizen who had withheld from his daughter praise which she did not deserve.

Westbrook Pegler

Chicago Tribune/December 31, 1928

New York, Dec. 30.–Old Mr. Dempsey, the broken down prize fighter, apparently has agreed to resume the heavyweight championship at the end of the heavyweight elimination bouts, series of 1928-29. He is reported to be on his way to Miami Beach at this time to do anything he can toward stimulating the customer demand for the proposed bout between Jack (Rin Tin-Tin-ear) Sharkey of Boston and Willie Stribling, the inveterate schoolboy of Macon, Ga.

When this one is out of the way these two boys will be paired and cross-paired with other heavyweights on the regular Rickard staff and the whole program will work up to a more or less grand finale late next summer, in which Mr. Dempsey will fight the best, or the least worst of the lot, and win.

This will make Dempsey the champion again and that will be a terrible reflection on the championship, because Mr. Dempsey himself said not long ago that he was a confirmed has-been as early as 1926, when he lost the championship to Mr. Tunney.

Tex Boosting Florida.

In the absence of any other apparent justification for the Sharkey-Stribling transaction at Miami Beach, one is led to suspect that Mr. Rickard is putting this one on down there merely to help along the revival of the real estate and tourist business of that community in which he now holds citizenship and property.

The mere mention of the plan served to place the name of Miami Beach in the newspaper datelines a couple of weeks and the wrangling over terms and officials, bandages, and the interpretation of the knockdown rule will keep this sort of thing going intermittently until the boys finally step into the ring at the dog track along toward the end of February.

This is not real wrangling, but something that might better be called shadow wrangling, for the boys and their managers and Mr. Rickard all understand that the disputes are raised and argued purely in a spirit of helpfulness.

When there is a real wrangle over some point such as the selection of a referee, the business is so grim that the sportsmen concerned in the choice forget to call up the papers. As I recall the incidents leading up to the Dempsey-Tunney uplift in Chicago, there was little or nothing said for publication regarding the selection of the referee, although subsequent confessions and memoirs have revealed that the wrangle in this case was almost homicidal at times.

I also see a new and strange significance now in the visit which I received from a persuasive young man in Chicago who called for the purpose of arguing the sterling honor and professional merits of one of the candidates for the referee’s host. He wished me to get behind his candidate in a big aggressive way and campaign for him as the people’s choice or something of that nature.

Recalls Chicago Incident

I could only reply that to the best of my judgment, the people’s interests would be best served by an emergency session of the legislature to relegate this fight back to the true and natural status of prize fighting, which was regarded as a felonious practice until a previous legislature divorced it by special enactment from its ethical communion with safe blowing, porch climbing. and blackmail.

Subsequently I was glad of my decision, for one of the principals in the uplift work told me that this candidate went to the other principal, got on his knees, raised his right hand and swore: ” If I am in the center when you boys fight you will leave the ring champion of the world.”

At this I could only exclaim: “Heavens. can such things be!”

Damon Runyon

Wilkes-Barre Evening News/March 10, 1926

In the little old Broadway club the other night, way down deep in Brooklyn, I beheld a fighter that I believe is Mickey Walker’s most dangerous contender for the welterweight title. 

He is Georgie Levine, a Wiilliamsburg Hebrew, dark-visaged, thin-flanked, cunning, ice-cold and wicked, the type of fighter that Benny Leonard was a few years ago and looking much like Leonard in general appearance. I saw this Levine administer a terrific shellacking to Tommy Milligan, who claims the welterweight and middleweight championships of all Europe.

Milligan had made something of an impression on New York ring-worms in three battles in the arena of the big town. He is rated by the New York Athletic Commission, so I am informed, as first in the line of title contenders in the welterweight division, with Joe Dundee, of Baltimore, second to him.

I do not know just how the New York Commission arrives at its ratings, unless it is on the basis of personal regard. The commissioners cannot have seen Jimmy Finley, of Kentucky, now fighting on the west coast; Al Mello, of Massachusetts; Georgie Ward, of New Jersey; or half a dozen others I might name. They surely have not seen Levine, a native New Yorker.

Yet Levine is no over-night flash. He. has been coming up for over a year through the rasping schooling of the little clubs, where a man meets tough opponents for mighty small money. It is a bitter, cruel education, but it makes the fighter.

Up in the Commonwealth Club, in Harlem. Levine has beaten the bard-bitten old Panama Joe Gans, and the leathery black Frisco McGale, with the galleryites snarling at him and hurling missiles into the ring. The lean Hebrew has struggled through desperate glove duels in nearly every tiny out-of-the-way club in the big city. He has served as a sparring partner to Mickey Walker in the champion’s training camp.

He has undergone the hardest grind of the Manly Art of Scrambling Ears, but he has survived it with scarcely a mark on him, and the result is a finished, graceful fighter who knows his business thoroughly—a potential champion. If he should meet Walker for the title I would hesitate about picking the winner, because Walker’s style of fighting is the style that Levine knows how to overcome. It is exactly suited to the Williamsburg boy.

He is a slashing fellow in action, a very smart boxer and a good puncher. Against Milligan he displayed more real ring craft than any fighter I have seen in some time. He outgeneraled, outboxed and outfought the overseas champion from start to finish. Incidentally Levine demonstrated during the battle that he can take a body punching. 

Milligan fought a foul fight, constantly using his elbows and throwing many punches very low, but Levine merely smiled a thin, saturnine smile and kept on fighting. He displayed great aggressiveness throughout and fought with amazing confidence.

He has a knack of turning and spinning an opponent, and tying him up in the clinches. He sidesteps a rush much after the manner of Mike Gibbons in the days when the St. Paul phantom was a shadowy, elusive ringman.

They say that Levine has been something of an in-and-outer heretofore, fighting great battles one night, and putting up indifferent showings another night. He did not take his business seriously, perhaps because he did not feel that he was getting on rapidly enough. Youth is impatient.

But just before the fight with Milligan, the Williamsburg Hebrew had taken a decision over Paul Doyle, one of the toughest welterweights in the game, and he fought like a champion against Milligan. Often these youngsters find themselves overnight. Levine will be a hard man for anyone to beat from now on.

He has real class. He boxes in an upright position, but he is always on the move. He picked up a couple of Mickey Walker’s tricks while working with the welterweight champion as a sparring partner, but he is a better boxer than Walker. He is about the best box-fighter of all the welterweights in my opinion, at least on the form he displayed against Milligan.

Levine is now about twenty-two years old. He gave an astonishing display of ring courage when he was just starting out at eighteen in a fight with Dave Shade, of California. He went fourteen rounds against Shade before he fell exhausted.

Levine then went to the Pacific Coast and did some little boxing in the four-round game. It is only within the rest year that he has commenced to find himself, however. The lads who bet on these demonstrations of The Manly Art of Scrambling Ears made Milligan a 3-to-1 favorite over Levine, but the price would have been no better than even money had they bothered to analyze Levine’s record, and studied his improvement. 

Despite the result of the Brooklyn battle, I understand the New York State Athletic Commission still insists that Milligan is to have first chance at Walker’s title in this state. This is very nice for Walker, as Milligan is made to order for him, but Levine, and perhaps Joe Dundee of Baltimore, would worry Walker a lot more.

Damon Runyon

Wilkes-Barre Evening News/March 11, 1926

Ere my remarks concerning Georgie Levin, the dark-visaged Willamsburg Hebrew, were cold in print yesterday, the indefatigable Mr. Jersey Jones had weighed in with a communication bearing on welterweights in general.

Mr. Jersey Jones is a trim youth who abandoned the Fourth Estate for the Manly Art of Scrapping Ears some time ago and who is a busy little cup of tea with a typewriter. He is associated in The Manly Art of Scrambling Ears with the Messrs Jimmie Bronson and Lou Brown, who have a large and interesting collection of pugilistic fauna, including one Meyer Cohen, a Welterweight of Holyoke, Mass.

It is of Meyer Cohen that Mr. Jersey Jones really speaks in his communication, but he has a lot of words about other welterweights, and he mentions the indubitable fact that this division at present time carries more pugilistic class than any of the others.

Moreover, he names as one of the great welterweights of the country a youth that I said is one of several the New York State Athletic Commission could not have seen when it put forward Tommy Milligan as the leading contender for Mickey Walker’s title with Joe Dundee, of Baltimore, as the runner-up. This youth is Al Mello, of Lowell. Mass, the best southpaw fighter since the days of Lew Tendler.

Mr. Jersey Jones was behind Tommy Milligan over in the New Broadway Club in Brooklyn the night Georgia Levine gave Thomas a terrific shellacking. Also Mr. Jersey Jones was behind Wee Willie Woods, of Scotland, who was ingloriously stopped by little Johnny Breelin, of the New York West Side, whose name you have often read in this column as one of the most promising of flyweights.

“He shall hereafter be Mr. Jersey Jonah,” unkindly remarked the astute Mr. Ed Van Every of the Evening World, who sat to the loo’ard of me.

Be that as it may, Mr. Jersey Jones thinks well of Al Mello, and he presents the information that Meyer Cohen gave Mello a tough battle not long ago as a feather in Cohen’s cap. Melio got the decision, but Mr. Jersey Jones claims that Cohen had the Lowell sidewinder very tipsy in the sixth.

He says he thinks Mello can whip most of the welterweights in the country. He says he is a fast, clever boxer, and a sharpshooter with either hand, and points out that in the past year Mello has knocked out Eddie Shevlin and Bob Lowery and taken decisions from Jimmy Jones and Morris Schlafer.

Mello is only twenty years old, which makes him a little too young for the New York trade. He could engage only in six rounders here. A lot of the best fighters are too young for New York, and some of those they are showing in the large city are too old for any other place.

I have heard much of Al Mello, although I have never seen him in action. If he can beat Georgie Levine I will concede that he is a great fighter. I think Levine has real boxing class, and he ought to go a long way if he takes his business seriously.

Meyer Cohen formerly operated as Kid Carson, so Mr. Jersey Jones informs me. He has knocked out Pete Scrarano. Vic Woody. Henry Journet, Gene Mars and Joe Carlo, and beaten Tracy Ferguson, Sheik Leonard, Jimmy Kelly, Vincent Forgione. Joe Saviola. Barney Shaw, Wop Manoleum, Pip Damis and Al Sears.

I mention these names, not so much because of their importance, as to show the omnivorous reader what we have in the way of nomenclature in the welterweight division. Some of these young men are very tough in spite of their obscurity. Meyer Cohen must be pretty tough himself.

Mr. Jersey Jones says that with Micky Walker, the champion, leading the procession, there is plenty of class behind him in Georgie Levine, Jack Zivic. Tommy Milligan, George Ward, Willie Harmon, Joe Dundee, Al Mello, Bermondsey Billy Wells. Jack McVey, Sailor Friedman. Jimmy Finley, Morrie Schlaifer, Tommy Freeman, Jack Rappaport, Frankie Schoell, Paul Doyle, Oakland Jimmy Duffy and many, many others.

He does not speak of Dave Shade as a welterweight, he says, because Shad announced some time ago that he was forsaking the welters for the middleweights. He adds, however, that Shads can make 147 pounds at 2 o’clock with hard work and that as a welterweight he must be rated right at the top. 

I shall undoubtedly hear from scores and scores of managers of welterweights whose names are omitted from the above list, but I place the responsibility for these omissions upon Mr. Jersey Jones. Life, I should say, is much too short to keep track of all the welterweights in the business.

Damon Runyon

Wilkes-Barre Evening News/March 16, 1926

Some of my big city contemporaries have fallen into a custom of referring to Brunswick, Georgia, the home of the redoubtable Deacon Tiger Flowers, middleweight champion of the world, as “a small village.”

I resent this reference, and I call upon all loyal inmates of Dover Hall to do some good, strong resenting with me. Dover Hall is an estate in the piney woods, fourteen or fifteen miles from Brunswick, the winter seat of such baseball notables as Your Uncle Wilbert Robinson, Colonel Tillinghast, L’Hommedieu Huston, Ban B. Johnson, Babe Ruth and many others.

When the frost is on the pumpkin up north, you can find a baseball magnate, or player, or writer, behind almost every other tree on Dover Hall estate, lying in wait to ambush the nimble squirrel, or the festive deer, or the other ferocious wild fauna that abounds there.

And Brunswick, Georgia, is no “small village.” It is a thriving, up-and-going little city, with a population well into five figures. It is thoroughly modernized, with paved streets, parks, public buildings, good hotels and all that sort of thing, and it has behind it a romantic history. Its people are friendly, progressive and spirited. It is a good town.

I resume my contemporaries are unaware that Brunswick is the seat of the shrimp industry of this great nation, a shrimp being an edible extracted from the mighty deep, and not to be despised as anyone will tell you who has partaken of a Brunswick shrimp cocktail.

There are myriads of shrimp in the waters off Brunswick. Mr. George Stallings, former manager of the Boston Braves, and now of Rochester, N. Y., once gave a vivid description of the shrimpiness of the region when he was telling a northern man of the glories of Dover Hall, of which Mr. Stallings is a member.

“It’s near Brunswick,” said Mr. Stallings, to more definitely locate Dover Hall in the man’s mind.

“Brunswick?” repeated the man.

“Isn’t that where the shrimp come from?”

“It is,” said Mr. Stallings.

“Are there any shrimp around Dover Hall?” asked the man.

“Shrimp?”’ said Mr. Stalling. “Why the water is blood red with ’em!”

I have not been to Brunswick, Georgia, since Deacon Tiger Flowers attained the middleweight championship, so I cannot say how the community views the achievement. I doubt that it takes it very seriously, however, for Brunswick, Georgia, has many matters to think about of more importance than pugilism.

Among the people of his own race, the victory of the Deacon has caused no little gratification, for the reason that he is perhaps their most popular gladiator. I mean to say, he is the most popular with the colored people of all the colored fighters.

In fact, I believe that Flowers is the most popular fighter with his own race that it has produced since the days of George Dixon and Joe Gans. They were both immensely popular with their own people, and Gans was perhaps more popular with the whites than any colored fighter in the history of the game.

He had a mild, diffident manner, and a great good common sense. He was a fine sportsman in the ring, besides being a wonderful fighter. He had many friends among the white followers of The Manly Art of Scrambling Ears.

The fact a fighter is colored doesn’t necessarily make him popular with his own people. Though he became heavyweight champion of the world, John Arthur Johnson was extremely unpopular with his own race—perhaps more so than with the whites. He had a stand-offish attitude toward the colored people. He tried to associate with whites, he married a white woman. His people felt that his conduct was a reflection upon the race in general.

Sam Langford, the Boston Bear Cat, was always fairly popular with his people. They admired his tremendous fighting ability, and the colored race took great pride in him. Harry Wills, the Brown Panther of New Orleans, is personally popular, and well respected by his people, but oddly enough they are the severest critics of his ability. A lot of them don’t think he can fight up to his reputation.

I think Flowers’ popularity with his people is based more on his career than on his fighting ability. More than any other fighter, the dark deacon of Georgia typifies the struggle of the race against adversity. He has come onward and upward in the boxing game in spite of many obstacles.

His devoutness and simplicity excite the admiration of the colored people. They know that it is on the level with him. A lot of our white fighters might take example from the dark deacon. It wouldn’t hurt them to adopt his manner of living, even to the religious phase of it.