Roanoke Rapids Daily Herald

Pegler: "Do-Goods" Are A Breed Dedicated to the Idea
Contentment
Is
A
Curse
Severely
Chastises Lyons For Idea
Of Forming Society Of Red Baiters

By Westbrook Pegler
(Copyright, 1948, King Features Syndicate, Inc.)

Eugene Lyons, a professional brand from the burning, has come up with the idea of organizing a Society of Red Baiters. This might have been all right for purposes of discussion, but then he had to get grim and start talking about the good that such an organization might do. If I have any bigotry in my juices it is a rancid abhorrence of people who cold-bloodedly set out to do unprovoked good to other people because all the immortal malevolents who set our nation to hating in 1929 and have kept us at a licking boil till now were do-goods. They are a breed conceived in malice and dedicated to the proposition that contentment is a curse. They thrive in troublous times on frightened souls and, just as the parson and the cop would find themselves professionally obsolete in a world of total peace and piety, they must have woe to feed upon or die.

I refer you to the roster of hot-eyed provocators who have called themselves reformers in our time, and put it to you whether men of good will would intentionally sign up with any new lodge consecrated to the purposes which they professed. In our country I have watched them all, from Bishop Cannon, who put poison in our hootch in God's name, to Henry Wallace waving fagots for the purifying fires, and I have yet to find one whose love of virtue and pity for the poor and ailing was comparable in voltage to his voluptuous hatred. I might say that there have been a few complaints along this line regarding my own work upon the rogues of social uplift and unionism, but only from the ill-formed. Any person who has ever looked to me for good works has only himself to blame, for my motives always have been obviously retributive not idealistic and any good I may have wrought has been purely coincidental. I think I may say that I have little to answer for.

Mr. Lyons is a back-slid Bolo of the early New York crop who went to Moscow for the United Press and came hurrying home yelling that the Bolsheviks, those dirty dogs, were given to impure speech and committed to holocaust. He wrote an expose called "Assignment in Utopia," which has become a library book for cosmic oracles, and another called "The Red Decade," likewise reliable for reference but not privileged matter like the invaluable five-foot shelf of the Dies and Thomas Committees of Congress. His acquaintance among the New York and Washington Communists was extensive and his hatred of his old comrades purifies and renews itself as he pursues his career and they pursue him. It is a droll paradox that the Messrs. Lyons, Ben Stolberg and Ben Gitlow, the last named a renegade of the highest quality, all of them Jewish, have been denounced by the Communist propaganda as anti-Semites and probably, if the truth were known, honorary emir of the Arab. Mr. Stolberg is a scholar and a brisk and stylish writer who used to get crushes and, once, in throes over David dubinsky, of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, wrote a rapturous biographical toast which he now regrets with the writhing shame of a moonstruck banker in a breach of promise suit. Mr. Stolberg never was a Communist but was, as he says, a radical in his political dolesscence, but he knows them with a sensuous and exhilarating fury. Mr. Gitlow, of course is well known as the former chief of the Communist Party in the United States and the most vehement and convincing confessor of the large American class of apostates. His current work, entitled "The Whole of Their Lives," is a fine chapter for the American White Book on the ultimate war with Soviet Russia. The story of the Party's management of the Bonus March against Herbert Hoover in Washington is practically official, and actually news, even after 16 years. It was but natural, incidentally, that the New York Herald Tribune condemned this book to the attention of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., of the Harvard clique, for politico-literary review. Mr. Schlesinger is a most reliable fellow for the fixed political motives of the H-T's literary appraisals, being a high-octane New Dealer and an unpinkened hero of the conquest of the Nazi. He served in the O. S. S. but dealt in "research," not personal violence. It was natural also that the Herald Tribune would assign him to review John T. Flynn's book, "The Roosevelt Myth," after ignoring it long and praising many lesser and inferior jobs. And natural, too, that Mr. Schlesinger should do a job on Mr. Flynn, as they say in the book trade. Unable to fault Mr. Gitlow's charges, Mr. Schlesinger wrote that his feeling against Communism was an "obsession" and that his broad picture of the role of Communism in American life in the '30's and '40's is surely far out of perspective. This is the smear technique which is the weapon of the Herald Tribune's party line. Mr. Schlesinger has good reason to know whether any work on Communism in the United States is authoritative. I feel less confident, however, that he could be trusted to review any anti-Communist or anti-New Deal work with artistic and historical objectivity.

Other objections aside, I firmly rejected Mr. Lyons' invitation to join his Society of Red-Baiters on the further ground that if it ever should show any signs of life, we would be invaded and taken over by the Communists themselves. The mere fact that the society was by name devoted to red-baiting would not deter the comrades. They have filtered into many church organizations whose titles gave them fine deceptive coloration and there was a period when even the Congressional Committee on un-American Activities served the Kremlin faithfully and well.

Hitlerism was an un-American activity. Communism was its foe. By promoting Communism the Committee harassed the Nazis. So voila! Why not?

The title of the Society of Red-Baiters might seem prohibitive. But in three months it would be the Society to Bait Red-Baiters with an executive secretary drawn from the Newspaper Guild, the Furriers' Union or Hollywood and Mr. Lyons would have another lesson in his endless education.