The Government and the Jobless

Westbrook Pegler

Connecticut Post/March 6, 1961

The statements of the Department of Labor on unemployment always are subject to suspicion because administrations promote policies by propaganda. The Kennedy administration has not been in office long enough to have run up any substantial blame for a big factor of unemployment. Therefore, the worse the unemployment is made to seem, the worse the reproach to the Eisenhower administration. Jack turned the rascal out just in time. After a year, President Kennedy and his Labor Department either will have to put out claims that employment has picked up nicely or, as Roosevelt did, start up a rousing “war effort” to take idle people off the streets.

It is hard to define unemployment. I recently heard of a man drawing $35 a week as unemployed although he was working as a chore-boy for $10 a day, paid in cash. Given three days a week as chore-boy, he was drawing $65 a week for three days’ work. To a young man in an inexpensive neighborhood, that was a convenient deal. On one of those days as chore-boy, he said he could not get to work until 11 o’clock because he had to go downtown and get his check from “the unemployment.” He worked overtime to give eight hours. He is very honest and conscientious. Another young fellow, and this one with a wife and new baby, implored a few days’ work as a laborer with a builder. He really needed work. But the very first day he went to the builder at noon and asked for his time, explaining that he had to have his car fixed. There would seem to be a million variations of these examples which would reduce the alarming figure of five million considerably. Some of the great but uncertain army of unemployed will work for ten employers in a year or hundreds of employers in a lifetime. There are many intervals between jobs. These individuals are off the payroll for that amount of time, but are they really unemployed in the sense that calls before the public imagination pinched faces and worried eyes?

A friend of mine has made an avocation of firing cooks. He complains fiercely that humanity and the economy are ill-served by the provision which bars an applicant from “unemployment” if she quit her last job voluntarily.

He holds that this folly makes it necessary for cooks desiring unearned money from “unemployment” to get fired. How does a cook get fired? This man says the surest way is to burn a roast or smash a precious article of crockery. Obviously it would be better for the national economy in the preservation of such values to deny “unemployment” to those who purposely have got fired and grant this dole only to those who quit. But the fallacies in that were threshed out in the debates long ago. Millions and millions would quit. The only certain safeguard would be to abolish unemployment money altogether, but that would be reactionary, undemocratic, and probably Hitlerian.

Even when there is no big, dramatic strike going, there are always strikes affecting many strikers directly and affecting indirectly many others who are not strikers but have run out of raw materials to make into products or run out of finished products to transport and sell. Billing clerks, all sorts of incidental workers in the stream of commerce, are not strikers.

But they are laid off just the same. Thus they qualify for “unemployment” and are added into the Department of Labor’s alarming total.

I always doubted that Eisenhower knew anything about labor when he took office. Senator Taft’s indignation on hearing that Ike had picked the president of the plumbers’ union, a New Deal Democrat, to be Secretary of Labor, spoke volumes about Eisenhower’s unfitness. He thus confirmed the impression he had given me at his grand headquarters of the United Nations armies outside Paris a few days before he allowed that he was in the market for the nomination. That day he seemed to be reciting from a memorized survey thrust at him by some secretary who told him Pegler would ask questions about unions and labor. Then, so help me God, he got out a golf driver with a head like a flat-iron and whipped it around the room. The head weighed about a pound and Ike explained that on days when he couldn’t get out and play or ride a horse, he got in his licks in the office.

It may seem heartless to weigh such a fact, but it is a fact that in all masses of unemployed people there are many who work as little as they have to. Skill used to be one of the most important elements, but machines have changed the skill to “man-hours” in many cases. Such people are not necessarily unhappy to be unemployed provided they get “unemployment.”

The wife who holds a job while her husband is unemployed actually is his rival in the job market and the rival of the idle breadwinner of the homebody wife down the block. That fact makes many women so mad that they scream and hiss in their furious letters. They think I am trying to argue that all married women should wear aprons and murmur “yes, dear” when the master of the household plants himself down for the corned beef at eventide. I do think it would be a good idea, but I wouldn’t waste my genius arguing an axiom.

In the Days of the Runyonesque

Westbrook Pegler

The Idaho Statesman/February 6, 1961

Gene Fowler’s farewell is here, a story of Park Row in the ’twenties, called “Skyline.” On my pillow late at night I slowly realized with sorrow that I had known a saintly man whose goodness glows with a supernatural light as of a halo. His recountal of little matters among reporters long ago is a rosary of trivialities made spiritual and precious by an apostle who never knowingly hurt anyone.

Why didn’t he wear sandals and a cowl?

I criticized Gene for condoning guilty wrongs by notorious public men of his time and circle which had an important aggregate harmful effect on the morals of the rabble. He implied that the charm, the shocking abandon, luxurious wantons compensated the harm they did far, far beyond the company of those who knew them.

I agree with Damon Runyon on the vocation of the reporter and the reporter’s duty to walk alone shunning popularity. Which reminds me, there is a studio and factory a block from where I often work on 45th Street, where shields, plaques, and medals are designed, graven, and washed in gold for presentation in considered recognition of the glory of heroic columnists who savagely condemn racism, bigotry, and McCarthyism. This is now a commerce. The banquet departments of big hotels run it.

Once, in a thoughtless moment, the honoree of such a tribute invited me to sit among the elect at his recognition in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf on a Sunday night. I had known him in the first war so I accepted. But when I showed up, he panicked. The chart disclosed no seat for me in the ranks of the great, and he seemed to hope I would get the idea and get lost.

I did get the idea, but I did not get lost. I dogged him and his manager until, at last, they wedged in an extra chair in the fifth or sixth row from the front in rising bleachers about 20 rows deep. I was at the very end until some other Dutchman, as they call inconvenient creatures, came in late and became the end man.

It is not vanity, I assure you, but irony which reminds, after all this time, that although the occasion was loaded with leaders of the Roosevelt cult, when our names were called, only Jim Farley’s decibels measured up to mine. I will never forget the rage and consternation in the dark visage of Fanny Hurst as she swiveled around in unbelief. Cheers for Pegler! Here was McCarthyism running riot.

Damon Runyon ran with the underworld but he wrote and made his fortune interpreting the brutality of criminals of the bootleg era. He never blew the whistle but rather endeared his rodent associates to the public by his skill, but as well by an innate sympathy which he brought to Broadway from water tanks and jails in Pueblo and Denver.

If Damon had had any of the district attorney in his nature he would have written the truth.

But he was not a crusade or campaign reporter. He was a description-reporter, and his fiction also was reporting of that kind.

Probably all men know fear and so, I suppose, did he. But he had soldiered as a skinny kid volunteer with the 13th Minnesota in the Philippines, and he had never stepped back in any casual quarrels around Madison Square Garden. So he was true to his principles and not afraid in his failure to write the truth about the Broadway underworld.

Ed Sullivan, however, now an institution, a great man of brotherhood, wrote on Nov. 22, 1953, a confession that would make me writhe. Ed Sullivan said in his column in the New York Daily News: “That not one of the newspaper men covering the Broadway beat in those days was shot is an index of the lousy jobs each of us turned in as reporters. Winchell, Hellinger, Runyon, Sobol, Skolsky, and Sullivan each relied on mob protection during the machine gun era. We were ‘right guys,’ a happy compliment when you’re young and actually a savage indictment viewed through the other end of the telescope a quarter of a century later.”

I hasten to dismiss the others from this roster. We have only Sullivan’s word that they relied on “mob protection,” and his word is not enough. But he can speak for himself and does.

Runyon in his own name wrote a fine, honest testament on the proud but lonely honor of reporters who write the truth and walk alone. I will present it in my next dispatch with my compliments to Sullivan and to others who, last year raised a suspect chorus of welcome to Josephine Baker, the antique sepia squirm who came back from Paris to the fine country which she had repudiated with scorn—to make some easy money. In the vulgar idiom of their world and hers, she laid an egg.

Personalities

Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/January 27, 1910

If I had a dozen daughters, do you know what I would do with them?

Fine them ten cents every time any one of them began to talk personalities and nothing but personalities.

Me, mine; you, yours; she, hers; he, his—I’m getting to hate the very words.

Men can talk five minutes at a time without dragging in a personality. I wonder why the average woman can’t?

I heard two young fellows talking for half an hour the other day. They discussed a boxing match, a polo game, Peary and Cook, Stevenson’s “Wreckers,” the difference between American football and the English game and a dozen other absolutely impersonal things.

Then they went out somewhere, and their two sisters came into the same room, and for one solid hour the air was heavy with what she said and how he looks and whether she had a good nose and whether he really danced well or not—personalities, personalities, personalities. The room was so suffocated with little ideas about little people that I kept wanting to open the window and let in a regular winter blizzard, so we’d all get a chance to breathe.

Now, both of those girls are just as bright as their bright brothers.

They’ve seen as much of the world, are as well educated and at heart just as kindly, yet you couldn’t interest them in anything that didn’t happen to someone they know, not if you pulled down the eternal heavens to do it. I wonder why?

I’m going to tie a bell to the tea table in my living room, and every time my little girl begins to tell what she said or how she looked I’m going to ring that bell and make her pay a forfeit.

I don’t want her to grow up a little-minded personality monger if I can help it.

I want her to grow up into a woman that her husband can talk to five minutes without having to weigh every word for fear she’s going to make a personal application of every syllable he says.

Why, Tom, I never do that.

Oh, Joe, why, who did you ever know that talked that way? Where did the woman live, do you suppose?

How many times have you heard a woman spoil the point of a good story by her eternal personalities and personal questions?

Come on, girls; let’s talk about the weather or the horse show or the way the Fiji islanders prefer their cooking—anything to get away from the eternal he, she, you and I.

Old Maid Teachers for College Girls

Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/October 13, 1910

President Frederick P. W. Hamilton of Tufts College is worried about the college girl. He says that the college girl will never do as much as she should in the world ’till she gets someone to teach her besides a corps of old maids.

“The highly cultured, middle aged, unmarried woman is a fine type individually,” says President Hamilton, “but it is not the proper type to create the atmosphere for girls at the formative period of their lives.”

Well, perhaps you’re right, President Hamilton, but what in the world are we going to do about it?

Who do you want for teachers in our women’s colleges—men?

Do you think that men are the proper type to “create the atmosphere for girls at the formative period of their lives”?

The average man understands an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old girl just about as well as an elephant understands a mockingbird.

I may not care for the manners nor the outlook nor the general appearance of a nice, comfortable hen, but I’d rather have her bring up a flock of chickens any day in the week than to trust those chickens to the most amazing eagle who ever cleft the ambient air with his defiant wings.

And the married women aren’t teaching in colleges, thank you, professor.

They have all they can do to teach the little tykes at home.

So what are you going to do about the old maid teacher in the girls’ college?

Let her alone, I say. She is not the ideal person in the ideal place, but she’s the nearest we seem to be able to come to right now; and, whisper, President Hamilton, don’t you think you lay a little too much stress upon the importance of the personality of college teachers, anyway?

It only takes four years for a girl to go through college.

A good deal of that time she’s making fudge and getting ready for the senior prom. and writing letters home and having crushes on some other girl and looking at a photograph of some young fellow back home and writing letters to Harvard or to Yale or wherever her particular student happens to be at that particular time. She isn’t taking college half so seriously as you seem to think, and as for forming herself on the model of teachers there, did you ever hear a bunch of college girls sit around and roast marshmallows—and the teachers, at the same joyous moment?

The average college girl is just about as much affected by the average college teacher as the average college boy is affected personally by the average college professor.

I wish you would cross your heart, President Hamilton, and tell us honestly and truly just exactly how much you think that is.