First of Pegler’s “Reporter in London” Series

Westbrook Pegler

The Weekly Guard (Council Grove, KS)/October 20, 1916

London, Oct. 17. (By Mail) Becoming an inmate of London an American has to take the police deep into his confidence. The searchlight of suspicion goes into his soul, probing its utmost recesses for possible pro-German sentiments.

He tells them whence he came and why and how long he has stay; he gives his ideas on religion, beer and the Freudian theory. If he is wearing a four-in-hand tie and the officer leans to bow he stands a good chance of being investigated further.

On the other mitt, if the inspector’s dyspepsia happens to be off watch, maybe the arrival is passed.

The first session of the third degree is staged in Liverpool when the ship warps up to the dock. Stewards go up and down the decks shooting the low-lived passengers into the roped-off part of the dining saloon. Uniformed gentlemen appear at the exits barring the way and the officers take their places at tables near each door, with long registration forms on which to enter the arrival.

Each passenger is given a number but the inspector gets it back before the official razooing is over.

A free-born, star-spangled reporter from Dallas was a typical victim before being suffered to land in the gloomy old burg.

A man called his number, the erstwhile passenger stepped forward with a deep genuflection and weighty misgivings. He showed his hand, a passport, and some kindred documents. The inspector showed nothing but suspicion.

“Ever been in Europe before?” asked the official.

“Never.”

“Never?”

“No, not ever.”

“Then, why are you coming here now?”

“To work.”

“Work?”

“Yes, work.”

“When were in Europe last?”

“I was never in Europe last.”

“Not last?”

“Yes, not last.”

This is very adroit cross-examination, sure to trap anyone trying to slip anything over.

The inspector looks the inspectee square in the eye while he’s talking, seeming to say “come out from behind that bush, I see you.”

Then he passes the candidate or sends him back to New York on the same ship.

Except for a few distinctive wrinkles of inquiry the London police duplicate the process. They want to know where you are going to live and how long and why you chose that place. And you’d better tell them. It all goes down in the book in the closest system of surveillance in the world.

With his documents the immigrant is free, not as the birds of the air but with the allowed freedom of a lifer in an honor camp. He may roam the streets in comparative safety, showing his papers whenever he’s tackled by recruiting agents.

That word “comparative”—that’s the right word, in a place where the traffic rules were designed by a southpaw.

In London taxis and buses, big, grunting “caterpillars,” locomotives and push-carts go prowling along the left-hand curbs. The party from Denver has fifty hair-raising jumps a day to avoid being bumped in the radiator, until he gets used to the game.

By that time he is doubly protected. He has crawled into an English suit, with cylindrical pants and cloth-covered buttons, which feels like a load of coal; he doesn’t brush his hat anymore and wears a half inch collar nine sizes too large for his 14 and 3-4 neck; he smokes a hay burner and looks like a native.

It is contrary to public policy to run over natives.

This is the process of busting in.

Welsh’s Home Region Breeds Scrappers

Westbrook Pegler

Santa Cruz Evening News/October 11, 1916

LONDON, Sept. 22 (By Mail) The scrappingest, swattingest part in the world; that is the boast of the Rhondda Valley in the coal fields of Wales.

The world is quite a chunk of territory but the Valley is ready to back up the boast with grimy, toil-hardened fists.

Saturday night in the public bars the matches are made and all Rhondda Valley’s male population turns out in the dawn of Sunday to battle or watch in the hills that cup the Valley. Every weekend from New Year’s to Christmas and on through the holidays the program goes on.

This is about how it happens: Bill Williams ambles down to the pub for his Saturday evening’s evening after a hard week’s work and a pretty good supper at home. He is at peace with the world and inclined to keep it, but only on certain terms.

Down the bar is Floyd Jenkins. He is a lot like Bill; has worked hard all week, just tucked in a satisfactory supper and is peaceable on the same conditions.

Bill surrounds a covey of flowing bowls and gives voice to some radical opinions on conscription or politics.

Floyd is a radical, too, but just the other way. Of course he can’t stand by and hear his firmest convictions run into the ground, so he wallops Bill on the nose.

Friends intervene and the belligerents draw on liberal night-caps before winding their way home.

The same incident has been repeated in perhaps a score of places.

Bill doesn’t hate Floyd; he pities him in his wrong convictions and so they are going to battle for a principle.

Sunday morning they meet and fight to a knockout out in the open, whatever the weather, with no ropes, no gloves and only the grass for their mat.

If Bill wins he is undoubtedly right about conscription or whatever it was he was expounding.

The other logicians settle their controversies in the same way.

Jimmy Wilde, the knockout flyweight champion, came from the Rhondda Valley and learned his fighting up in the hills. The miners are proud of Jimmy and back him to the limit. He, in turn, has done his part by slumberizing a lot of good fighters from flyweights to feathers.

Yes, Freddie Welsh comes from Rhondda, too, but the miners only mumble the fact when they mention it at all.

Freddie is popular in his old hometown with the inverse popularity of a German butcher.

Convict Lied Way to Trenches and Died

Westbrook Pegler

The Capitol Journal (Salem, OR)/September 23, 1916

Story of a Confirmed Criminal Who Turned Out a Real Hero

London, Sept. 12. (By mail) An ex-convict, veteran inmate of the British prisons, today is mourned by his regiment and Scotland Yard alike as one of England’s war heroes. With a whole list of convictions behind nis name he lied his way into the army, won the Victoria Cross and finally made the great atonement during the big push. The story was told here today.

As a tribute to the burglar-hero, the war office is shielding his name, but Scotland Yard remembers him of old. His bunkies in France recall him as a hollow-cheeked man, slightly stooped, who took life and death as lightly as he did the prison sentences imposed from time to time by glowering judges. He had no relatives; his only friends, who took part in his forays against the law, are still in the game of cracking safes and evading arrest. Therefore his medal will become one of the treasurers of a crack regiment of fighters.

The dead Tommy had just been released from prison when the war broke out.

“Shaving water at nine,” he said with a grin as the turnkey slammed the door behind him the night before his release. “I’m leaving early for the front.”

“You’ll be back again in a month,” growled the case-hardened warden as he switched off the lights in the tier.

But the convict shed his name and police record with the prison greys and eased by a lax recruiting officer.

In a few months he was ankle-deep in the icy slush of the trenches, sniping through a loophole and running in with his officers for taking rash chances. He was used to taking chances and couldn’t see why they didn’t go over the parapet and mix it with the Germans.

At last his opportunity came. The battalion went over with a howl and the burglar-Tommy yelled with glee as he ran firing his rifle from the hip. In the excitement of the fight he became separated from the battalion. A few yards away a German machine gun crew in a pit was pouring death into the charging ranks. Tommy ran to the brink of the pit and killed the crew.

When the lines were reformed he was first disciplined for disobeying orders—he shouldn’t have gone astray—and then commended for his daring. Tommy merely smiled. Shortly later he received the V.C. and a furlough. The London police shook hands with him and bought him cigarettes.

Tommy went back to France and went over the parapet again in the big push. A big shell killed him.

“He was a real enthusiast,” said a detective who used to round up the hero in the old days. “He never went after a little job when we had dealings with him and he played the game to a finish in war.”

Labor Court System Gains Favor

Westbrook Pegler

Press and Sun-Bulletin/December 3, 1946

Two senators, Ferguson of Michigan, a Republican, and Fulbright of Arkansas, a Democrat, have now proposed a system of special federal courts to deal with labor disputes. I believe the basic idea was original with Judge John C. Knox, of New York, who, in the twilight years of his judicial career, belatedly is coming to be known by the people as a giant in his defense of real American liberties.

Judge Knox is a much better man than any of the Roosevelt appointees to the Supreme Court but knowingly forfeited his chance of a distinction to which most judges aspire when, as a citizen, he fought Mr. Roosevelt on the court-packing plan.

He was one of the few who were able to dramatize the fact that Mr. Roosevelt intended not only to pack the Supreme Court but planned to corrupt federal justice below by naming a team of reliable New Deal devotees, with headquarters in Washington, who could be assigned to try cases in which the government and the ruling politicians and bureaucrats had a special interest.

To the extent that this evil intent was understood outside Congress Judge Knox earned credit for a loyal and self-sacrificing defense of American justice, in defiance of the leader of his own party.

I ASSUME that Senators Ferguson and Fulbright readily yield to Judge Knox the honor of having first proposed federal labor courts and equally confident that the judge would waive priority as of no importance. The important thing is to cause it to be talked up among the people, including union members, so that the arguments may be understood which show that the rulers of the union movement, with their fatal potential power over the nation, are, in fact, reactionaries, not progressives, and far behind the times.

These are old men, and Lewis, Green, Murray, Tobin, Dubinsky and Woll are among the most obstructive. Like the obdurate magnates of big business in their time, they have acquired that sort of power which is never yielded except to force, whether political or military, by a King John, a George III, a Vanderbilt or a Wayne B. Wheeler.

THEY HAVE THEIR incomes, comfort and security. They have fame and flattery for their souls. They are, in their way, historic and they constantly threaten their subjects with the fear that if they should be hampered the subjects would lose their “protectors” and be thrown to the wolves.

If labor courts were instituted, most of them would be broken, discredited and outmoded men and it is no exaggeration to say that some would crack up and die of shock, self-pity and bitterness in the way of Woodrow Wilson.

They have not progressed in all the years since Mr. Roosevelt’s first inauguration. They have taken their stand on an imperfect experiment, the Wagner Act, whose fallacies and harmful defects objective men soon recognized. And, while Mr. Roosevelt, their patron, preached experiment, progress and change as general political propaganda, they damned all change and still do.

TO THEM, for reasons of selfishness and “consistency,” the Wagner Act has been the goal, the final, if slightly imperfect development in labor relations. Progress has gone as far as it can go and any change would be a backward movement toward boss terrorism and serfdom.

I know that Judge Knox does not believe his proposed labor courts would mark the end of progress or even that his plan, in its present state, is the only means of salvation. In general debate, other useful ideas might be contributed. Mine would be that the unions would require the help of new laws to protect them from racketeers and arbitrary rule so that when unions should come to the bar for justice they could come with clean hands and not as petitioners for the private fortunes of unscrupulous and dictatorial union politicians.

Senators Ferguson and Fulbright doubtless are willing to debate, compromise and amend their proposals, and if the people will only follow the debates sensible, patriotic men and women, including union members may at last be made to see that the plan is actually progressive.

Purported Review of Communism

Westbrook Pegler

Press and Sun-Bulletin/December 4, 1946

Life, the pictorial magazine, recently presented an article purporting to be a review of the communist movement, or conspiracy, in the United States by an expert.

The author was Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

The New York Herald Tribune selected Mr. Schlesinger to review a book called “The Plotters” by a man known by many names, including Arthur A. Derounian, Avedis Boghos Derounian and John Roy Carlson. Mr. Schlesinger thought well of the book itself and regarded the author as a sincere authority. In this latter particular he disagreed with Federal Judge John P. Barnes, of Chicago, who said from the bench, after a trial of the evidence, that Mr. Carlson was “a wholly irresponsible person who was willing to say anything for money,” and added, “I wouldn’t believe him on oath, now or at any time hereafter.”

OF MR. CARLSON’S chapter on the American Communist Party, Mr. Schlesinger wrote that it was “not so complete as his picture of the Fascists, largely because the efficiently organized Communist Party is harder to penetrate by Carlson’s methods.”

The meaning of that remark plainly is that the Communist conspiracy is more dangerous because it is less easily unmasked. Nevertheless, Mr. Carlson and, I gather, Mr. Schlesinger, too, regard “Fascism” as the greater menace. The reader with a free mind has a right to suspect that Mr. Carlson had undisclosed reasons for presenting an incomplete picture of the Communist conspiracy. An outsider certainly would have, as Mr. Schlesinger writes, great difficulty penetrating the Communists’ iron curtain in American politics and unionism. But a person sympathetic with most, or all, of its aims might be loath to reveal it fully and might try to dismiss it as a secondary or unimportant threat.

BUT THE chapter on Communism, shows amply that Carlson’s awareness of the “Proto-Fascist use of Red-baiting as a means of smearing anyone to the left of General Franco does not suspend his conviction that liberals must nail down Communist activity wherever it is clear and probable, Mr. Schlesinger continued.

I should prefer plainer Americanese, but these double-dome types use an ideological geechee and we have to use their own wordage or they may say we distorted it.

“Proto-Fascist” is their way of saying “Pro-Fascist” or even “Fascist.” William S. Gailrnor, the sniveling thief who lectures along the party line, once explained that he found the device “Fascist-minded” to be useful, as it would be pretty hard to prove what was or wasn’t in a victim’s mind.

CANVASSING Mr. Schlesinger’s statements and assumptions, we find here that he does not accuse all anti-Communists of “smearing anyone to the left of General Franco.” But there are many Americans in “The Plotters” far to the left of General Franco who nevertheless indulge in “Redbaiting.”

I have done it for years, even when “Red-baiting” was regarded as undignified if not dirty pool. Why should the Reds enjoy exclusive immunity from “baiting”? And, moreover, there are those who regard all opposition to Communism as “Red-baiting.”

Notwithstanding his “expose” in Life, which I thought deficient in important matters for reasons which I am at liberty to surmise, I think Mr. Schlesinger could have gone much further in Life without exposing himself to any reasonable charge of “Red-baiting.”

George Spelvin Writes the General

Westbrook Pegler

Press and Sun-Bulletin/March 12, 1945

You and your people seem to think your troubles should come first with us, but let me tell you something.

The party is over and France is off the cuff and the best thing you can do for yourselves is pull down that trained thumb of yours and quit standing by the road always waiting for a hitch.

We have an awful lot of our own people, maybe more than a million, living in trailers on parking lots, and I wouldn’t even try to guess how many others living in shacks and barracks who are likely to kick up a row if we don’t pull up our socks and somehow slap together some fairly habitable houses when this war is over.

It is so confused that we don’t exactly know ourselves where they all came from or how far from their old homes they find themselves today and you might say that a lot of them haven’t had their stakes down for years and can’t really call any place home except just where they happen to be.

Living in a trailer is like being a turtle. You tote your home along with you and when it began people thought it was kind of cute, but that was just for a short vacation and it is a very different thing for steady. Even two people in one of those things get into each other’s way and on each other’s nerves, but when there is a child or two it is just awful. You know, no privacy, no sitting room, no bathroom, no room.

To hear you people, a fellow would think we didn’t have a care in the world. You would think that if a fellow just had the money in this country he could walk in and buy whatever he wants for himself.

Why, nowadays, you walk into a store and you see rows of empty shelves and all they can give you mostly is the nopes. Any cigarettes? Nope.

Sugar? Nope.

Can you sell me a baseball for my kid? Nope.

Steak? Nope. Bacon? Nope. Chewing gum? Nope. Babies’ under? Nope. Black pepper? Nope. Sheets? Well maybe next week.

That wonderful standard of living that we used to boast so much about is way down around the Bulgarian level, if you ask me, and those cars that the American workman used to rattle around in so regardlessly, with a new one every year or two, are now anywhere from three to 10 or 12 years old and most of them are five years on the road. And the gas is closely rationed and lots of times even if you have the coupons and the money the guy just gives you the same old nope because he can’t get any himself.

You people better make your plans to get to work and take care of your own needs and not count on us for much. The way it looks around here we will have a market for all those millions of cars and washing machines and refrigerators within our own borders for years and years and a lot of our cities are going to need rebuilding almost as badly as some of those that were bombed in Europe and then there will have to be new roads and railroad equipment and we are not going to stay on rationing and the nopes indefinitely just to feed France. Our people come first and frankly yours haven’t exactly overwhelmed us with gratitude for past favors.

Would you care to discuss trading Martinique to us to get that burr out from beneath our shirt so that if France should go Bolshevik we wouldn’t have to keep covered with warships and planes, as we did after 1940? Well, then maybe the U. S. A will have to do as Russia did about protecting her western frontier and, judging by 1940 that wouldn’t be too hard. Anyway, general, haul down that thumb because we have an awful lot to do for ourselves before we even pull up level with our normal standard of life.

Yours truly,

George Spelvin, American.

Lewis’ Royalty Idea is Not Original

Westbrook Pegler

Press and Sun-Bulletin/March 14, 1945

Contrary to the tenor of many shrill cries of alarm, there is nothing new or unconventional in the demand of John L. Lewis for a royalty of ten cents a ton or $60,000,000 a year, payable, not to the individual coal miners but to the treasury of their totalitarian union. Neither was the idea original with Jimmy Petrillo when, recently, in rowdy contempt for the War Labor Board (WLB) and President Roosevelt, he insisted on a sales tax on recorded music which he expects to yield about $4,000,000 a year, not to the musicians, but to his treasury.

The precedent exists far back in union practice, notably in the needle trades whose rulers are staunch New Dealers, and in certain local butchers’ unions which sell tags to be affixed to chickens killed under union conditions.

The basic principle of the case, the right of unions to collect sales taxes on commodities payable, in the long run, by the consumer, has long been established, probably without the knowledge of the people. Whether this tax accrues to the individual who does the work, is shared by all members of a union or flows into a fund inaccessible to them, is a secondary matter, loaded however with its own fascinating portents.

These rights, or assumptions, existed in a small way and in desultory and imperceptible practice before the New Deal. Since the New Deal began, however, they have been confirmed by recognition.

Mr. Lewis’ demand is in the public interest because it presents in shocking enormity the power of private organizations, subject to no income taxes and exempt even from the obligation to file reports of their income, to tax all the people, each in its own interest. Now the people have no excuse to remain unaware and if they continue to submit, they have only themselves to blame. Possibly they want it that way.

Mr. Petrillo expects to reap $4,000,000 a year to start, but hopes, by extending his sales tax to movie admissions, to run it up to $6,000,000 a year, at least. He says it is his intention to hold the money until the fund reaches $100,000,000 and then begin unemployment payments to musicians thrown out of work by the mechanization and repetition of music.

Assuming that this would take 15 years, many of the distressed musicians will be dead before their unemployment benefits are released and granting Mr. Petrillo’s argument that most of them will be thrown out of jobs very soon, it follows that most of them will take up other work and drop out of Jimmy’s union.

Thus, by the time the $100,000,000 is ready for distribution, the membership might be down to no more than, say, 25,000, a possibility that surely has not eluded men so shrewd and far-sighted as Mr. Petrillo and his counsel, Joe Padway, honored friends, both, and devoted followers of Mr. Roosevelt.

Or, under his constitution and with the advice and counsel of Mr. Padway, he could expel all the surviving members and cut up the money with Mr. Padway and any others toward whom he might feel generous. His constitution permits him to do this and no law forbids him.

At any rate, Mr. Petrillo’s mere “intention” to use the money for unemployment benefits or cultural works in the sweet bye and bye is not legal and binding. It is just a momentary idea, subject to change at his own discretion, under the close and curious structure of his union. So is the “intention” of John L. Lewis to use his sales tax of $60,000,000 a year for “modern medical and surgical service, hospitalization, insurance, rehabilitation and economic protection.” Mr. Lewis is strong and willful and a consummate politician as Franklin D. Roosevelt has learned in the touchy fingering of many bruises suffered in contests with one man who delights to draw him into fights and has licked him every time save 1940 when Mr. Lewis supported Wendell Willkie.

But there is no excuse for indignation against Mr. Lewis. He is only exercising a privilege of unions confirmed by the Roosevelt government and doggedly defended by Roosevelt henchmen in the Senate.

So if Mr. Lewis collects, say, $200,000,000 in the next four years and spends it all in the next election that is, after all, not his doing, but Mr. Roosevelt’s. He could do this on the precedent of Mr. Roosevelt’s own P. A. C., as an “educational” project for the attainment of his stated purpose to “provide for the economic protection” of the miners.

Placing U.S. Army in False Light

Westbrook Pegler

Press and Sun-Bulletin/March 9, 1945

In the light of Judge Phillip L. Sullivan’s decision that the seizure of Montgomery Ward’s property was a lawless act, let us refer to a gratuitous statement by Frank P. Graham, ostensibly a “public” or impartial member of the War Labor Board (WLB), on Dec. 17.

The very designation “public” member reveals a serious fault in the spirit of government these days, for all government officials should be “public” officials. That is to say they should be impartial and just. Yet we have labor senators and congressmen and Mr. Biddle, the attorney general, has announced, in effect, that the Roosevelt Government is a “labor” government. That means that the Roosevelt Government is partial to unions which are subordinate groups of his political party and in just that degree, is unfair to the rest of the nation.

To be sure that is democracy majority rule, but it is not equal justice under law.

Mr. Graham denounced Montgomery Ward, a private citizen, so to speak, and taxpayer, for “blasting at the foundations of maximum production” and spoke of the “no strike” agreement of “patriotic labor.”

An impartial member of this board, if he felt called on to make any statement at all, might have felt that fairness required him to recall that the “no strike” agreement of “patriotic labor” had been violated by thousands of strikes, which had blasted “at the foundations of production” in works vitally essential to the war. On the other hand, Ward’s actual connection with such production is slight, if not wholly imaginary.

James Byrnes, the director of war mobilization, also attacked Ward’s in an affidavit and the army moved in by order of President Roosevelt, executed by the secretary of war.

The army seized the company’s private property, including its receipts, and made disbursements, including wages, according to the decisions of the War Labor Board. It has just as much right to take the money out of your pockets.

By now we have the President, the War Labor Board, the director of war mobilization and the army itself all arrayed against a citizen defending his rights. He may not be a popular citizen but neither was Captain Dreyfuss.

The army, of course, is not “public” in the sense of impartiality. The President is commander-in-chief and all the officers are obliged to obey his orders and uphold him in his contentions. An officer might have some vague and theoretical legal right to publicly criticize an order given to him by authority of his commander-in-chief, but this simply is not done.

Examining the situation now, we find the army enforcing an illegal order to uphold a “policy” of a government which is admittedly partial to Ward’s opponent in a case at law. The army, too, has propaganda services whose duty is to justify the army’s position which in this case violates a citizen’s rights. The army is, in practical effect, the client of its own propaganda specialists and obviously will suffer no criticism at their hands.

All this puts the army in a false position and imposes on its propaganda services the duty of defending indefensible acts.

Washington vs. Moscow as Capital

Westbrook Pegler

Press and Sun-Bulletin/March 16, 1945

A few years ago Henry Wallace declared that the people had made a mistake in a congressional election which went against his party and since then the Political Action Committee has agreed that they were in error on that occasion. In fact, one stated purpose of the P. A. C. was to educate the citizens against repetition of the lapse in which they returned a batch of Republicans.

I am forced to agree with them that the people can be wrong but I am almost sure they will disagree with me when I say the people were wrong last fall in electing Mr. Roosevelt to a fourth term.

Still, I think it would have been wiser to elect Tom Dewey because I believe that in that case the President of our great republic would not have gone to Yalta but would have made Premier Stalin come at least halfway for once, which would have been important to our national prestige and a gain for Christian morality in the world.

You may argue that this is a small point and the discussion of it mere quibbling but my idea is that the peoples of the world who looked to us for leadership have now turned their eyes and thoughts to Moscow because Premier Stalin always makes Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill go to him. That is bad for morality in the world at large because, after all, the world knows that Premier Stalin is just about as bad as Hitler and we deceive ourselves if we refuse to give it a thought.

Once they said Premier Stalin was too busy chasing Germans to go farther than Tehran. Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill had a few little concerns of their own at the time but off they went, nevertheless, to meet Premier Stalin. The inconvenience to Mr. Roosevelt must have been awful, much as he loves travel and much as he seems to enjoy the ostentation of such bull-sessions in the old world.

I think an awful lot of good people in many countries who hate and fear Communism would have taken hope if the people of the United States had elected Mr. Dewey. Naturally, he would have cooperated with Premier Stalin in the fighting war and, in the face of an inherited situation, he could not have refused to discuss and plan peace.

On two points, in my judgment, Mr. Dewey has been wrong. I think he yielded to a condition when he said, in Portland, Ore., that the Wagner Act was a good law. As a lawyer, he knows it is lopsided because it makes the employer the defendant in a government court which is not only the judge but the plaintiff, prosecutor and court of appeals.

Possibly he intended, once elected, to educate the people to the evil of this law, acquaint them with its European character and revise it, step by step. The other fault that I find with his political wisdom is his endorsement, since his defeat, of the New York anti-discrimination bill.

Mr. Dewey never has shown the slightest racial or religious prejudice. As district attorney and as governor, he has been either utterly unfeeling or studiously correct in his appointments of Jews and Negroes, the two minorities to whose favor the anti-discrimination bill was directed. But he had been so placed by propaganda that, had he opposed the proposal, the other side would have called him a Jew-baiter and Jim Crow Republican. Not only he but his party would have suffered unfairly.

I insist that Mr. Dewey is a better man than Mr. Roosevelt on every count and would have continued the war just as successfully as Mr. Roosevelt has, a point of doubt in the hearts of many voters last fall which may have been the deciding factor. He takes government seriously. not flippantly.

He governs by law, not by fear and by prejudice. He is against special privilege not only for the other side but from his side and for himself and his family. And his moral courage is such that if he had been elected he would not have been afraid to discard the devious and dubious term “democracy” and substitute “Christianity” or “Christian ideals” from time to time.

Finally, I believe Mr. Dewey would have established Washington. D. C., and not Moscow, U. S. S. R., as the moral and political capital of the world.

Delaney Wins From Paulino on Foul

Damon Runyon

Johnson City Staff-News/August 12, 1927

This foul business is really becoming fashionable

We have foul balls, foul play, foul punches, and a foul language, a lot of which was spilled around the Yankee Stadium tonight when Senor Paolina Uzcudun, the pudgy wood chopper of Spain, was disqualified by Referee James Crowley for the alleged fouling of M. Viola Chap-Delain, commonly known as Jack Delaney.

It came about after a minute and fifty seconds, of what they were passing off on the 30,000 clients for fighting, in the seventh round.

The pugilistic pride of sunny Spain was pushing into Movila like a snow plow, throwing punches ahead of him in a sort of haphazard manner at Delaney’s body.

They seemed to be landing in the territory that was fair enough and the dignified looking French Canadian was offering no complaint.

The referee commenced warning Paolino, and admonishing him to “keep ’em up,” to which the Spaniard replied with a blank stare.

I here rise to remark that when Paolino offers a blank stare, it is pretty blank, at that.

He continued plowing, when suddenly Crowley stepped between the boys, and motioned the Spaniard to his corner, from which immediately arose loud Carrambas, the like of that. The same words were spoken in English by many of the ringworms present. They sound much different from Spanish.

Paolino gave the referee another blank stare, and finally wandered to his corner, where he sat down looking very blank indeed. Delaney seemed somewhat startled by Crowley’s action, but he is a nimble-witted young gent, and he turned and trotted to his own corner.

His manager, Pete Riley, presently emerged from the corner and passed about the ring above the dazed inmates of the press section exhibiting an aluminum pot, or pan, one of those protectors won by boxers when engaged in their professional labors. I believe the technical name is a “cup.” The “cup” exhibited by Mr. Riley seemed to be dented, as if it had been sat on by Mr. Fatty Arbuckle, or someone of like avoirdupois. I am informed that these dents are commonly accepted as prima facie evidence of a foul blow.

Later Mr. Rilley hoisted the aluminum vessel high above his head that the whole world might see, and for the rest of the evening the foul was forgotten by gents present as they tried to explain to their fair neighbors what it was all about.

As far as I am personally concerned, I could find no fault, but then these fouls are getting me all confused, anyway. Someone is always being fouled in this man’s town, either in the ring, or out of it. I viewed the punches that Mr. Crowley said was foul, but Mr. Rickard has his press seats so constructed for this event that most of the inmates were peering up slope at the proceedings, and thus their vision was a trifle cockeyed.

I will say, however, that if M. Olvia was fouled I must revamp my diagnosis of the Dempsey-Sharkey matter, and hereby, declare the terrible Sharkey to have been fouled a foot to a foot and a half. My first impression when Mr. Crowley stopped the proceedings was that he had taken pity on the clients and was doing away with the matter as a humane act.

I was thinking well of Mr. Crowley as a kindly man, when the news of the fouling came out, for you see the thing had been pretty terrible.

For six rounds the woodchopper couldn’t have hit M. Ovilia with a handful of rice. However, Paolino kept himself totally surrounded by Elbows, and while M. Ovilia played the march of the wooden soldiers on his bean, the delegates from the Basque didn’t seem more than just slightly annoyed.