Damon Runyon

The New Statesman (Wilkes-Barre, PA)/June 10, 1935

The Cinderella Man of Fistiana, James J. Braddock, will enter the ring with Heavyweight Champion Max Baer Thursday night, one of the longest-price contenders in heavyweight history. The odds against the Cinderella Man, who a year ago was one of the 11 poorest of the poor brothers of the fistic rich and who was transformed by a wave of the wand of circumstances into a title contender, will be at least 5 to 1.

Friends, kindIy remember that the betting odds on a heavyweight championship bout rarely reflect the winner. John L. Sullivan, in the long ago, was any price to lick James J. Corbett, the frail-looking bank clerk from California. The betting boys thought it a shame to take the money they laid on Tunney to beat the mighty Jack Dempsey in their first battle. Fitzsimmons was 2 to 1 to beat Jim Jeffries when they first met for the title. John Arthur Johnson was 3 and 4 to 1 over ponderous Jess Willard in Havana. Jack Sharkey was a 3-to-1 favorite over Camera and Camera was an 8-to-5 favorite over Baer.

So there you are. Most experts think Max will flatten Braddock in just a few rounds, perhaps forgetting that Braddock has always been noted for his ability to absorb punishment and to punch hard himself.

Dead Game Battler

Naturally, the form favors Baer, a great young champion in the first flush of a championship career, as against a veteran of nearly ten years’ service. Who was supposed to be all washed up a couple of years ago. But Braddock, always dead game, will be in there with nothing to lose and the pugilistic world to gain, and with desperation flogging a forlorn hope onward.

If the Cinderella Man wins, what an amazing story his will be. He had quit the ring to go back to hard labor to support his people. He couldn’t get a decent job and he was on public relief for a time, then he re-entered the ring a year ago to fight a preliminary on the Baer-Camera fight to get a few dollars. They threw him in with an up-and coming youngster, and even his best pals had scant hope for him. He was down in the resin right off the bat, got up, and knocked his opponent bowlegged, and since then the comeback of James J. Braddock has been one of the most astonishing chapters of ring history. He will be 5-to-1 Thursday night, but he was 1,000 to 1 a year ago against ever being in the spot you now see him.

So then it is not impossible for The Cinderella Man to go on to the heavyweight championship, though we must concede it seems somewhat improbable if you go by the form.

Expect $250,000 Gate

The fight takes place at the Madison Square Garden Bowl on Long Island and is under the promotion of Colonel John R. Kilpatrick, president of the Garden Corporation, and James J. Johnston, the boxing director. They expect a gate of at least $250,000, which seems a conservative estimate. With the defection of earners and the inability of Max Schmeling to come to this country before September, the Garden turned to Braddock as the next best available opponent for Baer, who is closing out a contract with the Garden with this fight.

Both Beer and Braddock are concluding their training in splendid condition. Baer, always unimpressive gymnasium efforts, is at a weight that indicates he is physically well-nigh perfect. Braddock is bigger and stronger and is firmly convinced that he can win. If a man believes in himself, that is half the battle.

Omaha Rates First

“Well, he’s not a great horse, he’s just the best of a bad lot.” This expression, which has been sounding down through the racing ages, is now being heard of Omaha. The old-timers always say this of a new turf champion. They said it of Omaha’s father Gallant Fox, they will be saying it of other horses long years to come. We do not know just what constitutes a champion horse or man. It always seemed to us that the fellow who is best of his generation at whatever he is doing, fighting, foot racing, or pitching hay, is the champ, and that the horse that beats all the other horses is entitled to similar status. And we never could see any point in always belittling the caliber of competition overcome by the champion. In horse racing they compare all horses with Man o’ War, but Man o’ War never won the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont, and if Omaha isn’t a great horse, he at least is one of the only three horses in all American racing history that accomplished this feat.

Those Close Finishes

It seems that all the charges of astigmatism are not centered on the referee and judges of pugilistic contests. A large number of persons at Belmont Park Saturday thought White Cockade beat Delphinium in the National Stallion Stakes, and there was as much booing when the placing judges decided otherwise as when Jack Dempsey and the two judges said that Barney Ross had bested Jimmy McLarnin. We have no personal opinion on the horse race, though we were present, but we do not believe that any spectator in the grandstand or on the lawn at Belmont can see enough of the finish of the races run over the cockeyed Widener course to determine a winner. The Widener course is the straightaway when they run the two-year-olds at Belmont, though all the rest of their racing lives the horses have to run around turns, and if you can see any logic in this system you ought to be a placing judge at Belmont.

Damon Runyon

Reading Times/December 19, 1935

FRANK G. MENKE, the editor of the famous all-sports record book, perhaps the greatest compendium of its kind in existence, leaned over our shoulder at Madison Square Garden the other night, and propounded a conundrum, to wit:

“Why are there so few knockouts by little men as compared with the heavies?”

It was just about the time they were trying to revive Paulino Uzcudun in his corner, and we let the puzzle pass for the nonce, as we say in Lindy’s.

Finally after Mr. Whitey Bimstein, and Mr. Ray Arcel, and Mr. Lou Brix had mopped off Paulino, and removed him to the solace of a cold shower back behind the scenes, we turned to Mr. Menke again, and said:

“All right now, why are there so few knockouts by little men as compared with the heavies?”

“Because,” said Mr. Menke, triumphantly, “the little guys wear about the same weight glove, and it acts as a cushion outside their small fists.”

“Is that so?” we said.

“Yes, that’s so,” replied Mr. Menke in a truculent tone that precluded further debate.

Well, much as we hesitate arguing with a walking encyclopedia like Mr. Menke, we are forced to take issue on this point with him.

We decline to concede that there are few knockouts by little men as compared with the heavies. As a matter of fact, after the passing of Jack Dempsey, and down to the rise of Joe Louis, our heavyweights were mighty niggardly in their knocking out, while the little fellows were going on at their usual rate—not high, not low, just average.

We admit that the heavies used to do more knocking out than the little fellows, but that was before the advent of boxing commissioners, when the business of building up a heavyweight prospect by the simple expedient of giving him numerous pop-overs was considered entirely legitimate.

IT STANDS to reason that little fellows can’t punch as hard as big fellows, though the answer isn’t in the gloves. It is in the muscles, and the heft behind the muscles.

But we make bold to say that the prize ring has had little fellows who could punch, proportionately to their weight, harder than any heavyweight that ever lived, and that goes for Joe Louis. We are pretty sure that Louis cannot punch, proportionately again, any harder than a featherweight of years back named Aurelio Herrera.

This Aurelio Herreara was a west coast Mexican, who weighed around the featherweight mark of his time, and who could knock your brains out with a punch.

There was another west coast fellow, a Negro out of Stockton, Calif., named Rufe Turner, who could hit about as hard as any little man we ever saw, especially with a left hand. Turner was a lightweight.

Jack Dempsey was a heavy hitter, but he didn’t flatten the lads with sharp shots, like Louis. He mowed them down by mauling.

But, proportionately to his poundage, Dempsey wasn’t as good a puncher as a man of our own time, Jimmy McLarnin, the Vancouver chappy had a neat lick when he was at his best. He certainly was a better puncher, proportionately, than heavyweights like Gene Tunney, Jack Sharkey, Max Schmeling or Primo Camera.

Max Baer. for a time, was a great puncher. So was James J. Braddock, the current champion. At one stage of his light heavyweight career, Braddock had one of the deadliest right hands in the business.

The history of the American prize ring will undoubtedly show that there have been more knockouts by men between the flyweight and welterweight division than by heavies, taking the gladiators of contemporaneous periods for comparison.

We are not taking into account the middleweight and light heavyweight divisions. We think good middleweight and good light heavies ought to whip most heavies, anyway. So Mr. Frank G. Menke is wrong. Being a little cautious when it comes to arguing with a sage like Mr. Menke we went to the trouble of peering into history to make sure we are right.

The gloves have nothing to do with it.

You could have put mattresses on Herrera’s hands, and that wouldn’t have saved you from feeling his biffs.

Damon Runyon

Reading Times/December 20, 1935

It is to be regretted that political parties cannot use the same system of nominating their candidates as the race horse owners.

Some weeks before a big stake race, the owner of a horse that he thinks well of at the moment is permitted to nominate this steed for the race by the simple expedient of sending in the name of the horse and, say, twenty-five bucks. It may be more, it may be less.

The mere nomination of a horse does not mean the horse will have to start in the race. The owner can wait and see how the horse turns out. If it turns out to be a goat, the owner forfeits his nominating fee, and lets it go at that.

However, if the horse happens to show real merit, the owner is apt to let it go to the post in the race for the big stake, for which privilege he pays perhaps $500. That is the starting fee in the Florida Derby and the Kentucky Derby.

For the Futurity, it is $1,000. But for that race, you nominate the potential mother of a horse. That is to say, you nominate a mare before the birth of her offspring. We are inclined to doubt that this system could be applied to politics.

But it would be a wonderful thing if a political party could nominate candidates with the privilege of first seeing how they turned out before sending them to the post. As it is now, when a party nominates a candidate, it has to let the nominee face the barrier, and only too often this is a grave error.

For stake races like the $20,000 Florida Derby, and the $100,000 Santa Anita Handicap, the leading turf features of the Winter that stretches before us, the owners have named a large number of candidates. We have forgotten the number of names sent in for the Handicap, but the list for the Derby totals 93, with more in prospect.

Now it is doubtful if more than fifteen horses will go to the post in either race—well, make it twenty as an outside figure. You see, by post-time most of the owners will have discovered that their nominees are strictly phflugs, and have no chance to win, except through an absolute miracle. And horse owners know that miracles are becoming somewhat rare.

Even some of the horses that overoptimistic owners send to meet the starter really have no chance, and their presence can be explained only by the hope that springs eternal in the human breast. The same hope that causes so many of us to buy sweepstakes tickets, and to look for justice in high places.

But 80 per cent of the nominating owners have long since discovered through experience that their nominees aren’t worth the powder to blow ’em out of their bridles, so they keep them in the barns on the day of the big race. Their experience has included actual trials, under all conditions, of their nominees.

It would be a great advantage to a political party if it could make its nominations first, and then have ample time to test the quality of its nominees for some weeks. It might wind up without any candidate at all, to be sure, but that would be better for the party than going to the expense of sending to the barrier some entry that can’t run fast enough to get up a mild perspiration.

The race track has its well-nigh infallible method of sifting out merit in horses. It consists of letting them run against each other. Eventually this method classifies all the horses—puts them where they belong. The stake horses go into the stakes, and the platers to the claiming races. They are pretty definitely placed by the time they are three-year-olds. (We are now speaking of horses, understand.)

Once in awhile a steed that has been dropped down among the platers and has mingled in that company for a time, suddenly emerges to real class. In the main, however, once they are pegged, they remain i that hole.

Oddly enough, a lot of platers know they are platers, too, in which they differ materially from the human political plater. An equine plater quickly realises when he is up against class, and is apt to stop trying to keep step, though when you put him with his own kind he never quits.

The Florida Derby, which has been increased to $20,000 added by Mr. Joseph E. Widener, the head of Hialeah Park in Florida, has drawn a very high-toned list of nominations, including Marshall Field’s Tintagel, winner of the Futurity, and Mr. Widener’s own Brevity, the probable Kentucky Derby winner.

Tintagel seems bred to go a route. He is the son of Sir Gallahad, III, sire of the great Gallant Fox, and grandpa of Omaha. Tintagel’s mother is a mare called Heloise.

Colonel E. R. Bradley, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, the rich Belair, and the Wheatley and Brookmeade stables have named Derby candidates, also the Greentree. M. L. Schwartz, and Warren Wright, master of the Calumet barn.

Until comparatively recent years, the big owners rarely sent their youthful stars to the winter tracks, preferring to hold them off until along toward Kentucky Derby time, but $20,000 added isn’t to be sneezed at. Moreover, winter racing has become fashionable.

Last year the Florida Derby produced a real Kentucky Derby contender in Roman Soldier, who ran second to the mighty Omaha, though the Soldier finished out of the money in the Florida Derby, which was won by Colonel Bradley’s Black Helen. The Florida Derby is a mile and a furlong, as against the Kentucky route of a mile and a quarter.

Damon Runyon

Lancaster New Era (Lancaster, PA)/June 11, 1935

Gene Tunney, former heavyweight champion of the world, will be an interested spectator at the battle Thursday night between Max Baer, current holder of the title, and James J. Braddock, The Cinderella Man of Fistiana.

It is a matter of seven years ago that Gene Tunney, then retired from championship cares, peered at James J. Braddock in pugilistic action and said of The Cinderella Man:

“This is just the fellow for my old job.”

Perhaps Gene Tunney has forgotten his prediction, or perhaps it was just one of a number of predictions that he made during his champion career. He once fingered out a lad named Harold Mays, one of his spar-pards at Speculator, as a likely sort of bloke for titular honors, though Harold rather let Gene Tunney down.

For that matter, so did James J. Braddock for quite a stretch of years. James J., by the way, is Gene Tunney’s official titling. He was one of three James J.’s to hold the heavyweight title. He was preceded therein by James J. Corbett and James J. Jeffries. James J. Braddock will enter the ring in the Madison Square Garden Bowl in Long Island City Thursday night with that much on Baer, anyway.

Muldoon’s Prediction

But getting back to the letting down of Gene Tunney by James J. Braddock.

A couple of years after he uttered his fateful prediction, Gene Tunney might well have wondered, if he could recall the name, what had become of that promising youth. By that time, James J. Braddock was losing with dismal regularity to gladiators of no great ability, and the promise Tunney had seen in him was sadly dimmed. But now if James J. Braddock should out-fumble Baer for the title Thursday night, Gene Tunney can turn to his neighbors at the ringside and proudly say:

“Well, I always said this was just the fellow for my old job.”

Incidentally, Gene Tunney was not the only predictor of James J. Braddock’s future heavyweight greatness back in the days when The Cinderella Man was fairly spouting with pugilistic promise. Old William Muldoon, “The Iron Duke,” who now sleeps with his fathers, called Braddock and Braddock’s manager Joe Gould, before him in 1929, and aiming a heavy digit at them, roared:

“I think this fighter is the next heavyweight champion of the world. And, Gould, I hold you responsible for him.”

Braddock Doesn’t Drink

Mr. Gould, a smallish man, not so volatile now as in those days, was slightly alarmed. He had responsibilities enough, without being held responsible for James J. Braddock becoming heavyweight champion of the world. He felt that just getting a remunerative match now and then was doing pretty good.

But he accepted the charge and did his best, did Joe Gould, and if the shade of the Old Roman is hanging around the Bowl Thursday night, Joseph can point to James J. Braddock’s presence in the ring as proof that he has done his part. Muldoon, who liked making predictions on pugilistic futures, would have been greatly pleased to see Braddock in there.

The Jerseyman satisfied Muldoon’s idea of a heavyweight in several details that Muldoon regarded as very important. First, Braddock was Irish; second, he could punch, and third, he didn’t drink or run around with loose characters. Muldoon liked moral and spiritual qualities in his fighters along with the physical.

Better Than Heeney

The Cinderella Man has lost a lot of decisions in the ring. but he has been knocked down just twice in some 82 battles, which indicates his durability. A technical knockout in his record by Lou Scozza, the Buffalo light heavy, was due to a cut eye.

We think James J. Braddock is a better fighter than a lot of those who have crawled through the ropes in pursuit of the heavyweight title. Certainly he is better than Tom Heeney, when the old Rock from Down Under fought Gene Tunney, it is doubtful if Baer is any Tunney.

Indeed. Braddock may be as good as Max Schmeling, or Jack Sharkey, or Primo Camera, or the late Young Stribling, who have all figured as contenders the past ten years. We will know more about that Thursday night. We are not trying to “build up” Braddock in print for the purpose of the gate; we are merely stating what seems to be truthful and fair.

The Cinderella Man is no pugilistic bum. He has always fought hard and earnestly, and his victory over as good a man as Art Lasky proves he still has some of his old ability. We place rather a high estimate on Lasky.

Can Take Punishment

We are not saying Braddock will beat Baer, but we do say that be will put up a better fight than the experts think. He is no set-up for the Californian, and Baer cannot afford to do any clowning around with Braddock.

If he fails to tag Braddock out inside of eight rounds, Max will have plenty of trouble. Braddock is so strong, and can take punches so well, that he may go the distance of 15 rounds—and then what? Maxie does not often out-box his opponents.

It looks to us as if Fate is setting the stage for one of those Forlorn Hope things. The amazing comeback out of fistic oblivion of Braddock, the odds, the expertorial guesses, all furnish the atmosphere. The form says Baer should walk out and knock Braddock over with a few gestures, but what has Fate, staunch ally of The Cinderella Man, lately got to say about that?

Westbrook Pegler

El Paso Herald-Post/October 7, 1960

NEW YORK – The great debate between Nixon and Kennedy on TV was a 10-round, no-decision Barney between a counter puncher and a bum who was afraid to lead. A good referee would have tossed them both through the skylight. About halfway through, I looked at a man sitting on the next stool in the Little Gem, a man with a chewing gum ear who used to fight under the name of Leo Brady, and asked: “Do you think this thing can be one of Those Things?”

“I was just going to ask you,” Leo said. “If I ever saw a Barney this is one.”

In the time that we come from, Leo Brady and I, a Barney was a Barney O’Leary, but we searched way back in memory and we could not remember who Barney O’Leary was or why those things were called Barney. But the Merry Widow was still echoing in our land about that time and whenever the boys went past round three without bloodshed or a knockdown, the rhythmic round of stomping would be heard booming on the board floors of the hanging gallery, then the derisive clap-clap-clap, then the whistling of the waltz.

Once in a while the referee would step between them and appeal to their better instincts to save the manly art of self-defense from another blot on its fair escutcheon by striking a few furious volleys of lefts and rights to the head and body. But I do not recall single mockery in which the better instincts of the principals responded to this heart-cry.

The referee would step through and they would lock arms about each other and sway in close embrace until the next bell. They were lost to shame.

I thought Nixon scored more near misses, but it was plain to me that he did not want to rile Kennedy and start him swinging. Nixon looked peaked and out of shape and Kennedy’s face was pulpy and his lids were puffy. When Kennedy is fine, his features are sharp. Anyway, he looked bloated, and he dogged it when he should have been boring in and bulling Nixon from rope to rope. I was surprised to discover that he had so much dog or geezer in him, after his brash defi in his acceptance speech in Los Angeles. But he certainly did tin-can it from the opening bell to the end.

Nixon may have thought he had an excuse in his intimation during the Chicago convention that he would leave the dirty work to Kennedy, but for his part would keep the campaign clean. Kennedy could take “the low road.”

This seemed to have taken the brash out of Kennedy, because he tried to out-gentleman a guy who is pretty good with the knee and the glove Iaces across the eyes himself.

On the whole, though, I blame Nixon more than Kennedy. After all, Kennedy has no philosophy or program in his heart. He just wants the power of the presidency for a good deal, the same reason that F. D. Roosevelt wanted.it. They both were rich, petulant and spoiled by adoring family women, and had no belly for the rough-and-tumble of masculine society. Roosevelt went around fluting melodious head-sounds against extravagance and promising strict economy, hut his only economy was to reduce the salaries of Army officers who couldn’t do anything about it. Then came the wildest extravagance in all history.

Kennedy’s theme song is scored for gas pipe, wash board, bongo and Dakota whistle. It doesn’t mean anything so it means everything and Nixon could tear him to tatters analyzing this gibberish. If Nixon has any belly for this fight he could say, “Well, who rescued Soviet Russia from Hitler and Japan and who smothered Stalin with railroad trains, diesels, synthetic rubber factories and tire plants, and who gave Stalin the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Balkans and the islands north of Japan? Wasn’t it your man Roosevelt?”

But Nixon won’t even jab.

It wasn’t Castro, was it, who deported millions of men and. women, the relatives of millions of our own Americans, from their native countries in Eastern Europe to the mysterious wilderness of Russia’s terra incognita in the Arctic Circle?

And this was done by the fawning permission of Roosevelt and Truman. Wasn’t it?

Why doesn’t Nixon haul off on the subject of Jack’s friends in the union rackets? What has Nixon got to lose? The rank and file would vote for anybody with the courage to fight for them.

Westbrook Pegler

El Paso Herald-Post/October 3, 1960

NEW YORK. – The Wall Street Journal says, “Few Americans, we suppose, would, disagree with this- statement: ‘The U. S. Government is not the enemy of the people.’” That triple-jointed negative almost hides its own meaning, but in simple Americanese, the Journal means to argue that the U.S. Government is not the enemy of the people. That proposition is a mistake, which I will now refute.

In the first place, however, be it understood that “the Government” is not the country, but the country’s political management. It consists of a gang of politicians who, by the time they have achieved power in Washington, have lost their natural respect for the rights of people as human beings and their own sense of honor as individuals.

The bureaucracy, in descending scale, is an auxiliary of the management. Owing its living and its powers to the management, this monstrous mass obeys the management’s evil design against the people.

This truth is seen in terrifying clarity whenever an unfortunate citizen overspeaks himself against the management or the President and may find himself harried by the Internal-Revenue Bureau. He is a citizen alone, but the management has literally thousands of fly-cops, accountants, cowed and servile informants hidden in the counting rooms of banks, and swarms of lawyers to throw into action against him. The Government does not worry. It sleeps well.

But the victim must hire his own lawyers and accountants, and pay for court records, at as much as $4 a page. He is ruined, His earnings stop and his assets are seized by order of the Government’s own courts. So the Government destroys its critics and the warning is plain to all others.

Very brief association with the management in Washington creates within the politician a second self, sordid and utterly dishonest, which lives by a code of rules and morals repulsive to his normal, personal self.

Thus we find even Senator Barry Goldwater, an amazingly decent man in his private life, at friendly ease with Jack Kennedy even though he has accused Kennedy of complicity in conduct which ought to forbid even the bleak civility of a soundless movement of the lips in a Capitol elevator. Goldwater ought to despise Kennedy. But this immoral condition permits members of the management as such to commit flagrancies without inner shame or public embarrassment.

I am confident that this will be put down as vitriolic, scurrilous, insensate temper, but I have developed a serene contempt for the servile, irresistible hankering for royalty which always unnerves Americans in the -presence of a President.

This was worst in the case of Roosevelt II, but three Presidents who have reigned since I came of age have thrown my country into wars which were none of our business and in each case Congress, as. part. of the managerial apparatus, gave overwhelming consent. But the people certainly were unwilling because they resorted to a maze of excuses to escape the draft.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau were conspicuously indispensable to the home front in the First War, but nobody was more ferocious in hounding appeasers into the ranks in the Second.

The Government is an immoral institution, for it commits outrages which would be criminal if they were done by individuals.

The repudiation of gold by Franklin D. Roosevelt was a colossal swindle which, on appropriate scale, would have been statutory fraud if done by you.

Social Security is another, in which the people are forced to buy annuities of uncertain value on the seller’s terms and subject to constant upward revision of the price.

The members of a whole nation are guilty of the crimes of the general management, as Eleanor Roosevelt said of the German people when she wanted to punish them for Hitler’s misconduct.

By the same process, Walter Reuther’s subjects are personally guilty of the crimes of the UAW, for the UAW is Government imposed on 300,000 Faceless Men. Thus also the national U. S. management is Imposed on a baby who is born today.

Westbrook Pegler

El Paso Herald-Post/June 13, 1962

NEW YORK.—I feel a temptation to sentimental extravagance in thinking of John M. Garner. His honesty and his patriotism, not merely to our geographical country but to our beautiful old ideals, are a treasure which few of us comprehend. Few of us have been able to visit the Kremlin, but I think of it as a mausoleum where the soul of Russia awaits resurrection, a shrine of something impalpable, spiritual and unspeakably potent. We have nothing that may be compared with it. I have felt a similar emotion in St. Peter’s and in St. Paul’s in London.

It seems ludicrous to hint that I would sense a spiritual vibration in thinking of this frail, very untidy, lovely old man in the little town of Uvalde, Texas, but he personifies virtues we recklessly repudiated with the advent of Roosevelt. Garner was manly.

Vice President Garner was so modest that he failed to establish in the public mind the contrast between a good American and a frivolous, avaricious adventurer with a counterfeit “background” of aristocracy.

Bascom Timmons performed a public service with a book published in 1948 called “Garner of Texas: A Personal History.” It did not sell very well. The book claque in New York has more praise for dirty things.

But I find comfort in Timmons’ life of John Garner, like an old woman fingering her Bible. Garner’s son, Tully, walked into his father’s office the day after Garner voted for Woodrow Wilson’s war and said, “I aim to go, Dad.” The old man said, “Hell, you are going! I would not vote to send other boys to war if I hadn’t known I was sending my own. And one more thing. Your mother and I will want to hear from you, but promise me you’ll never ask me a favor. I might be in a position to get it and I don’t want to be exposed to temptation.”

Garner almost fought Roosevelt on recognition of Russia. The country was against recognition, but Roosevelt and his cult wanted recognition.

Gamer said: “If this outfit has kept its word to anyone or done anything in good faith, I have not heard about it. My considered judgment is that the United States will gain nothing and lose a lot.”

In 1931, President Hoover called Garner hurriedly from Uvalde. For the first time Garner travelled by air and when he stepped from the plane in Washington he pulled from his coat pocket a slip of paper which Mrs. Garner had put there. She had written: “The Lord watches over you and keeps you in perfect safety. His spirit is guiding, protecting and inspiring you in all your ways.”

Notwithstanding Garner’s counsel Roosevelt “personally” did recognize Russia on Garner’s 65th birthday, Nov. 22, 1933. That was our death warrant, but you will find exultation in the morning papers of the next day by men and women who are still influential among us in Washington and New York.

Garner said: “It’s all through. The dishes wiped. I hope it turns out better than I think it will. This outfit wants to pull down our Government.”

Garner often walked out of Cabinet meetings because Roosevelt prattled “500 words for every one that he listens to.” He thought Henry Wallace had “crazy” ideas, but that Henry Morgenthau had none at all and was “the most servile man I have ever seen, and I mean servile, not loyal.”

The Garners lived in three rooms in the Washington Hotel, a converted office building, and took most of their meals in the coffee shop. He was richer than Roosevelt, even then.

Both his wife and his son were carried on his official payroll until he became Vice President.

But, Timmons writes, “when a radio sponsor offered him $100,000 a year, he said. ‘I am not worth it as John Garner and any value I have attained as Vice President is not for sale.”

He rode the street cars until he became speaker of the House.

They rarely accepted an invitation to dinner.

He had $100,000 to invest in 1933 and stocks were very low. He knew how he could double or treble the money, but he bought land and Timmons said that in 1918 Garner had made $200,000 or $300,000 thereby.

Westbrook Pegler

El Paso Herald-Post/March 23, 1962

NEW YORK. — An American lawyer who interviewed Rudolf Hess at Spandau Prison, Berlin, in 1947, said the other day that Hess informed him his mission on his parachute drop into Scotland in May, 1941, was to transmit an offer of peace from Hitler to Churchill. Thus Hitler would have taken Great Britain out of the war and frustrated Franklin Roosevelt’s determination to throw us into it. Hitler had shrewdly refrained from creating a legal excuse for Roosevelt to make war on Germany.

Roosevelt even sent a pro-Communist ambassador to Berlin, a seedy pedagogue named William E. Dodd, whose daughter with her husband defected to the far side of the Iron Curtain a few years ago. True, Germany was raucous and spied on us, but German Communists had waged bloody civil war in Germany and American Communists flaunted the American passport in Germany for protection.

Rudolf Hess was second in Hitler’s political machine. In this status he flew to Scotland and dropped by chute. There are inexcusable defects, including lies, in the historic account of this. Churchill has written thousands of pages, but not about Hess.

Robert E. Sherwood, a playwright, wrote an idolatrous account of the joint war career of Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, including a version of the Hess matter so weak and loose that a decent city editor might have thrown him out for payola.

Sherwood would have had us believe that Roosevelt never did insist on knowing Hess’s mission when all Roosevelt had to do was phone Churchill. But any admission by Sherwood that Hess offered peace to Britain would only prove that Roosevelt was determined to throw his country into war to save Russia.

My informant is Robert M. Donihi, formerly of our State Department, later a staff lawyer in the Nuremberg “war crimes” trials and occasional political candidate. He is legislative assistant to Senator Winston L. Prouty of Vermont in Washington.

Commenting on my discussion of the Hess thing, Donihi wrote a mutual friend: “Pegler is quite right. Hitler and Hess concluded that there was no chance of whipping the Soviets if the United States were to come into the war. They thought Hess might have contacts in England to influence Germany into an attractive separate peace. Roosevelt could get away with a war to help Britain but he knew he couldn’t persuade Congress to declare war on Germany just to help Russia alone.”

Hess told Donihi he never was given an opportunity to meet high echelon persons in England. “Churchill,” says Donihi, “referred to him as ‘the mad Hun’ without ever talking to him. The man who replaced Hess as No. 2 Nazi was, and is, Martin Bormann. He had been Hess’s private secretary.

Mr. Donihi explained that as a pro-Soviet Communist planted in Hitler’s inner circle, Bormann relied on other Communist agents in England and other countries to discredit Hess. Then Bormann would become Hitler’s first lieutenant in Berlin, doing an inside job for Stalin. Bormann has been “missing” since the fall of Berlin. Donihi thinks he is in Russia.

After Hess got life in solitary in the “war crimes” trials, Donihi continued to nag at the mystery. Hess’s “offense” was not a “war crime” except to Russia. Donihi believes he is the last American to see Hess whose defense he had assisted in the trial. After 1947, the Russians prevented further interrogation of Hess.

“Hess,” Donihi said, “told me the entire story of his flight, the reasons for it, circumstances, etc.”

Donihi insists that, contrary to common superstition, Hess had a military pilot who flew back to Germany after the jump.

Be it remembered that when Hess jumped, Hitler and Stalin were still honeymooning, only a month before Hitler jumped the Russians in a crazy gamble to beat Stalin before Roosevelt could drag the Germans off Russia’s back.

The Duke of Windsor had tried to maneuver Britain out of the war. He had no use for Hitler, but no more for Stalin, and like many Americans he wanted a head-on scrap between those two. Like most British and Americans of impartial intelligence, he regarded Hitler and Mussolini as short-term fools. He was right.

Instead, Roosevelt made naval war on Germany in the North Atlantic and threw his country into the holocaust.

Ambrose Bierce

San Francisco Examiner/February 4, 1900

WASHINGTON, February 1.—Senator Mason of Illinois is without a skin; his nerves are all out-of-doors, exposed to the rude touch of whomsoever curiosity may lure or malevolence incite. He winces when observed, and when a thumb is bitten at him he shudders. On Monday last he “rose to a question of privilege” to hurl back an allegation made by Allegator Van Sittart, the British consul at New Orleans. The part of the allegation which Senator Mason took the trouble to hurl back at a considerable expenditure of energy that was given him by Providence in trust for mankind consisted of the following words as reported in a newspaper:

“But what are the people of my country to think when such men as Senator Mason adopt the role of mountebank in the Senate chamber of the United States and hurl invectives at England, the friend, and encourage the half- civilized people who are fighting her? I have been in this country five years and understand fully what it all means. I know nothing can come of it except votes from the constituency for whose benefit it was done. It was never intended that such speeches should change the friendly relations between England and the United States; consequently it was all for show and for votes.”

This, Senator Mason described as “hardly worth attention except that it is the expression of one of the accredited representatives of England to the United States”—a gentleman who in his next sentence he called “an English diplomat.” It is to be regretted that the customary and time-tried distinction between diplomatic and consular officers does not commend itself to Mr. Mason’s intelligence, but that is a matter which can perhaps be adjusted when necessary by a conference committee representing both parties to the disagreement. Meantime a good deal of needless friction might be avoided by a stern and heroic resolve of our Senators and Representatives to give more time to the discharge of their Constitutional duties and less to the affairs of Great Britain and the South African republics. If in pursuance of this modus vivendi any honorable member of either House should fail to hold his tongue with one hand, there could be no objection to his employment of both.

After all, Mr. Van Sittart denies that he said anything of the kind. It is to be hoped he did not, for Senator Mason is not a mountebank and it makes no difference to him what the voting population of Illinois thinks of him; he is elected by the State Legislature, and he knows it. Let us be always just, even to the lowly; when a United States Senator “rises in his place” and makes “the halls of legislation” ring with denunciation of Great Britain for what is none of our business, it is not because he needs votes, but because he needs manners.

If, Sheldon, you show us

   How Christ, scorning pelf,

Would edit a newspaper,

   That will be strange;

But show us how Satan would

   Carry himself

   If pulpited—nobody’ll notice the change.

From the “Queen’s speech” in opening Parliament I make (with indignation) this extract: “I regret that, owing to insufficient rainfall in autumn over a great part of Western and Central India, the harvests and pasturage have failed to such an extent as to make a famine.”

That will not do, madam. As “Empress” of two hundred and fifty million hapless wretches who groan beneath your iron heel, your manifest duty was to assure them a sufficient rainfall. In this country, the most enlightened on the face of the earth, many millions of freemen (sons of revolutionary sires and mostly in sympathy with the embattled farmers of South Africa) have their considering eyes upon you as you sit in fancied security in the parlor of the Tower of London, eating bread and honey and fondling your gold crown while the victims of your misrule in India devour their cotton headgear without salt.

War—even a little war like ours—is a horrible business; not so much because of the privation, suffering and death afield as because of its effect upon the minds of the non-combatants. A nation fighting is like a dog fighting; or, for that matter, a man. It has no powers of reason—nothing but a blind, passionate fury that is neither vincible to suasion nor pregnable to sense. Those who are not incapable of justice to the enemy are as bigoted in his defense as the others in his vilification. If these disagreeable phenomena are less conspicuous in our national life today than they were during the civil war it is only because the present affair touches our interests and therefore our feelings, less nearly; we are no better than we were then. The fury of the non-combatant awaits the great occasion, that is all. On the real war, which God willing, we shall have if we get our deserts we shall doubtless calumniate the enemy and one another with the same lack of common sense that served to distinguish us from our asylumed idiots in the crazy days of the great rebellion. I don’t know why human beings should not acknowledge the lonely virtues of Aguinaldo, nor why Senator Pettigrew should not acknowledge ours. These unripe reflections are the fruit of a debate in the Senate on Wednesday last, when the Senator from Calumpit sought to have a “resolution” read, consisting mainly of Aguinaldo’s version of a conference between himself and Admiral Dewey. The Senator had already tried in vain to have that statement printed at the expense of the Government, and the impudence of this second attempt was very properly resented, but not resented very properly. Mr. Hawley of Connecticut, for example, objected to the reading as “treason” which Is very like calling a throbbing boil an active volcano. Mr. Pettlgrew as a traitor would at least engage the interest of the curious; as a bore he is without distinction.

Mr. Lodge was hardly more reasonable than Mr. Hawley. He denounced Aguinaldo’s statement as false and said he wanted all the facts which he proceeded to supply by reading a letter of denial from Admiral Dewey. That was opportunity to Mr. Gallinger of New Hampshire, who solemnly said that to him the question was simple; whether we should believe “a man in open rebellion, or the hero of Manila Bay.” With all due respect for this logician, the question is not quite so simple as that. Men of sense, even in war time, do not believe what they will, but what -they must; they believe according to what seems to them the preponderance of evidence. To such the fact of a man being “in open rebellion” as was Cromwell, Washington (he of the hatchet) and Lee is not proof of his inveracity; nor, does the fact that another man is the “hero” of something; that is to say, the victor in a battle, establish beyond question his credibility as a witness. But Mr. Galllnger was not content to set up his monumental criterion and have it shining in the admiration of mankind. He went on to say that doubtless the loyalty of the American people would come to the rescue of Admiral Dewey, whose words would be believed in preference to the words of a man “engaged In shooting the soldiers of this republic” and doubtless these interesting phenomena really will ensue, for Mr. Gallinger’s countrymen are no wiser than Mr. Gallinger. They have all manner of solemn convictions, but Sentiment Is the bell-wether of the whole flock.

I know no more about the relative credibility. of General Agulnaldo and Admiral Dewey than a babe unborn—no more than Senator Gallinger himself. A fairly good working presumption would be that at a pinch both can “say the thing which is not” if they diligently try to; most of us can. I have never found that illustrious personages, even men of high rank, are more truthful than the humble folk who stand with hats half-masked to see them go glittering by to the Temple of Fame. Yet I dare be sworn that Senor Gallingero of the Filipino Congress has many a time mounted his hind legs and “nailed” an Americano lie with the simple word of Emilio Aguinaldo, Field Marshal and Dictator.

Count Boni, so the Masters say

   In Heraldry (they’re furious)

Wears fifteen pairs of “pants” a day

   And honors that are spurious.

His title if he must forego

   (And quite a pretty war it is)

Yet snatch not at his trousers, O

   Sartorial authorities.

Possibly Congress can afford to ignore the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, but a combination of Costa Rica, Nicaragua and the overland railways is another kind of snap-dog. If the railway gentlemen can subsidize the governments of these countries with a larger sum than ours would give them for a right of way through their worthless dominions they will indubitably accept it. Considerations of morality and international comity do not count for much with the rogue republics of Central America. Under these circumstances it may be expedient to discover great commercial possibilities in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and find that the logic of events has thrust upon us responsibilities that we cannot evade. It may, indeed, become necessary to discern in all Central America a wicked indisposition to accord the elective franchise to Yankee Uitlanders.

A coal-and-wine merchant in Paris having sub-let a part of his shop to a cobbler had trouble with his landlord about it; but he showed the court that his license permitted him to “sell coal, wine, et cetera.” He held that et cetera covered cobbling and won his case. This recalls the London shoedealer who, when his pedamic competitor across the wav ostentatiously displayed the motto, “Mens Conscia Recti” outdid him by flinging to the battle and the breeze the glittering legend, “Mens, Womens and Childrens Conscia Recti.” And that, in its turn, reminds me of some of the Latin which one has the happiness to hear in the hauls of legislation on Capitol Hill.

Why didn’t Buller, applying right

The rules of his art, advance to White

   And out of trouble get him?

O, well, for one thing (more are in sight

To military children of light)—

  Old Joubert wouldn’t let him.

The amenities of debate in the House of Representatives are not devoid of Interest. On Wednesday last Mr. Linney of North Carolina addressed the House on—but that is “another story,” “a detail,” what you please; the importance of the subject is sometimes dependent on that of the speaker. Mr. Williams of Mississippi afterward accused Mr. Linney of having called some other member an ass.

“The gentleman is mistaken,” interrupted Mr. Linney, “I did not brand any one in the way he says.”

“O, I heard it,” retorted Mr. Williams. “When some gentleman wanted to interrupt the gentleman from North Carolina, he said: ‘O, I do not refer to you. I referred to another ass.’ That is what he said. It is the ‘record’ and will be found there to-morrow unless he revises it out.” There was no further denial, but I dare say the remark will not be found in the “Congressional Record.” Honorable gentlemen have a trick of revising out a good deal that they say and revising in a good deal that they do not say. The momentous question remains, whom did Mr. Linney call an ass, or whom did be call asses—for by obvious inference he had in mind at least two—the gentleman to whom he referred and the gentleman to whom he did not. I suppose they will be heard from later, particularly if the taunt is true, for it is observable that the man has the strongest objection to being called an ass who has no objection at all to being one. Anyhow, it is sad to think that the House of Representatives should be so rich in asses and the Senate have none at all.

“The great need of Washington at the present time,” says Mr. Warner of the Board of Trade, “is a municipal building.” I beg his pardon; this is a matter to which I have given the deepest study. The great need of Washington is a good French restaurant.

“Ladysmlth, Mafeking and Kimberley,” says, Dr. Leyds, “are simply prisons, with the sole difference that the prisoners consume their own provisions.” O, no—there is another difference; they require four or five times their own number of keepers who also are not air-eaters. Dr. Leyds is deep, but not unfathomable. In a dry season you can wade him.

The Senate has adopted a resolution looking to the enlargement of the Capitol, in order that Senators may have more elbow room. There would be room enough if Senators would keep their hands in their own pockets. The resolution was introduced naturally by Senator Hoar, whose innocent enjoyment of his own magnitude is abated by his sense of the pressure of his cosmic environment: He is hemmed in on all sides by the points of the compass. Of him it cannot be said that he knows no north, no south, no east, no west. He knows all too well and they affect him with an acute discomfort. When he walks they chafe him.

The bullet that pierced Goebel’s chest

Cannot be found in all the West;

Good reason: It iIs speeding here

To stretch McKinley on the Bier.

Ambrose Bierce

San Francisco Examiner/February 3, 1900

WASHINGTON. February 2.—Before withdrawing from Spion Kop the British troops, according to General Duller, endured a loss of 40 per cent. To those who favor the British cause—and I am one of them—this is encouraging news. It breaks a long record of defeat without fighting and promotes the hope that the British soldier has begun to display soldierly qualities.

The first of soldierly qualities is the courage to fight and fight hard. Up to the day of Spion Kop there had been no hard fighting in South Africa. In all previous engagements either the attack or the defense has given way before its losses justified it in so doing. Generally speaking, it has been the attack, and, generally speaking, the British have done the attacking. The inevitable inference is that they have not fought as well as their antagonists.

It is all very well to talk about “terrific fighting” (as Lord Methuen ridiculously did), but there is one, and only one, inffallible test of such civilian vaunting, namely: the percentage of killed and wounded. Fighting is not terrific where that is only 7 or 8 percent of the troops actually engaged. Losses by capture in the open field do not count; they are presumptive evidence of feeble resistance. Great Britain can hardly point to her thousands of soldiers in Pretoria as proof of gallantry and endurance. If they had fought better when, by the blundering of her officers, they were cut off from their comrades, there would be fewer of them there.

Advantage of the Boers

It is admitted that in the South African war (still gravely called the Transvaal war, although not a shot has been fired on Transvaal soil), the Boers and their allies have a tremendous advantage in everything but numbers. That has nothing to do with what we are considering the fighting and staying qualities of the British soldiery. An enemy’s advantage calls for greater sacrifices to overcome it, and these sacrifices are not yet in evidence. In the British defense of Spion Kop we have the sole exception, and even there the endurance seems to have been not voluntary, but compulsory—the defenders could not retire during daylight without extermination. As soon as they could safely retire they did, and they did well. In the general operation, in which that bloody affair was included, two-thirds of General Buller’s army was engaged in an offensive movement against the enemy’s position, and after more than a week’s fighting gave it up and retreated, with a total loss of but a little more than 1,400.

As to the terrible Boer artillery, of which we bear so much in palliation of British defeat, it seems, excepting in the instance of Spion Kop, to have been about as harmless as the guns pitted against it. It is of record that it killed a dog in Mafeking and a child or two in Ladysmlth, and it makes an appalling noise. And that is about all that artillery ever does in land fighting, except when working upon masses of contiguous fugitives too much preoccupied with important matters for remonstrance.

Bloody American Unities

In the American civil war it came to be expected that in a general engagement we should experience a loss of from 15 to 20 per cent. On certain parts of the field and in isolated fights a loss of 40 and 50 per cent was not so exceptional as to cause surprise. I have myself seen a small brigade of 1,500 men attack an entrenched enemy and, fighting a hopeless battle, lose 700 men in twenty minutes. Perhaps this is too exacting a standard. The battles of the American civil war were more bloody than any in modern history possibly because Americans have a brutal and barbarous disregard of human life as is seen in our nearly 10,000 homicides annually, mostly unpunished. But compare the English at Maagersfontain and Badajose and Colenso with the English at Balaklava and Sebastopol. I will not take into consideration such battles as that at Omdurman, between “Tommy Atkins” and the war-like, but unmilitary “Fuzzy-Wuzzy,” who, if he once “broke a British square” was nevertheless an easy prey to the British machine gunner. There is nothing—can be nothing—in such work to justify the British boast, as made by a sympathetic poet:

We are the men that were the men

Of Malaplaquet and Agincourt.

Of course it is understood that modern long-range cannon, small arms of “precision” and other “destructive weapons” have materially reduced the mortality in cattle from what it was when men fought hand to hand with sword and spear—even from what it was when the cavalryman’s saber and infantryman’s bayonet had more than a moral urpose. When it is possible to fight at a distance measured by the thousand yards most of the fighting will be done at that distance and will be comparatively innocuous; but the least an army suffers from an enemy’s fire the longer it ought to hold out. It can stand and fire till it loses as many men as it wants to. My point is that the British don’t seem to want to lose very many of themselves, at either long-range “sniping” or “in-fighting” on a parapet. As long as an assailant is not himself dead or disabled he can go forward if he will. It is simply a question when to quit. In the South African war there has been too much early quitting. Of course it has been always explained; but what cannot be explained is the necessity of so much explanation.

What Does It All Mean?

What does it all mean? For one thing, obviously enough, incapable generalship For another, only less obviously, defective organization. But is there another element? It is to be remembered that most of the collisions which resulted in failure of the British attacks the men have not been recalled from the enemy’s glacis; no command has been given by their Generals for them to retire from a hopeless task, and none could have reached them if it had been given. They gave it up of their own motion, scuttling back to their own lines one by one, as opportunity presented; and excepting instances of such needless surprise or ambuscade as that in which Wauchope fell, they did this without having suffered any very great loss in killed and wounded. Is it possible that the unfriendly German critics are right that England, like Spain and many another nation, is already taking her turn at military decadence as all must eventually do? Is her power on the wane? That power has always been not her wealth, not her vast sea armament, nor her enlightened Institutions, but the courage and devotion or her sons. Are these failing her? Amongst her many resources, can she no longer count upon that first and last line of aggression and defense, the breasts of her soldiers?

I am not prepared to believe it. I hold and hope to continue to hold my lifelong conviction that next to the incomparable Turk the Englishman is the best fighter in the world. Certainly he was two generations ago, and it is difficult to think that while his empire has been extending itself to so stupendous dimensions, his ships multiplying themselves incalculably on every sea and his capital dictating the commercial and financial policies of the world he has himself sunk to the low estate of military degenerate. But in candor it must be confessed that all the current explanations of the paralysis of the British arms in South Africa leave something to be desired—fall somewhere short of entire adequacy. If the British soldier has really become the base and vulgar brute that Mr. Kipling delights proudly to paint him, all is clear.