The Wilmington morning star. [volume] (Wilmington, N.C.) 1909-1990, 1943-09-22
By WEsTBROOK PEGLER

NEW YORk-lf by popular vote or action
of Congress, the people of the United States
should decide that the members of any par
ticular group among us, say freckle faced or
pigeon-toed people, or tenors or cartoonists,
should be forbidden to hold office, own prop
erty or vote, would that be an undemocratic
action?
Surely, it would violate our concept of the
American way but it would not be undem-
ocratic, although most of us probably believe
it would be. Under democracy, the will of
the barest majority is the law for all and,
by gradual process you could narrow things
down so that in time even maj ority Of the
people would be without rights and governed
by the will of the few and for the benefit of
the few. First you disqualfy the members of
a race, then the believers in a creed, then
one more group after another, each time by
a majority Of the popular vote of the re-
naming citizens or by a majority vote of
the chosen representatives in Congress. And,
finally, you could have here fair reproduc
ton of the Hitler state, arrived at through
the processes of democracy.
Georgia's recent decision, wise or unwise,
to enfranchise kids of 10, points out that we
do place limitations on the rights of classes
OF human beings In some cases, 1t is very
unjust to deny an intelligent decent kid of
10 the right to vote or even the right to hold
public office while his opposite number, some
illiterate, useless old drunkard, let say is
allowed to vote, and, theoretically, is quail
fled for the presidency We could, without
violating the principles Of democracy, decide
that persons above the age of so or the top
draft age, 38, are no longer qualified to eXer
else the privileges Of citizenship. For long
period Of the life of this republic, slavery was
legal and respected institution and in 1861 a
Constitutional amendment was proposed which
would have forbidden the people, themselves,
to fho ratified
four years later, abolishng slavery. 1t failed,
of course, but had it been adopted it would
then have been unconstitutional to abolish an
institution which has been widely and deeply
abhorred as undemocratic although it is moth
ing of the kind And it was not until 1920
that women were granted the right to vote.
Our constant tendency has been toward
greater extension of the rights of citizenship
but that is something that comes out of the
nature of our people and it is not inherent in
democracy at all. We could go sharply into
reverse without violating democracy. We could
re-establish slavery and disenfranchise wom-
en- by pure democratic procedure.
You may think 1 am obsessed, which is
neither here nor there, but we have gone
into reverse in some of our unions and with
the tacit approval and connivance Of our gov
eminent. Many unions have what they call
B-class and Cclass subsidiaries and, in their
big national conventions, violate the principle
defined by cockney cab driver at "a time
when reform was rife in England as the prin-
cple of lone bloody man. one bloody vote"
These B-class and C-class locals are robot
groups having one vote per unit, even though
there be 5000 members in the unit But the
locals of the arstocracy, which live by the
Hitlerian principle of the master race, are
represented by one vote per member IN their
national conventions. The unioneers who de-
fend this ratio would call you dirty fascist
if you we're to suggest that any element Of
our people be limited to class-B or CLASSIC
citizenship with only one 5-1000th of a vote
in public elections, with skill occupation
as the basis of this rating, which is the basis
they use in their unions.
If you want to win a house for yourself
thrown at you brick at time, all you
have to do in this country is question the
perfect justice and beauty of democracy
Many of our people think there is no ground
no alternative, between democracy and Hit
lerism or Stalinism, but the fact is that our
government, the system that we love as
faith and a way of life, is not democracy but
something much better which, somehow, we
have neglected to give name to. 1t contains
the good that is in democracy but many I'M
provements as we'll wrought by generations
of American people to repress the evils OF
democracy.