The Wilmington morning star., 1947-06-19
As Pegler Sees 1t
BY PEGLER

BY WEsTBRooK PEGLER
Copyright, 1947, b. King Features Syndicate,
NEW YORK; hope I don't seem to be rub
bling it on this poor Louie Horch, the regional
dire tor of the Department of Commerce, who
1T the job by appointment of Henry Wallace
shortly before Harry Trum1n threw Henry
down the, stairs all tan leC. up in his nletaphy-
sician's robe adorned with the soft-Shell crabs
ard perch and s~norting bull of the Zociac and
Il rev his crystal ball and stuffed tomcat after
him.
Horch got mixed up with Wallace and Prof.
Nicholas Konstantin Roerich back in the twer-
tbs. Holc CHI had made a lot of money in foreign
exchange and, like some others of the same
general experience in life, decided to invo~t
in a load of culture. That was how came he
to pick up with Roerich, who seems to have
sized up the American parvenus according to
the old continental formula, and certainly
w-sn't wrong. Roerich put on airs, he ran his
finoers through his scraggily, two-lego led orr
entail beard, and, on tn, "reminiscences of some
embittered backsliders of the cult, he was
elusive, exclusive and superior that = had
some If them thinking he was at least super
normal and one of those Tibetan wise guys, if
not supernatural and mighty God himself,
and that, my friends, isn't my blasphemy if
DldS plc1uy i W dI dl. "A 1ldl WIN , OccH
,1orking on theosophy was in a little while ago
with a big book on the hard-shell or Blavatsky
school of theosophy and he said they say God
lives in the Himalayas and is some kind of
Chinaman. They say they know his name and
R F. D.
do you think it could have been a mistake
on our part to brush off Father Divine?" I
asked him. You know his people said he was
Cod"
"That is ridiculous" he said. "Don't be
afraid. He is an Afro. This party is a Chink.''
Well, as I say, poor Horch put in with a lot
of money and he says old Roerich started out
impossible and became more and more so all
the time. He had to be the head man. He
didn't visit or talk business. You entered the
presence. And Horch got sick and tired of the
sameness OF the old boys paintings Ct noun
tains and Himalayan hop-joints and haystacks
on fire.
The first time I interviewed Horch he said
he soon got wise to Roerich and started to get
back some of the money he had put into the
bi,; lamasery on Riverside drive where the
faithful, a close little group, were going to
have free rent come .ell OF high water, and
nobody's paintings but the old mans were to
be shown in the gallery. This was the plant
where Henry Wallace visited some times, back
in those days when the goofy guru letters in a
handwriting an awful lot like his were being
written and in language that you would want
to disown even if you wero a sophomore in
the sweet anguish of your first crush. Henry.
Wallace used to visit there and Roer;ch gave
him the arms length treatment, too, and had
our cog 5le-eyed Secretary of Agriculture with
the poultice-lips and the Hitlerian lang of
hair SO we'll in hand that Wallace was honored
to be allowed to send Roerich to Mongolia
and China chasing grass-seed at our expense.
He wa going to pl mt it in our dust bowl, But
after a spell, Wallace, too, like his pal, Horch,
-ok ~. -J l.--I e -----I H.
by a cable in China. And then nature nd the
rotten Republicans conspired together 70 souse
the dust bowl with rain and blow seed in on
the north wind and the grass came back any
way without any special packets of seed from
Mongolia, to the discredit of our Department
of Agriculture.
eve fired the guy soon enough" Mr.. Horch
said. "He wanted to be flattered all the time.
We fired him out in 1885, absolutely. Success
went completely to his head"
Yes, but, what about the guru business, I
wished to know. Did Mr.. Horch ever subscribe
to the monkey-business about the flaming chal-
ice and the purifying fires, the heart trust and
so forth? This was the kind of prattle that
made the guru letters such amusing yet terri
flying reading when one considered that the
writer of this gullah might have been a man
who might have stepped into the presidency
in time of war. Suppose it was Wallace and
consider those goofy expressions and the state
ments that he has been making in his recent
speeches abroad and here. He was vice presi-
dent until 1915, three years after we actually
went into the war. He could have called in
some fortune teller or Himalayan faker to
tell him what to do. Hitler heard voices. He
obeyed his instinct rather than his generals
and plowed ahead into Russia and plowed
under thu whole German race.
Horch laughed. Nope, he never went for
the philosophical. or spiritual nonsense. He
was a practical business man. Foreign ex-
change. Foreign credit. Money. Very common
sense fellow.
Then I plodded on, down to the lawyers OF,
fees, after that record of the court trial in
which Horch got back control of the apartment
house.
And then I called Horch back and started
reading him out of the record some of his own
baby-talk letters land honestly lie cringed so
hard yoI could hear him. Well, yes, of course,
he said, -or a while they kind of humored the
old guy just to make him feel GOOD. And, yes,
Of course, that kind of stuff sounds silly when
you read it in cold blood later, but, after all,
don't forget, he, Horc.-, and Henry Wallace,
did fire Roerich.
The strange quirk Of it all is that poor
Horch's letters are in the la. books for any
one to read or republish, while the goofy guru
letters are still more or less withheld from
public view, and Henry hasn't been forced to
acknowledge them or forced to deny them and
set people to pinning them on him.
was going over some of Henry's writings
today. AS a symbol in the front of the one
called "New Frontiers there is a device de-
signed by Roerich himself as the insignia Of
the cultural Red Gro. of tn world. Roerich
was right proud of that little sign. 1t consists
of a redcircle and within the circle three red
spheres. The circle, of course, is probably tie
oldest and simplest sign in all symbolism and
the three red spheres haze long been honorcd
in the VICAR culture of the western world as
the insignia of the place where, a man
! can hook a watch from Monday to nay day.