Westbrook Pegler
Spartanburg Herald/November 2, 1940
New York, Nov. 1—When the Democratic national committee tries to make it appear that President Roosevelt has been hostile to the Communists the record makes the committee look very foolish. The record shows that both the president and Mrs. Roosevelt and most of the administration have been warmly sympathetic with the Communists for the last seven years, and there is much more factual information bearing on this subject than I had room for in yesterday’s living human document on the subject.
The labor relations board has been packed in favor of Communism, and its rulings and the Wagner act at the present time even conspire to prevent the dismissal of a Communist from an airplane or munitions plant on the ground that he is a Communist, although the WPA has finally come to the admission that Communists are incorrigible and insufferable wreckers and may not be hired or retained on its rolls.
The employer cannot discriminate against a Communist because he is a Communist. It was discovered also, in the course of the investigation conducted by the Dies committee, which President Roosevelt tried to discredit and suppress, that the wife of an agent of the Russian GPU was employed in a confidential position in the department of labor, but so many shocking discoveries have been made by Dies and his colleagues that the citizens are practically shockproof. Things like that go almost unnoticed nowadays.
But I do not dismiss the possibility that President Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt are now turning against the Communists. It is not surprising that the national committee now wants to take credit for the conviction of Earl Browder on behalf of President Roosevelt. Nor is it surprising that Mrs. Roosevelt disputed the Communists who control the American Newspaper guild. These developments are puzzling but not surprising. They indicate changes in the Roosevelt or National Socialist party line.
It may be remembered, in this connection, that Benito Mussolini also was a Communist once and scratched his back on the same brick wall with the comrades in Switzerland. He played along with them until he was big enough to become his own dictator, and then turned violently against them and presented himself as the savior of Italy from the curse of Communism.
Mr. Roosevelt’s aims are more like those of Mussolini and Hitler than of Trotsky and Stalin. His method has been to create a great myth of personal benevolence to the masses by working to destroy the industries which provide jobs for the masses. With this loyalty highly developed the unemployed can be made to hate the operators of private industry more and more for failing to re-employ them and to adore the President more and more for bludgeoning business.
If and when private investment cannot be persuaded to maintain business any more the investors will put their money into government securities only, and the government will pass it on to the industries and become the boss of both employers and employees. That is substantially what Mussolini and Hitler did, and it is better than the Communist system, because it leaves the business executives still in nominal charge of their properties. It is a method which spares the lives and preserves the talents of men and women who cannot be easily replaced, but it achieves the same general result that Communism strives for, namely government control of everything, including labor. It is less noisy and violent than the Communist type of revolution, and if the Communists don’t happen to like it, that is their hard luck.
The Communists think they are very shrewd and cunning, but they have been played for dopes before—notably, as I have recalled, by Mussolini—and there is not a single country outside Russia in which they did the preliminary dirty work, as they have been doing all this time in Washington, where they won the government in the end.
France was the latest example. They drove the French people crazy for years, and the result is National Socialism under Petain and Hitler.
In this country they have followed the same course, have been used by the New Deal administration for its own mysterious purposes, and now are beginning to lose favor as the government turns toward an Americanized version of the very system which it professes to hate worst.
(Source: Google News, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=SFOYbPikdlgC&dat=19401102&printsec=frontpage&hl=en)
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