Westbrook Pegler

The Times-News/February 28, 1956

I have often saluted the Tablet of Brooklyn as the best Catholic diocesan paper in the United States, and its managing editor, Pat ScanIan, both by inference and in plainer terms, as the best editor in this phase of our press.

It is with more sorrow than respect, therefore, that I find them both praising George Meany, the boss of the combined rackets of the AFL and the CIO, on the occasion of his speech opposing commerce with Soviet Russia lest the enemy be thus nourished by our business to carry on sly and sinister works among us.

Meany is about 25 years behind Westbrook Pegler and a hundred other journalists who recognized and opposed this evil when Roosevelt and Walter Reuther, Meany’s partner in power in the new combination, were joyously consorting with communists while Meany was bumbling along as a docile, sedentary bureaucrat of a thoroughly vicious political phenomenon.

If Meany had said then that which so belatedly he says today, to the applause of The Tablet, Mr. Scanlan and some of the prelacy, he made no impression on the memory of a pioneer in this difficult but, to honest Americans, ever-delightful contest. The truth is that he never opened his mouth against any phrase of communism until now and, further, that he has joined these last few years a contemptible gang of opportunists of Tom Dewey’s adherence to destroy and crush, even to death, Joe Ryan, the one man who personally kept Harry Bridges and the communists of the CIO Longshoremen’s union off the eastern seaboard and the gulf.

Ryan made Meany what he is today, promoting him from the status of punk. But for Ryan, Bridges would have seized the remainder of the American ports during the war and would control their commerce now.

There is nothing to indicate that Meany had anything to do with this repulse.

Ryan did it himself and, moreover, while other unions of the AFL were keeping loyal Negro workers on the permit list without hope of full membership, Ryan not only welcomed Negro dockers to his conventions at the same Commodore hotel where Meany made this speech, but elevated them to regional offices.

While Ryan was doing this, Meany kept a still tongue in his fat head, a silent, compliant political agent of the party which, however painful the truth may be to Harry Truman, did load the labor relations board, the state department, agriculture, treasury and the department of justice with communists, meaning in a shorter and uglier word, traitors.

That is the party which Meany served all this time through his rising influence in the AFL, which was and is today an appanage of the party of the communists.

Mr. Scanlan is a savvy man who knows his way around the seamier phases of politics and unionism. Thus, he knows that Meany’s own home union, the plumbers, is rotten with graft, extortion and more primitive crime in locals across the land and that George has never exerted himself to any effect at all against a condition which must be a challenge to any man aspiring as Meany does to the respect of the Catholic community.

I am sincere in saying that I sadly regret this editorial by a fine paper which has had in my opinion the strongest moral influence of all our press, religious and worldly, these last 15 or 20 years. Mr. Scanlan has fought strongly and at times has taken risks which only a few of us colleagues knew to expose communists and less forthright enemies allied with them but professing to oppose them, including fakers of religious aspect.

But he knows that George Meany previously never hit a lick against communism or against old-line union racketeering, either. George Meany was one of those miserable pilgrims who went crawling to the Sing Sing cell of Joe Fay, secretly, however, and on business so indecent that he has never dared to say what it was. Fay betrayed labor, which Meany, in a facetious manner of speaking, represents by the free choice of the working stiff. It is hard to find anyone to respect in this morbid situation.