Westbrook Pegler

The Weekly Guard (Council Grove, KS)/October 20, 1916

London, Oct. 17. (By Mail) Becoming an inmate of London an American has to take the police deep into his confidence. The searchlight of suspicion goes into his soul, probing its utmost recesses for possible pro-German sentiments.

He tells them whence he came and why and how long he has stay; he gives his ideas on religion, beer and the Freudian theory. If he is wearing a four-in-hand tie and the officer leans to bow he stands a good chance of being investigated further.

On the other mitt, if the inspector’s dyspepsia happens to be off watch, maybe the arrival is passed.

The first session of the third degree is staged in Liverpool when the ship warps up to the dock. Stewards go up and down the decks shooting the low-lived passengers into the roped-off part of the dining saloon. Uniformed gentlemen appear at the exits barring the way and the officers take their places at tables near each door, with long registration forms on which to enter the arrival.

Each passenger is given a number but the inspector gets it back before the official razooing is over.

A free-born, star-spangled reporter from Dallas was a typical victim before being suffered to land in the gloomy old burg.

A man called his number, the erstwhile passenger stepped forward with a deep genuflection and weighty misgivings. He showed his hand, a passport, and some kindred documents. The inspector showed nothing but suspicion.

“Ever been in Europe before?” asked the official.

“Never.”

“Never?”

“No, not ever.”

“Then, why are you coming here now?”

“To work.”

“Work?”

“Yes, work.”

“When were in Europe last?”

“I was never in Europe last.”

“Not last?”

“Yes, not last.”

This is very adroit cross-examination, sure to trap anyone trying to slip anything over.

The inspector looks the inspectee square in the eye while he’s talking, seeming to say “come out from behind that bush, I see you.”

Then he passes the candidate or sends him back to New York on the same ship.

Except for a few distinctive wrinkles of inquiry the London police duplicate the process. They want to know where you are going to live and how long and why you chose that place. And you’d better tell them. It all goes down in the book in the closest system of surveillance in the world.

With his documents the immigrant is free, not as the birds of the air but with the allowed freedom of a lifer in an honor camp. He may roam the streets in comparative safety, showing his papers whenever he’s tackled by recruiting agents.

That word “comparative”—that’s the right word, in a place where the traffic rules were designed by a southpaw.

In London taxis and buses, big, grunting “caterpillars,” locomotives and push-carts go prowling along the left-hand curbs. The party from Denver has fifty hair-raising jumps a day to avoid being bumped in the radiator, until he gets used to the game.

By that time he is doubly protected. He has crawled into an English suit, with cylindrical pants and cloth-covered buttons, which feels like a load of coal; he doesn’t brush his hat anymore and wears a half inch collar nine sizes too large for his 14 and 3-4 neck; he smokes a hay burner and looks like a native.

It is contrary to public policy to run over natives.

This is the process of busting in.

Westbrook Pegler

Santa Cruz Evening News/October 11, 1916

LONDON, Sept. 22 (By Mail) The scrappingest, swattingest part in the world; that is the boast of the Rhondda Valley in the coal fields of Wales.

The world is quite a chunk of territory but the Valley is ready to back up the boast with grimy, toil-hardened fists.

Saturday night in the public bars the matches are made and all Rhondda Valley’s male population turns out in the dawn of Sunday to battle or watch in the hills that cup the Valley. Every weekend from New Year’s to Christmas and on through the holidays the program goes on.

This is about how it happens: Bill Williams ambles down to the pub for his Saturday evening’s evening after a hard week’s work and a pretty good supper at home. He is at peace with the world and inclined to keep it, but only on certain terms.

Down the bar is Floyd Jenkins. He is a lot like Bill; has worked hard all week, just tucked in a satisfactory supper and is peaceable on the same conditions.

Bill surrounds a covey of flowing bowls and gives voice to some radical opinions on conscription or politics.

Floyd is a radical, too, but just the other way. Of course he can’t stand by and hear his firmest convictions run into the ground, so he wallops Bill on the nose.

Friends intervene and the belligerents draw on liberal night-caps before winding their way home.

The same incident has been repeated in perhaps a score of places.

Bill doesn’t hate Floyd; he pities him in his wrong convictions and so they are going to battle for a principle.

Sunday morning they meet and fight to a knockout out in the open, whatever the weather, with no ropes, no gloves and only the grass for their mat.

If Bill wins he is undoubtedly right about conscription or whatever it was he was expounding.

The other logicians settle their controversies in the same way.

Jimmy Wilde, the knockout flyweight champion, came from the Rhondda Valley and learned his fighting up in the hills. The miners are proud of Jimmy and back him to the limit. He, in turn, has done his part by slumberizing a lot of good fighters from flyweights to feathers.

Yes, Freddie Welsh comes from Rhondda, too, but the miners only mumble the fact when they mention it at all.

Freddie is popular in his old hometown with the inverse popularity of a German butcher.

Westbrook Pegler

The Capitol Journal (Salem, OR)/September 23, 1916

Story of a Confirmed Criminal Who Turned Out a Real Hero

London, Sept. 12. (By mail) An ex-convict, veteran inmate of the British prisons, today is mourned by his regiment and Scotland Yard alike as one of England’s war heroes. With a whole list of convictions behind nis name he lied his way into the army, won the Victoria Cross and finally made the great atonement during the big push. The story was told here today.

As a tribute to the burglar-hero, the war office is shielding his name, but Scotland Yard remembers him of old. His bunkies in France recall him as a hollow-cheeked man, slightly stooped, who took life and death as lightly as he did the prison sentences imposed from time to time by glowering judges. He had no relatives; his only friends, who took part in his forays against the law, are still in the game of cracking safes and evading arrest. Therefore his medal will become one of the treasurers of a crack regiment of fighters.

The dead Tommy had just been released from prison when the war broke out.

“Shaving water at nine,” he said with a grin as the turnkey slammed the door behind him the night before his release. “I’m leaving early for the front.”

“You’ll be back again in a month,” growled the case-hardened warden as he switched off the lights in the tier.

But the convict shed his name and police record with the prison greys and eased by a lax recruiting officer.

In a few months he was ankle-deep in the icy slush of the trenches, sniping through a loophole and running in with his officers for taking rash chances. He was used to taking chances and couldn’t see why they didn’t go over the parapet and mix it with the Germans.

At last his opportunity came. The battalion went over with a howl and the burglar-Tommy yelled with glee as he ran firing his rifle from the hip. In the excitement of the fight he became separated from the battalion. A few yards away a German machine gun crew in a pit was pouring death into the charging ranks. Tommy ran to the brink of the pit and killed the crew.

When the lines were reformed he was first disciplined for disobeying orders—he shouldn’t have gone astray—and then commended for his daring. Tommy merely smiled. Shortly later he received the V.C. and a furlough. The London police shook hands with him and bought him cigarettes.

Tommy went back to France and went over the parapet again in the big push. A big shell killed him.

“He was a real enthusiast,” said a detective who used to round up the hero in the old days. “He never went after a little job when we had dealings with him and he played the game to a finish in war.”

Westbrook Pegler

Press and Sun-Bulletin/December 3, 1946

Two senators, Ferguson of Michigan, a Republican, and Fulbright of Arkansas, a Democrat, have now proposed a system of special federal courts to deal with labor disputes. I believe the basic idea was original with Judge John C. Knox, of New York, who, in the twilight years of his judicial career, belatedly is coming to be known by the people as a giant in his defense of real American liberties.

Judge Knox is a much better man than any of the Roosevelt appointees to the Supreme Court but knowingly forfeited his chance of a distinction to which most judges aspire when, as a citizen, he fought Mr. Roosevelt on the court-packing plan.

He was one of the few who were able to dramatize the fact that Mr. Roosevelt intended not only to pack the Supreme Court but planned to corrupt federal justice below by naming a team of reliable New Deal devotees, with headquarters in Washington, who could be assigned to try cases in which the government and the ruling politicians and bureaucrats had a special interest.

To the extent that this evil intent was understood outside Congress Judge Knox earned credit for a loyal and self-sacrificing defense of American justice, in defiance of the leader of his own party.

I ASSUME that Senators Ferguson and Fulbright readily yield to Judge Knox the honor of having first proposed federal labor courts and equally confident that the judge would waive priority as of no importance. The important thing is to cause it to be talked up among the people, including union members, so that the arguments may be understood which show that the rulers of the union movement, with their fatal potential power over the nation, are, in fact, reactionaries, not progressives, and far behind the times.

These are old men, and Lewis, Green, Murray, Tobin, Dubinsky and Woll are among the most obstructive. Like the obdurate magnates of big business in their time, they have acquired that sort of power which is never yielded except to force, whether political or military, by a King John, a George III, a Vanderbilt or a Wayne B. Wheeler.

THEY HAVE THEIR incomes, comfort and security. They have fame and flattery for their souls. They are, in their way, historic and they constantly threaten their subjects with the fear that if they should be hampered the subjects would lose their “protectors” and be thrown to the wolves.

If labor courts were instituted, most of them would be broken, discredited and outmoded men and it is no exaggeration to say that some would crack up and die of shock, self-pity and bitterness in the way of Woodrow Wilson.

They have not progressed in all the years since Mr. Roosevelt’s first inauguration. They have taken their stand on an imperfect experiment, the Wagner Act, whose fallacies and harmful defects objective men soon recognized. And, while Mr. Roosevelt, their patron, preached experiment, progress and change as general political propaganda, they damned all change and still do.

TO THEM, for reasons of selfishness and “consistency,” the Wagner Act has been the goal, the final, if slightly imperfect development in labor relations. Progress has gone as far as it can go and any change would be a backward movement toward boss terrorism and serfdom.

I know that Judge Knox does not believe his proposed labor courts would mark the end of progress or even that his plan, in its present state, is the only means of salvation. In general debate, other useful ideas might be contributed. Mine would be that the unions would require the help of new laws to protect them from racketeers and arbitrary rule so that when unions should come to the bar for justice they could come with clean hands and not as petitioners for the private fortunes of unscrupulous and dictatorial union politicians.

Senators Ferguson and Fulbright doubtless are willing to debate, compromise and amend their proposals, and if the people will only follow the debates sensible, patriotic men and women, including union members may at last be made to see that the plan is actually progressive.

Westbrook Pegler

Press and Sun-Bulletin/December 4, 1946

Life, the pictorial magazine, recently presented an article purporting to be a review of the communist movement, or conspiracy, in the United States by an expert.

The author was Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

The New York Herald Tribune selected Mr. Schlesinger to review a book called “The Plotters” by a man known by many names, including Arthur A. Derounian, Avedis Boghos Derounian and John Roy Carlson. Mr. Schlesinger thought well of the book itself and regarded the author as a sincere authority. In this latter particular he disagreed with Federal Judge John P. Barnes, of Chicago, who said from the bench, after a trial of the evidence, that Mr. Carlson was “a wholly irresponsible person who was willing to say anything for money,” and added, “I wouldn’t believe him on oath, now or at any time hereafter.”

OF MR. CARLSON’S chapter on the American Communist Party, Mr. Schlesinger wrote that it was “not so complete as his picture of the Fascists, largely because the efficiently organized Communist Party is harder to penetrate by Carlson’s methods.”

The meaning of that remark plainly is that the Communist conspiracy is more dangerous because it is less easily unmasked. Nevertheless, Mr. Carlson and, I gather, Mr. Schlesinger, too, regard “Fascism” as the greater menace. The reader with a free mind has a right to suspect that Mr. Carlson had undisclosed reasons for presenting an incomplete picture of the Communist conspiracy. An outsider certainly would have, as Mr. Schlesinger writes, great difficulty penetrating the Communists’ iron curtain in American politics and unionism. But a person sympathetic with most, or all, of its aims might be loath to reveal it fully and might try to dismiss it as a secondary or unimportant threat.

BUT THE chapter on Communism, shows amply that Carlson’s awareness of the “Proto-Fascist use of Red-baiting as a means of smearing anyone to the left of General Franco does not suspend his conviction that liberals must nail down Communist activity wherever it is clear and probable, Mr. Schlesinger continued.

I should prefer plainer Americanese, but these double-dome types use an ideological geechee and we have to use their own wordage or they may say we distorted it.

“Proto-Fascist” is their way of saying “Pro-Fascist” or even “Fascist.” William S. Gailrnor, the sniveling thief who lectures along the party line, once explained that he found the device “Fascist-minded” to be useful, as it would be pretty hard to prove what was or wasn’t in a victim’s mind.

CANVASSING Mr. Schlesinger’s statements and assumptions, we find here that he does not accuse all anti-Communists of “smearing anyone to the left of General Franco.” But there are many Americans in “The Plotters” far to the left of General Franco who nevertheless indulge in “Redbaiting.”

I have done it for years, even when “Red-baiting” was regarded as undignified if not dirty pool. Why should the Reds enjoy exclusive immunity from “baiting”? And, moreover, there are those who regard all opposition to Communism as “Red-baiting.”

Notwithstanding his “expose” in Life, which I thought deficient in important matters for reasons which I am at liberty to surmise, I think Mr. Schlesinger could have gone much further in Life without exposing himself to any reasonable charge of “Red-baiting.”