Ring Lardner

Ledger-Star/September 4, 1923

Expert Says Argentine Might Not Know American Word For Ten

Have been sitting all day in Dan McLoughlin’s hotel waiting for an invitation from Senor Firpo’s manager to come out and see the Bull of the Pampas do his daily dozen but so far nobody has called up in Spanish, so will have to depend on hearsay for my first day’s report of the Bull’s activities. 

Luis is training out to the Park where they have the dog races and when the greyhounds takes their workout, he follows them around the track in the hopes that between now and the 14th he will learn to run as fast as they do, in which case he will have Dempsey wore out inside of ten rounds and can spend the last five trying to fell him. Luis has overlooked the fact that Dempsey has been following the horses up at Saratoga some of who can run almost as fast as a Grey hound when I ain’t betting on them. 

Joking to one side, the boys say that Firpo’s trainers is making frantic efforts to get him use his left hand which he ain’t never employed except to lift mashed potatoes. A great many men shave the left side of their face with their left hand, thus keeping the muscles supple, but Firpo’s left lacks even that much training as he is razor shy. The experts say that a man that don’t lead with his left won’t never make a fighter and that in his alleged fight with McAuliffe, Willard, and Weinert, Luis didn’t hit with nothing but his right. As far as results is concerned, you might as well say that Babe Ruth don’t hit with nothing but his bat. However, it is my own personal observation that champion box fighters do depend on their left leads to keep the other guy worried, and when they have got him believing that their right arm is paralyzed, they bring it into action and smack him on what I call the chin. 

A notable example of this method was champion Jess Willard and the only trouble with him was that by the time he got the other guy to believing that his right arm was paralyzed, he was believing it himself. Jess had hay making right but before he begun to make hay the sun had generally always went down. 

This fight ain’t going to be no such affair like a fight between Johnny Wilson and Harry Greb for inst., where either one of them could hit the other with a crow bar and they would think a gnat was bitting them. Dempsey and Firpo can both sock and when a couple of sockers is matched, the question always rises which of them can take it or leave it. Well, friends, I never seen nobody hit Firpo, as most of his apponents is always laying on the floor where they can’t reach him, so am unable to say whether or no he will stand up under the blows that finished Fulton, Willard, Brennan, Miske, and the Greek God. It will be recalled that Brennan after his little brawl with the Bull, made the classic remark that Luis was inhuman to punishment, but Brennan may of been overestimating his own ability to inflick same. However, I would judge from the Argentines gen. appearances, that he won’t topple over from the effect of a slap with the open glove, and even if he does get spilled for the court, he is libel to get up again on account of not knowing the North American word for ten. 

In regards to Dempsey, I have seen his jaw receiving smacks that anybody could get along just as well without. One of them was deposited in the second or third round at Toledo by the Giant of the Pottowatamies and for a second Jack looked like it had come as a big suprise. But he stayed vertical, and an instant afterwards he was re-engaged in closing Willard’s other eye. 

The second and last time I seen him really socked was on a July day in the beautiful and hospitable spface known as Boyle’s Thirty Acres and the sucker on this occasion was none other than the Greek God. The last named took a running jump and larded his far-famed right flush on of the pt. of the chin.

Personally I was setting just as close to the ring as anybody and my testimony is that Domesey was about as much staggered as you are when you pick up Monday’s mornings paper and read where a man and two gals in a motor car was met at grade crossing by speeding train and neither of them was his wife. The party that got the worst of that punch was the Greek God himself, it kind of discouraged him.

Firpo is big and strong enough to hit a whole lot harder than Carpentier and if Dempsey forgets himself for a minute and reaches in his left pants pocket for his lip stick or something, the Bull will hand him a wallop that will hurt a good deal more than the Frenchman’s did, in which case Jack will probably remain standing as he is very polite when theys ladies present. 

In a spirit of kindliness towards my readers, I will make a ernest effort tomorrow to crash the gate of the Bull pen and give you a firsthand, open and above board account of what is going on.

Dorothy Thompson

Edmonton Bulletin/September 9, 1947

Although Mr. Wallace is unlikely to create the farmer-labor bloc within the Democratic Party which he urged in his speech in Detroit, he knows where both the Truman administration and the Republicans are vulnerable: Namely, on the present “bipartisan foreign policy.” 

Mr. Wallace is not counting on victories for that policy but on setbacks, accompanied by a veering of American opinion toward isolationism, which force will be the head.

Failing to take cognizance of that changing sentiment, Truman might be defeated in the convention. The Republicans, having wagon to the star of the policy and having no domestic policy acceptable to organize labor, certainly would be defeated, while the Democratic Party – even with Mr. Truman—would be harassed by a growing bloc of dissidents within it, attracting independent Republicans.

Mr. Wallace must deny isolationismbecause his career denies it. That is his weakest spot. It forces him to become a Soviet apologist, which is far from the sentiment even of American labor. But if his foresight is basically correct, there will come a time of crisis when anything might happen.

Unfortunately, the bipartisan foreign policy is currently less promising of success than of failure. 

That policy is to recognize a new potential enemy in the USSR, which we must contain and eventually cause to retreat from the expanded positions already taken. States still open to Soviet expansion must be held by bolstering their economies and stabilizing their politics, and the United States must make herself the premier military power of the world which no country dare openly oppose. 

The trouble is it is probably too late and so far too little. 

Assuming — a big if — that anti-Soviet forces are strong enough to overcome their internal enemies within the parliamentary systems, which we are committed to uphold, what will the policy cost us? 

The American people have not grasped that it probably will take thirty billion dollars for the first four years, some three billions annually for long thereafter, and — austerity.

In 1945 the U.S. demobilized what already was the greatest military force on earth. The new foreign policy demands that we reconstruct and strengthen it, and the current cost is already a third of the budget. 

Our Policy, meanwhile, remains timorous and defensive. 

Nothing short of Western European federation — with a customs union, commonly stabilized currency, and a foreign and military policy integrated with our own — is sufficient as a counterbalance. But that, fought by parochialism of European states, can be “recommended” but not “imposed,” and we must pay for a hope, not a reality.

If, then, worse comes to worst, what will be left to the U.S. but to go to war or retire? 

The Soviets don’t have to go to war. They just have to invite it, on their own terms. Their object is to force our retirement and have us at their mercy. 

But who shall say that the American people, if peaceful half-measures fail, will not risk isolation rather than undertake another — this time atomic — venture at “liberation”? 

What great political assets have we in the realm of ideas? None, that are clear. 

The appalling fact is that we went into and through the war without any concept of its basic causes, its probable results, and the historical necessities for successful reconstruction. 

Not so the Soviets. Their leaders had a postwar plan to be realized as far as possible during the war. The western armies were to invade Europe where the Soviets decided, and be halted where they decided — and were. Soviet orbits were to be constituted and similar spheres for the West avoided with the aid of Communist sympathizers within western countries. Historically overdue measures, such as Danubian and Balkan federations, were to be realized within two or three years. These policies were to be furthered by all means, including the threat of force. 

None of this was to cost the Soviets a red ruble.

Countries do not become strong by weakening themselves for others, but by attracting others to their strength. Far from bolstering the economies of possibly hostile states, the Soviets plundered them, disintegrated them as autonomous bodies, and holding forth the promise of future rehabilitation only within a new integration and orientation. 

This is ruthless but purposeful.

Dorothy Thompson

Shreveport Journal/August 26, 1947

It is dubious whether the loyalty test of union heads under the Taft-Hartley Act will rid American trade unions of Communist leadership and influence. It is conceivable that it will have the opposite effect. 

Legislators have little grasp of workers’ psychology, and in my opinion this lack of insight is more responsible for labor difficulties than the machinations of the Communist. 

The trade unions themselves are fighting Communism in their ranks. They are also, however, fighting the Taft-Hartley Act. This latter fact leads them to oppose all parts of it, including the loyalty tests, and this puts them in the dilemma of protesting the very Communists whom they would like to get rid of. 

Affidavits will be falsified. Communists are fighting the “bourgeoisie” social order, and all its moralities. They are engaged in a “class war,” and find it no more immoral to deceive their enemies than armies do in wartime. The act, which provides no system for processing the affidavits to determine their validity, only provides that their truthfulness may be challenged — by “parties of interest” through complaints to the department of justice.

But in the trade unions solidarity against outside interference is a watchword. The act, therefore, creates a situation where union leaders as anti-Communist as John L. Lewis probably will sabotage the documents.

The Affidavits are hopelessly weak in definitions. Each official is required to swear that he is “not a member of the Communist Party, or affiliated with such,” and “is not a member or supporter of any organization that believes in, or advocates the overthrow of the United States government by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.” 

But membership in the Communist Party never has been, in Communist terms, a definition of a Communist. Communists run Poland though no “Communist Party” exists there. A party of that name exists or doesn’t, purely as a matter of tactics. The Communist Manifesto makes the strategy perfectly clear: Communists regard themselves, not as something separate from the working class movement, but as its spearhead. 

“The Communists are the most advanced and resolute section of the working class, that section which pushes forward all others. They have the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march. And the ultimate general results of the proletarianmovement.” Communist Manifesto. 

If it were provable that Communists plotted the overthrow of the government “by force or illegal means,” the party would be dissolved as subversive. 

They do not so plot, for the overthrow ofthe modern state by external or domestic force is impossible. They plot to put into power, in a time of crisis and unrest, a government subservient to the organized working class and its sympathizers. 

All modern revolutions make violent overturns only after they have secured by legal means the force to do so, which is the force of the state. The American Communist candidate today is not a Communist, but a muddled mystic: Henry Agard Wallace. 

The way to fight Communism among workers is not by “loyalty” tests, but by unremitting exposure of Communist aims and tactics and of the actual condition of the “proletariat” under Communist rule. It might also be well to recall one passage from the Communist Manifesto. 

Describing the “eternal” class struggles of the past, the Manifesto records: 

“A fight that each time ended in a revolutionary reconstitution of society, or in common ruin of the contending classes.” 

It is common ruin that the twentieth-century revolutions are promoting—ruin of wealth, labor, and civilization. And most working men know it.

Dorothy Thompson

Shreveport Journal/August 28, 1947

I have looked in vain on the lists of best sellers for a recent book that has topped such lists in Switzerland, Sweden, and France, and that is on a number of counts one of the very most important publications of the times: “To the Bitter End,” by Hans Bernd Gisevius. 

It is a unique chronicle of the war and the preface to the war as seen from inside the German government. From 1933 to 1944, after which he escaped with the aid of the American OSS, Gisevius was a German government official, most of the time in the ministry of interior, later in the counterintelligence of the army. 

As such he had access to confidential documents and contacts revealing, to an extent that few knew and none other lived truthfully to tell, the methods and practices of the Gestapo, spearhead of the Nazi revolution, the plots and counterplots, espionages and counterespionages, during the gradual subjection of 80,000,000 people to the most unconscionable gang that ever seized a state and led it to apocalyptic ruin.

During all this time, Gisevius belonged to an opposition that never for a moment relaxed its efforts from inside and outside the government to break the rule of this gang and save Germany and the world from the ultimate disasters it had set in motion. The book is thus a history of the modern revolution by coup d’état and a tragic study of futile though, in parts, heroic resistance.

Gisevius brings to his history more than knowledge of facts. He is always interested not only in what happened, but why it happened: what combination or circumstances attend the fall of a great state and its dissolution in progressive revolution and war. 

His revelations will not satisfy those who have all the readymade answers, such as that the Nazi revolt was a “plot of industrialists” or Hitler a “stooge of German militarists” or “Nazism a true expression of Germany.”

Gisevius, as he saw demonic crime, knew that he was witnessing a mass phenomenon, an overturning of all values, the rising of the great antispirit, based on spiritual infection in the German masses, and cunningly directed by conscienceless men absorbing bit by bit the leviathan of the modern centralized state and its instruments: The hordes of bureaucrats intent only on job-holding and getting their pensions, the bureaucratized and infiltrated army almost extinct of personal responsibility and the chivalric spirits, the pettily egotistic and frightened bourgeoisie, the organized workers already seeped through with cynical materialism.

Gisevius shows that Nazism but arose out of the morass of a society which had already taken leave of moral inhibitions and traditional values, and his book is both history and warning.

It also recounts the frightful tragedy of errors of the other European powers. Only once was there concerted determination of the military, who alone could overthrow the regime, to do so. 

That was in 1938 when both general staff and the people were fearful that Hitler meant war and war meant disaster. That counter-revolution was foiled by Neville Chamberlain at Munich. Even in 1939 it was not altogether too late — until Hitler was saved for the second time by Stalin. 

After that, the resistance was of individuals and circles of them. Let us not underrate them. They belong among the truest heroes of these terrible times.

Gisevius can also write, and his American publishers (Houghton Mifflin) have produced that rare thing: a first-rate translation by Richard and Clara Winston. Parts of this book read like a novel by, for instance, Joseph Conrad. 

I thought repeatedly of Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” for when you have finished it — and it is a book to read thoughtfully — you will wonder: How can such things be? But you will also be disturbed by a horrible awareness of the ease with which, under certain conditions, they can be. 

You will ask yourself whether the “bitter end” of violent revolution, demonism, and war already reached by Germany has been certainly avoided for the rest of us. 

And, perhaps, warned by the signs, you will think harder — as this book made me think harder, on what it is we live by and are prepared to stand for.

Ring Lardner

Idaho Statesman/December 2, 1923

Galatian Duels Fought With Dice While Residents of Silesia Use Forceps

To the editor:

I have been asked by a couple of feeble-minded friends from a small county in Minnesota to write an article on the subject of duels, which, according to the best advice, is one of the livest problems facing the world today, second only to the question of whether marked cards should be used in solitaire. Dueling has become so prevalent that a person can’t hardly pick up a newspaper without having a hunch that the news of some big duel has been suppressed.

This condition naturally has roused worldwide interest in the topic and the general public is in a fever to know the different kinds of dueling in vogue in different countries and the rules governing same and it is the purpose of this article to describe same.

A Duel That Nearly Came To Blows

The origin of dueling is so impossible to understand that it becomes laughable. The first authentic duel probably took place in the 16th century between a man named Geo Burden and the county clerk of Paraguay, South America. These two fellows got into a brawl concerning the relative merits of their rival parcheesi boards. 

It was decided that the matter should be settled by a hand-to-hand fight, using the styptic as a weapon. The styptic is a long-handled butcher’s cleaver and the man that gets in the first punch generally always wins.

These two fellows fought for one hr. and 20 minutes and at one time nearly came to blows. The final result was the calling of a special election as the county clerk’s position was now vacant.

The next record we have of a duel is the famous duel in Upper Silesia between Gus Parsons of Asia Minor and a resident of Upper Silesia named Harold Gelfrelch. The argument started when Mr. Parsons asked Mr. Gelfrelch why he always slept in an upper. 

At that time, the rules of dueling in Upper Silesia was to the effect that the two belligerents or petters were to meet the next morning and try to pull each other’s teeth. Each had to be a dentist graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. The both of them was armed with a forceps, and the code provided that the adversary had to keep his mouth open.

These two fellows feinted at one another for three days until finally one of them yawned, exposing three canines. His opponent, Mr. Parsons, took advantage of the situation if any and extracted the three canines. Thus honor was satisfied.

From that point on, dueling has become more and more laughable.

In April of 1825 there occurred the duel which revolutionized all previous efforts in the art of dueling. This occurred in Galatia, and as luck would have it, the argument was over a woman. One said she had been to a manicure, and the other gave a sarcastic laugh. This brought on a funny situation.

In less time than it takes to tell about it, Harvey Nichols, an entire stranger, had been called out and told that the honor of Worville Jauch, the Galatian, must be satisfied. So Harvey happened to ask what was the method of dueling in that country. He was told that the event was put on with dice.

An Affair Of International Proportions

Each duelist was provided with a set of two dice. If one of them made a pass, the other was supposed to get rid of himself in a quiet way. But if the loser was dissatisfied with the way the dice were shook, he could demand a new shake. In this way, some of the Galatian duels lasted for two or three years, and the man who was not exhausted by the end of that time felt a whole lot better.

The last great duel of international proportions took place three summers and seven winters ago and was all based on the frantic jealousy of two brothers. Both of them wanted to go to high school and neither could pass the entrance examination, so they decided to fight a duel. This took place in Sweden and the boys names was both Halam. The elder was named Hugh after his father and the other was numbered.

The Daily Duel in the United States

The rules of dueling in that country at that time was that you stood at a certain distance from each other’s noses. At the end of an hr. and a ½ the judges measured the noses and the one that had been pulled the furthest, why its owner lost. Hugh was entitled to a draw.

Dueling in the United States is limited to a few cases between husband and wife. The usual procedure is for the husband to get mad at the wife and challenge her to a duel. This is fought with cracker crumbs, and the one that can choke the most cracker crumbs down the adversary’s throat is a safe bet.

So much for the history of dueling, and I am certainly glad my admirers insisted on me writing it as it has been on my mind a long while.

Ring Lardner

Omaha World-Herald/September 11, 1923

Saratoga Springs, N.Y.—Here is a few predictions and assertions regarding to the fiasco scheduled for next Friday night at the Polo Grounds—before I spring them I want it distinctly understood that they don’t reflect no personal opinion of mine, and in fact, after being a chronic visitor for two weeks at the two training camps I ain’t got no personal opinion left except that it would be nice to be home. These predictions and assertions come from gents who are intimately connected with the so-called boxing game, and the most of them are slightly prejudiced in flavor of Dempsey, as you may be able to guess after reading same.

The gents referred to are Jack Kearns, Jimmy Daugherty, Wild Bill Lyons, Farmer Lodge and the Champ himself, and what they said was told to me in confidence, but as long as I don’t tell which one of them said what I figure I ain’t betraying no confidence. Well then here is the gist of it in alphabetical order.

ONE

1—Luis Angel Firpo is managing himself and has been called an astute businessman but they wasn’t never a fighter in history that was worse managed and if he had went and got himself a real manager we wouldn’t be going to see no fight next Friday between he and the champion of the world. Because Luis could of held off for a year and fought 8 or 9 fights with the kind of push-overs who he has been fighting against and made himself maybe $150,000 easy money without taking no risk. And a year from now, he would of been at least as good an attraction as he is today and would have at least as good a chance to beat Dempsey then as he has now and would get at least as much money for fighting Dempsey as he is getting now. Whereas if he gets knocked cold Friday night he won’t be nowhere near the drawing card that he would be without no such blot on his record.

TWO 

2— It took Firpo 2 rounds to dispose of Jack McAuliffe who has got a glass chin and was afterwards knocked dead in one minute of fighting by Floyd Johnson who had hit Willard 1,018 times on the jaw without even giving Jess a toothache. It took Firpo 6 or 7 rounds to drop Willard, who was once practically knocked out one round by Dempsey, when he, Willard was four years younger. In the Willard-Firpo fight, big Jess seemed to be in a receptive mood and not at all aggressive. The only thing Firpo had to fear was that the fight would be stopped by rain or that the Jersey City police would give either or both of the fighters the bum’s rush out of the arena on the grounds that the mayor wanted the ring space for some of his friends to sit in. Firpo did not half to defend hisself against Willard and could concentrate on his attack. Against Dempsey he won’t have time to concentrate on nothing.

THREE

3 — A man who leads with his right is a sucker for a man with a good left hand and a specially when the first-named writes you a post card telling his plans. When the man with the good left hand spots that the right hander is about to cut loose, why he steps in quick with a left that genally always causes an entire change of plans. Dempsey’s defense against Firpo’s roundhouse right will be a hard left hand punch to the stomach, which ain’t assigned to so many of these lefts to the stomach that finally Firpo will decide to not use his right no more for swinging purposes but just as a kind of a buffer.

FOUR

4 — Unless a champion is old and decrepit, why, the man fighting against him is under a big disadvantage. He realizes that the champion must be pretty good or he wouldn’t be champion. This is going to make him nervous and the first time he gets hit hard why he won’t only forget the plan of battle he mapped out in his training campaign but he is liable to forget to hit at all and just devote his time to saving himself from sudden death. Firpo ain’t never had to fight a defensive fight and don’t know how. Against Dempsey he will half to fight a defensive fight, and you can’t learn how in one night.

FIVE

5 — If Firpo stays more than 5 of 6 rounds he is a superman.

SIX

6 — Dempsey could retain his title by not trying for a knockout but by giving Firpo a 15-round lesson in boxing. This is what Dempsey could do but he won’t.

Well friends that is what I have heard from the boys mentioned above during my brief visit here and I thought I mite as well pass it along to you but will ask you again to remember that these is not my opinions and the only prediction I will make personally in regards to the fight is that it will be short enough and fast enough so as nobody is libel to get bored and doze off.

Westbrook Pegler

Montana Standard/January 17, 1957

The workers’ welfare fund of the United Mine Workers, subject to no inquiry or check by the subjects of John L. Lewis, has received about $1.525 million in 11 years. It started at five cents a ton “royalty” on coal mined in 1946-47. The next year the royalty was 10 cents, the next year 20 cents and, in the year 1949-50, 30 cents. Since 1950, the royalty has been 40 cents.

The fair average for this reckoning is 500 million tons. The legal costs of “administration,” a vague and mysterious term, and for litigation, are large and extremely confidential. Having no vested right in the fund, thanks to a federal court decision holding it to be a charity, the individual coal miner cannot compel the trustees to pay him his stated pension of $100 a month after he has served his 20 years in the mines and otherwise “qualified.” Lewis now gets enormous royalties, at 40 cents a ton, from the ordinary income taxpayers by way of the government program of “foreign aid.” The treasury sends this money abroad in hundreds of million and foreign governments send it back to individual corporations operating American coal mines, to buy coal for their internal uses. The American producer checks off 40 cents a ton of this come-back money and delivers it to the Lewis welfare fund. The American taxpayer also pays Lewis’ interests a profit on the operation of ocean ships used to deliver this “foreign aid” coal overseas.

American taxpayers have paid this royalty on enormous purchases of coal shipped from Virginia to England to close the deficit caused by British miners who curtailed production to keep their own taxes down. Lewis is one of the most powerful individuals in the United States. Without the necessity of specific requests or even suggestions, he commands special privilege not only in the Department of Justice but in the federal judicial system. The Central States Council of the Teamsters’ Union under James R. Hoffa and Harold Gibbons, two mysterious strangers who have muscled in since the death of the old president, Dan Tobin, is now coming under investigation by a Senate committee with Bobby Kennedy as counsel.

Investigators for the committee have been active in Chicago and St. Louis where Gibbons has headquarters. This district of the Teamsters’ embracing 26 states is now a thorough monopoly on highway freight transportation and much railroad transportation, exercised by Hoffa and Gibbons. Kennedy may promote himself politically, but the results are likely to be more noise than reform. The basic truths of this empire were disclosed five years ago by William McKenna, of California, attorney for Clare Hoffman’s subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and Labor.

McKenna and Hoffman were the first to reveal Hoffa as an upstart rival to Dave Beck, of Seattle, after Beck had patiently manipulated Tobin for years and finally got him to retire as president in his favor. Their work was frustrated by the White House palace guard in a futile effort to re-elect Sen. Homer Ferguson, of Michigan. Thus, years of advantage were thrown away. Hoffa and Gibbons now are organizing an employers’ union to control corporations which employ their teamsters.

This is done through a clause in the union’s labor contract with each employing corporation. The clause stipulates that the employing corporation will join the Central States Employers’ Assn. and conduct all labor negotiations through this association. Officers of such corporations have admitted that they never heard of this association, that they do not know where its offices are or who its represenatives would be in these labor negotiations with Hoffa and Gibbons.

Actually, the association dummy organized by Hoffa and Gibbons and it seems to have the charming virtue of legality. By this process, the union dictators would control the industry as well as the labor. The industry includes not only vehicles but warehouses in which masses of merchandise are stored and sorted and quarries producing stone for the great building activity of the Central States.

The status of Dave Dubinsky’s welfare and pension fund has not been formally announced to the public. However, it also appears to be a charity subject to Dubinsky’s whimsical generosity or harshness. He has boasted of gifts of millions of dollars of his subjects’ money to foreign countries. On the other hand, he denied earned vacation money to an American needleworker in the minimum income brackets on an arbitrary ruling that she had not shown the proper spirit in refusing to give up a stipulated free will donation as ordered by Dubinsky’s cabinet without consulting the faceless masses.

Westbrook Pegler

Montana Standard/January 18, 1957

CHICAGO–Having related the developments in a job of sabotage by dynamite in Scranton, Pa., I think I should play out my hand by reporting that the judge who sentenced four union goons to prison for making the explosion, with the comment that their crime was “very serious and shocking,” paroled them without consulting the district attorney after they had served only a few days more than nine months. They had been sentenced to 23 months and three of them still have to face charges of other crimes. One of the four, Robert Hubschman, 27, was serving two concurrent terms of 23 months, the second one for trying to fix a juror. All four had confessed dynamiting a dwelling under construction. All are members of Local 229 of the General Drivers’ Union, with jurisdiction over a large government military construction job in the region which has been the subject of federal indictments involving collusion among contractors and politicians.

Judge Michael J. Eagen, who passed sentence and issued the paroles, also paroled after less than six months a clerk of a hotel frequented by union hoodlums of the area whom he had sentenced to one year on a “morals” charge. The prisoner had held out against 11 other jurors and caused a mistrial in the first trial of four other terrorists involved in the same dynamiting. These four later were convicted of conspiracy to cause the explosion. They did not handle the charge themselves but assigned the others to do the actual job. There were two groups of four men each. Joseph P. Malloy, George J. Murphy, Bill Munley and Hubschman were convicted of the actual dynamiting. The four convicted of conspiracy whose appeals are now pending are: Joseph Bartell, Philip Brady, John Durking and Anthony Honacuse. They recently were guests of honor at a large “testimonial” dinner at $15 a plate to raise money for their further defense. The rakeoff was in the region of $20,000, earmarked mostly for lawyers. A Jesuit priest and a Protestant minister were among the guests. Orators exhorted them and others present to pray earnestly for the deliverance of the goons from their martyrdom into the affectionate arms of their families.

The four goons whom Eagen paroled at Christmas, though they had confessed their own crime, were reluctant, un-cooperative witnesses for the state in the trial of the higher-ups on the conspiracy charge. At first, Eagen refused to talk about the paroles. Soon afterward, however, he assumed full personal responsibility for his conduct and said he had received many appeals from the families of the convicts for mercy. Two of the conspirators and two others are still under indictment in another conspiracy to cause a masonry wall to be pushed down at night as sabotage on another dwelling under construction.

The unions, which are strong in the regional politics, directed fierce abuse at the Scrantonian, the local paper whose reporter, Harold Brislin, hounded witnesses and authorities until one of the original dynamiters cracked and confessed, implicating all the others. However, Brislin came through charged with nothing worse than excellent work at his profession and apparently without loss of face among the neighbors.

The Scrantonian, commenting on the Christmas paroles, said the original terms of 28 months were lenient in the dangerous and flagrant circumstances, the more so in view of the refusal of the goons to help the state in the later trial of the conspirators. The paper argued that the four dynamiters should have served their full time because “if we are to stamp out vandalism we must put fear of the law and retribution in the minds of those who contemplate crimes. We feel that mercy was shown in the original sentence.”

In defense, some adherents of the construction unions have argued that, after all, the explosion did very little damage because it occurred when little more had been accomplished than the construction of the cinder-block foundation. A considerable force of public opinion holds that this much damage by blast was permissible to admonish contractors to hire their workers from union halls through union agents in all cases.

Westbrook Pegler

Tulsa Tribune/October 16, 1957

MANY of my fellow-citizens including colleagues in our noble profession have evinced surprise over certain parliamentary procedures of the high-hoodlums of many of the big unions at their periodic hilarities on Miami Beach. It was news to them that such conventions could be fixed. I envy their innocence and will not shock their infant sensibilities with gross explications of the beautiful mystery of love and the truth about babies.

However, as one whose illusions were sullied long ago, I feel bound to do my duty as I see it and can say only that I will treat the facts as gently as the circumstances let me.

First, be it understood that an “international” union is a practical duplicate of the Republican and Democratic political parties. It is a private organization and its conventions, like the political consistories, generally are corrupt in keeping with the character of its dignitaries.

Unions are not public bodies in any sense. They hold neither license nor charter from the government. They have a right to make their own rules and to violate them at will in their internal affairs. They are amenable to public law only in remote phases of theory.

Those in command of a big union control the actions of their conventions so rigidly that a student might seriously ask why they bother to go through the rigmarole and effort of conventions. The answer is that these are traditional grand souse parties. Their spiritual advisors bray and write to the contrary, but it is the happy practice to transport widening old bags to the convention cities, drape them in luxurious white fox furs, ply them with bourbon and two-inch red steaks and cottage-fried potatoes and kick hell out of them at the climax of closing night. These accessories are usually carried on the expense accounts as secretarial assistants.

So, all right, now we understand why big unions would not willingly forego conventions. The president, secretary- treasurer, numerous vice presidents and members of the executive board or council name all chairmen and members of all committees. The most important of these, as in the political conventions, is the committee on credentials. This is the one which disqualifies the Taft delegates, as it were, and with this implied reproof to the the opposition, seats the Eisenhower slate. The floor of the convention is now packed with the henchmen of the ruling mob.

For example, a dissident brother, full of outrage and booze, may set up incoherent bawling from the midst of a bunch of administration stalwarts who are naturally embarrassed to find such a louse among them. One of them slugs him from behind and the chair declares him to be plainly out of order. The insurrecto persists, however, and the chair calls on the sergeant-at-arms to quell him. This is done by main strength, often with superficial contusions, lacerations and abrasions, and the chair now recognizes a brother from Springfield, Mo., who desires to spread on the record his personal compliments to the grand worthy president by way of promoting his own candidacy for regional plenipotentiary over some 200 locals.

The committee next in importance after the committee on credentials, which decides who shall vote on what, is the committee on resolutions, which analyzes all resolutions for subversive language and intent. Resolutions hostile or embarrassing to the administration are filed in the wastebasket.

By this means, disruptive elements are kept in abeyance and the floor is cleared for glorious laudations in the competitive rites wherein the president et al are nominated to succeed themselves.

This creates an atmosphere of good will so strident that a motion to suspend the constitutional method of balloting delegations is carried with whole tumults to spare and the entire list is retained for another four years by acclamation.

No court has ever established authority to interfere with such activities. And though the present federal courts undoubtedly could create their own pretext to interfere, the judges and the hoodlums are, after all, old grads of the same political school who learned their morals in the same book.

Westbrook Pegler

Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader/January 22, 1957

Chicago, Jan. 22—One Lester Velie, formerly of the late Collier’s, seems to have satisfied the ethical and other professional requirements of the Reader’s Digest and to have become its “expert” on union rackets. I have had occasion to disagree with Mr. Velie on matters of fact and I recall with satisfaction that when the Digest ran a story by another author of similar bent, lauding Irving Brown of Dave Dubinsky’s privately operated state department as a hero on our side of the barricades, I proved that Brown was more bashful than brash and that he had been a Bolshevik in the treasonous Communist movement in our country. I challenged that authority, De Witt Wallace, the editor and prop of the Digest, to prove that either Brown or Jake Lovestone, his political chief who runs Dubinsky’s state department from Dubinsky’s offices in New York, had ever repudiated all Communism.

But the best I ever got out of Wallace was a printed admission that I had not published a lie, as he insinuated I had, and testimonial endorsed by many anonymous characters in Washington that Brown was opposed to Communism. For some reason, Mr. Brown has never been willing to say that, or anything else, to me.

Bravery Minimal

Their testimony was discounted by their timidity on behalf of their warrior. Their own bravery was minimal.

The occasion of this discussion is an arbitrary and unsupported attribution of noble purpose and heroism to Will Lurye, a Dubinsky “organizer” who was murdered in the West Side garment center of New York in 1949. The heroine of Velie’s article is a sister of Mr. Lurye.

This is loose-end reporting but it meets Mr. Wallace’s standards, whereas my work has not appealed to him since I really got going on the Roosevelt family’s drolleries long, long ago. Before that, Mr. Wallace bought my pastorals as reprints and once he sent me another check at Christmas with a note saying he had underpaid me.

But, as I say, I suddenly lost my stuff, a modified calamity in my view inasmuch as the standards involved concern and the ability to reject unverified assumptions.

Lurye Loyal Unioneer

Now it is true that common report in New York has it that Will Lurye was a loyal unioneer who gave his life in the service of king David Dubinsky’s politico-union empire. He was a picket at a clothing plant which was sending out unfinished dresses to non-union shops for assembly and if he was faithful to his trust he was a martyr; but if he had sold to the company for 10 cents per garment for letting this “contraband’ go through, then the crime against Dubinsky and the union was offensive to morals, although quite ordinary and almost unprovable in court. The public apathy about repartee with razor blades, pistols and corrosives in this industry is almost imperturbable.

Now, like Wallace in the case of his anonymous character witnesses for Irving Brown, I must introduce a nameless authority for a version which holds that Lurye did accept money for letting “hot cargo” go through.

My authority is a retired official of the New York Police Department who worked on and prepared the case against Vincent Macri, who was acquitted but then disappeared forever down to now. Macri had muscled into a company which Lurye was harassing, and for 25 per cent of the corporate stock agreed to make him be good. The owners told Macri they could not carry both the load of 10 cents a garment to Lurye and 25 per cent of their net profit to him. Macri said he would take Lurye out of the deal. Lurye was accordingly eliminated.

My informant is anonymous because otherwise he would be fired out of his present job which augments his pension very nicely. However, in a pinch, he would stand forth and there are statements on file in New York supporting this account.

I deem it interesting that Dubinsky gets so much favorable publicity even when he has the gall to set up a political empire in foreign lands at the expense of American workers in his power.