Tag: politics

That Old Pepper

Westbrook Pegler

Connecticut Post/June 5, 1961

The precious right to vote is not as exciting as political superstition would have it. In California just now, it is nestled down like an aged yard-hen in a box. It is soft, insipid, and warm. It will wink the yellow lids if you mutter “chick-chick.” Cross-filing and gerrymandering have sickened the franchise with a pernicious roup. I was born with the right to vote when I came 21, and I have read of battles where young sprouts in ragged breeches were shot down by the soldiers of George III so that I could walk into a little canvas shower-stall at the Casas Adobes quarter of Tucson a few weeks ago to vote for Mac Matheson, the Republican candidate for Congress, against Mo Udall, the Democrat. But it was a listless exercise of a paltry heritage. I was heartily surprised late that night by a broadcast which told us that our man had hustled the Democrat right down to the finish, breathing hot on his neck. I will be aroused when I can’t vote. 

Republicans do not expect to win except with Democrats like Eisenhower. So here in California today, George Christopher, the Republican mayor of San Francisco, is giving Republicans the old pep talk about enticing Democrats to vote for Republicans next time out. He means Wendell Willkie Republicans. He reminds me of Charlie Pyle, the football promoter, who seduced Red Grange from the Illinois campus when we were very young and took him barnstorming with a gang of other apostates from the cloisters of statutory education. Charlie was stomping up and down the dressing room between halves this cold winter day, banging his walking cane on the concrete floor and yelling, “Now next half I want a lot of that old pepper.” This was at the Yankee Stadium. 

George Trafton, our center, was drinking hootch out of a paper cup.

“Did you hear that?” he said. “Charlie wants a lot of that old pepper.” A blond brute named McMillan stirred in his blankets and muttered, “Go away.” We had tossed and bounced over the mountains from Pittsburgh the whole night before. 

I have to doubt that the Republicans of Los Angeles were any more deeply stirred by Mayor Christopher’s exhortation. The mayor told them they must find a “positive, honest approach.” The old pep.

There is a tremendous, hardly perceptible silent commotion all over California about the outrage of reapportionment in both the congressional and state legislative bodies. The Republicans reapportioned these precious institutions ten years ago, and the Democrats yelled murder. This was going far too far—by far. 

This year the Democrats did it back, and Herb Klein, the quiet, mannerly press secretary who so well conducted Richard Nixon’s visit to Moscow in 1959, remarked, “They cut up the Republicans pretty badly. You have to have a party to have an opposition.”

Mr. Klein was right, although the Republicans still have the makings of a party. They will come back. The indomitable party spirit of American politics will keep the Republicans in business. Mr. Klein said, however, that it is a good thing to have a big, wide spread in a national party in this country. A New York Javits is a horror to a Goldwater Republican. Even Nixon finds a Javits hard to endure. But Rockefeller, for example, is worse. And it certainly was much worse when Harold Stassen was around, always latching onto the fabric of Ike’s pants like a cholla burr in the desert until something shook him finally loose and he spun off into nowhere. 

“Otherwise,” Mr. Klein said, “you disintegrate into the French system with every voter his own party and total confusion. Some Democrats ought to be Republicans, and some Republicans across the country are better Democrats.”

In 1964 Nixon will tear into Kennedy with more vigor and much better skill than he showed last fall. Nixon can’t help profit by his own mistakes and by Kennedy’s juvenile and shallow conduct since. At the thought of Herbert Klein showing up in a G-string at a Nixon presidential press conference as the astounding Pierre Salinger did at one of Kennedy’s, Herb wagged his head. Where did those Kennedy people pick up their sideshow talent? Was there ever such a spectacle as the President’s secretary bouncing around in a clout?

Goodie Knight, the Republican ex-governor of California, is making an astounding recovery by means of a teevy political harangue, or better say lecture, twice a night, five minutes a show, five nights a week, as a straight commercial feature. 

It is a miracle. He talks straight, practical politics and to the amazement of all others except his enchanting wife, he is coming back faster than even Nixon. His future seemed absolutely blank after Senator William Knowland balled up the whole Republican campaign in California with his clumsy version of right to work and a course so selfish that, as of now, he could not be nominated for a City Council. Knowland made so many enemies in his own right that he warped the organization out of plumb. He hated Nixon, and he may take a little pleasure in Nixon’s defeat. But it was an awful price for the whole party to pay for one man’s ugly spite.

Britons Face Government by Decree

Dorothy Thompson

Houston Chronicle/August 31, 1947

Great Britain no longer has merely a Labor government. She has a Labor dictatorship, and the course on which she is embarked is heading toward the totalitarian state. 

The reason given is the usual one: economic crisis. 

Just as under the Weimar public Chancellor Bruning started the process of governing by decree, certainly with no intention of initiating a procedure which would lead to the totalitarian state, so the “moderate” Laborites—pressed by their left—have started the same process which certainly will not stop of itself.

Few people in America realize the extent to which Anglo-Saxon liberty under law already has been undermined. 

Early in August the Labor majority passed its agricultural bill. This bill continues controls dubious even in wartime. Under it the British farmer can, if the opinion of certain monitors of the state so rules, be dispossessed of home and land though it may have been in his family’s possession for 100 years. 

The English farmer is under power of his county’s agricultural executive committee, which is a creature of the minister of agriculture with no independent authority or existence. The committees consist of farmers, millers, seed merchants (unpaid), and of paid executive officers who have the effective power. These officers consist of students from agricultural colleges who knew the theoretical aspects of farming but have little practical experience, and of farmers and other country people who prefer a bureaucratic job to farming. Every rural community knows the type—the man who becomes an insurance salesman, for instance, because he can’t make a go of his farm.

These are the inspectors who give evidence before the committees of the “inefficiency” of farmers. If their evidence is supported, such farmers may be dispossessed without compensation, disturbance, or loss of income. 

The procedure is the more unjustified because the British farm before the war was the most efficient in Europe. In 1937, for instance, the British produced £45 more net agricultural value per head than the next most efficient—the Danish. 

Everywhere in the world the independent farmer has been the bulwark of liberty. That is why all totalitarian movements must intimidate, bribe, and eventually break the peasant. The whole world knows what is happening to him “behind the iron curtain,” which is of highly transparent iron. But Britain is on the way to the same thing. And incidentally, the proportion of Britons, theoretically “engaged in agriculture,” who actually are engaged in drawing salaries to supervise the real producers, is enormous. 

No country yet has produced more food by breaking the independent farmer.

But theoreticians never learn from experience.