The Wilmington morning star., 1947-11-24
AS Pegler Sees 1t

AS L OS1Cl ONNo ~
BY WEsTBROOK PEGLER
(Copyright, 1947, King Features
Syndicate, lnc)
NEW YORK, Nov. ga few years ago
Robert NJ LaFollette, of Wisconsin, ROD:
ert the little, that is, ran sensational
inquiry into the practice OF spying on un'
ions, In those days this was held by some
to be reprehensible business For what rea'
son / never learned, the little man who
wasn't there never called me, although
was then and have continued to be one o1
our most successful agents of this kind.
I never made any bones about it.
For years and years. beginning soon att
er the adoption of the Wagner Act, have
movement in the American union racket
keeping alive the spark of freedom among
the conquered. We do not plant code mes
sages in hollow trees or wear dlsgulses
but sometimes when l had to call up {;
young fellow in a warehouse who was run
ming revolution against the a; F. Of l
thief named Ben Pross would say "tell
him this is Meyer"
You can imagine what they would have
done to this boy if | had said this is
Westbrook Pegler." These Pross racket
are rich criminal principality parceleo
American labor movement under the po
litical patronage of the late new deal.
No, Benny wouldn't have broken m
young friends leg but he had plenty
his mob who would. So, when l called hin
the girl on the board would sing out che.
arrange meeting. This way l found ou
that Benny, the thief, had bought himself
big estate on Lake Mahopac, close to the
summer villa of honest Ed Flynn, that fine
Fordham boy and a peculiar credit to his
teachers. so he is, indeed he is, and chair
man of the Democratic National Commit
Itee, so he was, he was indeed, who wrote
in his book that he once gave bundle
! of money to an upstate county chairman
to buy a lot of votes and the ticket lost
and few days later the guy showed ur
in new Buick. What kind of government
can you expect in country where morali-
ty has sunk so low that when fine, up
standing, straight shooting boy and g
credit to his raising and his teaching, give
Ia county chairman the money to buy tn,
votes, the dirty crook spends it for a Buci
instead
But devil word can you say against IS
years but finally, like an honest man, he
told the story in his book.
Another slave behind the iron curtain of
union discipline told me that Benny's
brother, and Benny himself, too, on the
quiet had bought a big hotel in Miami
Beach. Under the powers conferred on the
could be expelled for violation of secrecy
because he learned about it through the
union.
Bringing "reproach" on any dirty racket
run by any nest of jailbirds and shysters
is one very serious offense. You can be
fine you million because the federal gov
ernment, under old moosejaw, drove mil
lions of faceless nonentities into the un-
ions but always refused to protect their
rights from the new deal gangsters.
The United States Employment Service
will not send citizens to certain jobs un-
less they first prove that they have paid
extortion to some rotten shakedown outfit
or given their solemn promise to pay from
$50 to $500 to the Roosevelt racketeers.
They can fire a man out of his iveli-
hood for any "disreputable act;" for
"slandering" the racket and the likes OF
Benny Pross and Joe Fay; for, creating
business to Pegler And the gangsters are
plaintiffs, prosecutors, judges and juries.
The National Maritime Union, under Joe
Curran and nest of traltorous commu-
nists whom Curran later repudlated, used
to stew and fret about spies in the mem
bership during the war. And one ne OF those
who hollered 1oudest about the finking rat,
Pegler, was my own reliable stiff, right
in their midst. He would sidle into the ar
guments on meeting nights and bring up
the name of that dirty labor-bal Peg
ler and the next day would get the
mimeographed minutes and the current
number of The Pilot Sometimes 1 kind
of thought he was laying it on in calling
me rat, scab, fink. He seemed to enjoy
it little too much, the rat, but l must
say his information was infalible.
Long ago, he told me that the white
folks were beginning to drift over into
Harry Lundebergs seafaring union of the
A. F. of L., and this was true. The NM.U.
hall nan was coming to be known as Uncle
Ioms Cabin and the sailors were saying
a Wn!te man is as good as Negro any
day-lf he behaves himself
Curran and the communists were shoot
ing into the N. M. u. hundreds of half
savage Caribbeans and waterfront knife
1lghters 1lgs who were always causing trouble.
men II non-communist white boy talked
pacK the communists would pull him I'm
on charges. e
II you referred to a fellows color in
row at sea, or called him a communist.
you We're fascist. They fired out one
salor sS and tied up an Army transport until
L lie government set him on the beach lust
because he offered a resolution against
communism ,ao1.a Ism Many one got SO years. sus-
! pension Tor some remark in fight. Lunde
,oea neig @ SAD these were matters to be settled
iiiaanl7,faShlon IN, and not union business,
u,a al 11 tnls beaching of good sailors when
XII were short-handed at sea finally caused
noi,s,, ooin ana the N. M. U. quit giving out the
1in9teS ,1 et:7s and began to edit The Pilot tight
w. o''ll' my stiff kept me informed. had