The Wilmington morning star., 1945-02-05
BY WEsTBROOK PEGLER

serve the good purpose of making people
think)
BY WESTBROOK PEGLER
Copyright, 1915, by King Features Syndicate)
Searching for some explanation of the cor
ruption of American soldiers in France and
Italy who have been robbing their comrades
for the Black Market we are more likely to
find the answers here at home than abroad.
In any military force so large there will be
inevitably a small minority of completely bad
the number of thieves in the American forces
is out OF proportion.
But why not?
Most of the soldiers of this army grew up
under political regime which, early in it's
rule made an alliance with the criminal I'M
derworld in the labor movement and which,
lever since, has made occasions to honor fax
ers posing as labor leaders who actually, have
been the accompices of scoundrels. When
thew were boys they were made aware of an
attitude of their government towards criminal
conduct which they could only cotstrue as
endorsement of lawlessness and cynicism and
an invitation to act accordingly. Millions of
them from the time when they first became
conscious of the existence of government
were taught that disobedence of law and
authority was reasonable behavior.
This occurred when the Roosevelt govern
ment encouraged the CLIO, under John L.
Lewis, to transport professional rioters into
peaceful communities where they organized
terror, and governors, mayors and the police
fell back before them. They read that Senator
Joe Guffey, of Pennsylvania, Roosevelt
henchman, was allowed to owe an old income
tax debt for many years and that when he
finally decided that it would be good poll
tics to pay his share of the cost of government
No ,,ot 1aI IN int
though other men, outside the privileged
class, must do SO.
Millions of them, since they were ten or
twelve years old, had been given to under
stand that good citizenship did not require
conscience but was anything they could get
away with under political favor and protec-
ton They must have learned early that men
and women who pretended to be friends of
the worker and the poor, were first of all
avaricious profiteers in fake war on want,
Wantonly exploiting the victims of the situa-
ton to increase their own incomes. 1t surely
had dawned them, by the time they were
taken into the army, that the crisis had not
been cured but prolonged and that this con-
tinuance of unemployment and its denial of
opportunity to millions like them and their
parents, was advantageous to those who were
living lavishly On peak incomes in their role
of servants of the people.
If boy growing up has heard the Presi-
dent of the United States congratulate foreign
sWinolers their success in stealing several
million dollars from his own countrymen, that
boy, become young soldier, might feel JUS
titled in stealing from his countrymen, too
He might think that that was what was ex-
pected of him.
More intimately, however and, in fact, right
under their eyes in many of the camps in
which they trained, they saw thievery be-
You'd calculation carried on by privileged
racketeers who bestrode the roads and collected
from $25 to 5000 from hundreds of thousands
of citizens coming to work on constructions
They read exposes of such graft by commit
tees of Congress and by newspaper reporters
but they never heard that anyone went to
jail for this eXtortion and so, again, it was
theirs to conclude that there was nothing
wrong in doing approximately the same if
opportunity presented.
The immediate pressures of a poor rate of
exchange and temptation have been offered
in explanation of this frightening corruption,
but there can be no doubt that the guilty SOL
dlerS were morally prepared to regard their
treachecy as tine emulation of distinguished
example. The wonder is not that there have
been SO many such criminals but that there
have not been many more and the standard
of discipline that has been maintained is the
more remarkable by contrast with the in
discipline and special privilege of the ruling
group at home.
For all that has been written and said about
the exploitation, first of the on want and
later of the war against Germany and Japan
by the Roosevelt government, it is still doubt
full that the nation realizes what a cynical ex-
ample this established In the war on want.
entirely aside from the greedy, personal rush
to get rich through the by-products of high
office, the political regime, itself manipu-
lated want and relief repeatedly so as to i'm
pose on the distress of the victims and renew
itself by buying their votes with hams blan-
kets and dull, futureless jobs.
politicians down in the lower orders of the
great machine often examined not the necessi-
ty OF the applicant for relief or work but his
politics. In one spectacular case, a member
of grand jury in Senator Pepper State of
Florida was fired from his relief job because
the grand jury had embarrassed crooked
local machine by investigating gambling. So
not even the grand jury, one of the most i'm
portant institutions for the protection of the
rights of the people, was safe from political
intimidation.
In the fighting against foreign enemies,
these young men saw traitors exempted from
the draft to continue their dragooning as
union officials who, during the Russo-German
alliance, had done their utmost to sabotage
the job of putting weapons in their hands.
They saw, from affair." millions of their rela-
tives driven into unions, failing which they
could not work in the plants, and COM
PEELED to pay tribute to the Roosevelt fourth
term campaign funds. The successful result