Westbrook Pegler

North Adams Transcript/December 15, 1944

New York. As to whether it is good thing I will not be arbitrary but, anyway, it is a fact that the good people of our whilom happy land are becoming a breed of scuttlebutt or guardhouse lawyers, meaning the kind who think they know the law and their rights by ear and can and do argue eternally about the Constitution and why the cops or the government can’t do this or that to a law-abiding citizen. As an opinion, I would say that this is unfortunate because life was much serener when the laws were few and all of them done in black and white so that people could know instinctively what was wrong and conduct themselves accordingly.

It was unlawful and you could be fined $2 for leaving your horse without a hitching-weight or, in winter, without a blanket and, on Sundays and election days, in most well-governed cities, the saloon-keepers were supposed to pull down the shades and lock the front door, leaving the side or family entrance open, however, for invalids who might be taken bad and need a spoonful of brandy. The saloonkeepers were a respectable lot, and, generally speaking, did draw the blinds and lock up in front and seldom was a patrolman forced by his duty to make an arrest for open and defiant violation of law and public opinion.

Few families and individuals who lived in rented premises in the cities and towns were bothered about taxes even though there were local tax laws which theoretically required them to pay something on their household goods. Once in a few years, the assessor would select a block in a neighborhood and go from door to door and be invited in to look around but, usually, he would be out and gone in a minute and that would be the last of it.

Once each summer, on the average, the dog-catchers would come around with a few poor, sad mutts squatting in the cage with shame and humiliation written in their woebegone faces but the policemen were neighborly and word would spread like fire before a high wind.

The dogs along the block would vanish into their respective homes to be hidden until scouts tailing the dog-wagon would come back and give the all-clear. The dog-catchers were cunning, like Indians, though, and sometimes they would hurry around the block and come through again but the law-abiding citizens of the younger set were no dummies, either, and their maneuver never trapped any dogs in our block.

The only casualties were suffered in the first surprise but even then you could get your pooch back without penalty, if your old man called at the alderman’s house that night and sang him a song about the broken-hearted bairns.

The only federal law that anybody was really aware of was the one against monkeying with the United States mails. I am not sure whether we had the FBI then and I have no idea how the government could have caught you if, in the, dark of the night, you had filched a post-card or letter from a neighbor’s box, but people thought the punishment would be sure and swift and pretty awful and so the mails, even if unprotected, were inviolate.

Possibly big business men had problems that the people were oblivious of and it is the people, then as compared with now, that I am thinking of in their relation to the law. About their worst pitfalls were dealings with the instalment furniture people who would be around with a writ and a wagon and snatch it all back if you got careless with one of the final payments and pile on charges which they called court costs and lawyers and the loan-sharks who would eat you up and stop your pay and hound you from job to job and even from town to town. Th. h.H i even so.

These troubles were real bad but, even so, you didn’t have any doubt where you stood under the law. You didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance and that was all there was to that.

As to the other laws, of course everybody knew it was illegal to blow a safe or stick people up and anyway, these were practices of the criminal classes, exclusively, so the people didn’t have to bother their heads about their constitutional rights in such matters.

But look you now!

If you don’t get it up for old Sam on dough day, he begins to grind you in and the dizzy law is written so that you are damned whether you do or don’t because not even the treasury agents can agree on a given case.

Then the draft. A fellow with a pre-Pearl Harbor child was given a pass and started a little store on his savings and some credit but then was drafted anyway, and had to sell out, close up, park the family with relatives and report. Then, in six weks, he was back, broke and with his business gone. He had heart trouble all the time. Now, maybe he will be going again.

Can they do that to him? He thinks not, but they did.

Or a citizen and tax-payer in one town takes a little job installing a sink in another little town close by and the law clips him for a $100 fine because he didn’t take an examination from the local plumber, and pay a $30 license fee to cut in on their Balkan monopoly.

He is a foreigner in another town five miles away in his own home state.

Or he thinks he had better help make bullets for the war or build ships and the War Labor board says he must pay $150 to a union for the job. Howling they can’t do that to him, he walks off so the draft board grabs him and to the war he goes, still yelling pertinent excerpts from the Constitution and some nonsense about taxation without representation.

Miss Marguerite Rawalt, a tax lawyer in the treasury and president of the Federal Bar Association composed of sergeants, catchpolls and sheriffs of the national government, summed it up when she exultantly reminded the Texas Bar Association that there were now 217 special courts, commissions and bureaus and innumerable quasi-judicial state bodies administering law directly affecting the individual citizen and exhorted her colleagues of the bar to take profitable advantage of the poor wight’s distress in the toils.

The scuttle-butt or guard-house lawyer has a fool for a client but then in these conditions aren’t we all of us?