The Wilmington morning star., 1947-01-03
As Pegler Sees 1t
By WEsTBROOK PEGLER
Copyright, By King Features Syndicate, Inc.

Copyright, By King Features Syndicate, Incl
NEW YORK. The spectacle of Joe Curran,
the president of the National Maritime union,
running to Harry Lundeberg, the incarnation
of Popeye the sailor, for protection from the
Communists, is one that no artist can paint,
however drunk.
Curran is a fellow who has run with the
Communists, bunked with them, and employed
their wiles and oppressive harassments, and,
in one notorious case, threw an American
sailor off an army transport because he had
offered a resolution condemning Communism
and Nazi-Fascism alike. Lundeberg, with a
smaller union, has hated he Communists with
a sensuous JOY, and fought and derided and
frustrated them, and Curran with them for
years. While Curran and his Communist
friends were promoting social services for
his subjects afloat and ashore and bleaching
American sailors for as long as SO years for
impoliteness to ~illiterate and gamey savagcs
from the Caribbean waterfront Sums, Popeye
ridiculed him as a not excessively manly South
street mission STIFF and babe his own jolly
tars to keep out of the subsidized coffee and
salad parties, buy their own drinks with their
own money, pick their own girls and have
no truck with patronizing ladies assigned to
dance with the boys For their morale.
Popeye said a sailor was a sailor, not a
man with a message Or a high purpose to
create a bright new world. His strict policy
as a professional unioneer was to get as much
pay as the traffic would stand, and the best
possible food, quarters and conditions, and to
hell with the high-suburoan Summers and
their touch-me-not sympathy with poor Jack.
Popeye fought Harry Bridges in defiant con-
tempt Of the Supreme courts fine-draWn deci-
sion that Bridges was not quite a Communist,
and his union publications, with a humor as
rough as p~ig-iron, sometimes drew beads of
gore through a hide az thick as Senator Joe
Guffey's.
Curran, too, had a union publication, called
The Pilot. so largely an organ of personal
exaltatlon that it was not unusual to find six
photographs of Joe, usually posed in beneeicent
postures, in one issue. But sabotage seems to
have barred its green and Shiny fangs on an &C.
casion when Mrs. Curran had a baby and The
Pilot reported that Joe had been brought to
bed of the strain, a hell Of a plight for a sea-
faring man. Again, Intentionally or not, and
perhaps through miscalculation, The Pilot, on
another occasion, notified the subjects that
Joe's own column of lightsome banter and
angry politics would be suspended during the
period of his vacation, which conceded with
his only trip. to sea during the war. 1t was
summer and the seas were pleasant for a
recreation cruise, having been cleared of sub
marines by the Us. Navy, and this was to be
Curran's brave gesture of personal participa-
ton as a sailor. His draft board, and he was
eligible tor induction, had deferred him on
the ground that his work as a unioneer was
worthy, and so he sailed away in gentle
weather to Africa whence he returned to learn
that his high courage had been discounted by
the incautious reference to his vacation" He
had clamored for a second front in France,
but his own most daring gesture was dlScredlt-
ed by his own editorial staff.
Curran put himself into association with the
Roosevelts, him and her, through the unions
publicity and, throughout this long time, IN
New Deal union politics, he personified the
seafaring union civilian to the public, while
Lundeberg, less adroit but more muscular
and rough, was little known outside the circle
of the fight and the immediate spectators.
Lundeberg didn't try to enforce manners and
democracy on the forecastle. Il white and
Negro fought and fell to calling names, he
let them fight as men.
During these years Curran wrote me that
in his belief the war had been imperialistic
until Hitler attacked Stain, Whereat it be-
came a peoples war. This was the Commu-
mist line and 1t confOr1ned to the test by
which Elmer Davis, Of the Office of War In
formation, decided who were Communists and
who were not. On this basis and On other
evidence l made my own decision as to Cur
rams politics and so l was puzzled to read,
within the last year, that Curran and the
Communists in the N.M.U. had fallen out and
that they now were out to get him. My own
friend within the N.M.U.. an old sailor who
kept credentials and membership and used TO
send me copies of the minutes of the meet
ings, plus comments of his own, had lost
interest and quit going. l was engaged in
other things and couldn follow the quick
turns which, in Communist groups, set old
friends to s~lashing and cutting as s~avagely
as they had stood together. But Foster and
the rest of the Bolos had turned on' Earl
BroWder and damned him for a renegade and
surely the spat between Curran and his re-
cent comrades was a minor mystery COM
pared to that.
Curran found himself drawn into a COM
mite of unity Cor the maritime trades. found
his own large union outvoted by a bunch of
smaller unions, and rebelled. In unity, he was
losing his identity. And so then he ran to
Lundeberg for help ad comfort, and Popeye
seems to have taken the practical view that
all of us should take, and so few OF US have
courage to, toward the beaten and wretched
people of Germany. Lundeberg was willing to
accept his victory, forget the angers and
atrocities OF war and receive the cooperation
of one old enemy in the continuing Eight on