The Wilmington morning star., 1946-11-06
As Pegler Sees 1t
By PEGLER
Copyright, by King Features Syndicate, In

is not the winning of the presidency In 1913,
but the selection of their man for president,
Dewey, Taft, Bricker or Warren.
Even those who voted for Franklin D.
Roosevelt and those who quit him after the
first term will concede that he was one OF
the giants Of his time, great in the sense
that he was a man of power. His peers were
Stain and Hitler.
His power was ''personal'' and his wife did
not err when once she referred to him as
the 'elected ruler of the United States. That
she should so regard him was natural, Cor actu-
ally he did rule" not only his country but
many mutually bitter and irreconcilable ele-
ments which composed his new deal party.
No other personality could have held together
in one political household the standard, old
style democrats of the deep South and the
communists of New York and Hollywood who
constantly snarled horrendous insults but
yielded, in all shoWdoWns, to their chief. mat
yielded, in all showdowas, to their chief. That
contrast within Roosevelt's new deal was only
one of many. Catholic and Stalinist united in
support of him. The survivors of the Ku Klux
Khan in Georgia, Texas and other Southern
states must have been Roosevelt voters. for
they were democrats. He put Theodore Bilbo
into the senate by hand and sent Hugo Black
to the Supreme Court and these two Klans-
men found themselves party comrades of the
Negro democrats of the northern industrial
centers and of Sidney Hillman, Bernard Ba-
ruch and Felix Frankfurter, Ed Kelly, Frank
Hague and Jim Farley.
William Green, president of the AT. of L.,
and Philip Murray, president of the C.1.O.,
rivals in a union war, were Roosevelt men
and, in his name, Harold Ickes, who had at
tackled Kelly and Hague as corruptioneers and
fascists. could sit down with them to noml-
nate the boss for his third term. Kelly and
Hague disliked Roosevelt personally and were
too wise by nature and experience to be con-
trolled by his charm" The practical regu-
larity of professionals controlled their course.
You don't retire a stake horse and cut him
I'D and eat him. because he is a mean horse
in the barn, as long as he can win from
here to there.
There is a temptation to wonder whether,
had Roosevelt lived, he could have prevented
the disintegration of this Balkan empire OF
natural enemies and rivals. Surely, the col
lapse would have been less abrupt, for he
was a great improviser, but he was growing
old and repetition of his tricks had made
them familiar in type; people could antici-
pate his delivery. He had never had to "ex-
plain but always changed the subject in
stead, so inconsistency a 4 d hypocrisy went
unchallenged except by the opposition.
The fact that Roosevelt himself held the
new deal together by the force of his per-
sonality is shown in the first national election
since his death. When he was gone, the enc
mics within the group fell to fighting.
Northern carpetbaggers. who had sent Mar
%cantonio, La Guardia, Coffee and Guffey to
Congress, attacked Bilbo in Mississippi, egged
on by Marshall Field who, in 1914, had not
employed a single Negro in his editorial de-
partment in Chicago and few even in mental
jobs. If there had been any doubt, they re-
elected Bilbo. Henry Wallace. from within the
cabinet, repudiated the Truman foreign poll
cy. 1ckes got out of the cabinet and cam
~paigned, in his peculiar way, against the man
Roosevelt had selected to succeed him as
head of the party. Henry Morgenthau repudl-
ated Truman with low means. Whitney. OF
the railroad; workers, in a rage against Tru-
man, vowed to spend for his defeat a fund
SO large that even he was frightened by his
own efrontery and revised the figure lest the
people b~elatedly realize how great a power
to buy elections had been created in the name
of labor"
I have felt cheated that Roosevelt did not
live to be confronted with his own part in
engineering the confidence game by which he
got back his son Elliott's radio stock, where
BY John Hartford ultimately paid Elliott's
alimony to his divorced wife. Possibly his
living presence would have deferred Hartford
from admitting the facts even when it was
possible to walk in and put them before him,
and Jesse Jones from confirming them. Sure
ly, Roosevelt would have used his power to
prevent the treasury from disclosing a portion
of the corrupt record. But ! should like to
know how Roosevelt would have handled that
one in a press conference and in this cam
paign when it surely would have been throwh
straight in his face. He might have faced il
through somehow, though, for he was good.
Elliott showed the old mans true effrontery
when, having been the cause of the most dis
graceful act of venality by any American
President, he exploited his own notoriety to
authorize a book, at great further profit to
himself, and to campaign as the spokesman
of his fathers spirit.
Something new is coming. The democratic
party is no longer a single party. Tom Dewey
had a happy phrase for it. 'tae splinter
party" Many of its. elements which, under
Roosevelt's control, stuck together, as the
empire of Franz Josef stuck together in the
First World War, now hate one another more
savagely than they hate even Dewey. The
luxurious amateur politicians, the precious
poseurs Of the New York and Hollywood
chapters of the new deal, patronizing Negroes
In absentla in gaudy caravanserai where
Negroes are not even employable at washing
dishes, are homeless now. They can't follow
Truman, and Truman is the chief of the
democratic party. Wallace is homeless. La
Gaurdla is harmless, reduced to making faces