National Reports
PILAT, OLIVER
National Reports 'Peg' and the Ghost of 'Colonel Mouse' By Oliver Pilat New public-relations techniques may have spread American political life somewhat more evenly over the years, but the...
...Most everybody knew that the General's family was of German-Swiss extraction on both sides, and so the reaction of the politicians and reporters was "So what...
...During all these years since 1911 and 1912, by the secret evil design of one man, the government of this great republic has been corrupted and transformed into fascism, which that man invented long before Benito Mussolini was heard of outside his native village...
...The book was tossed off by the Colonel during a period of convalescence at his home in Houston a couple of years before he became a private adviser of President Wilson...
...Yet freedom of opinion is good because there is no better alternative...
...He had served on a committee of oldtimers during the campaign, and he subsequently proffered tidbits of advice to the White House...
...In the United States, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman furthered the plot...
...House never accomplished as much in the Wilson Administration as he liked to imply...
...Pegler's wildest shot in the dark was a guess that George Sylvester Viereck was imprisoned in World War II, not for anything like sedition, but because he "knew so much about House's relation with Roosevelt...
...Winrod's opus began: "The present plight of the American people is not the result of natural disorders...
...Our problems have been deliberately created by international conspirators...
...Why does the new Hearst regime let him get away with it...
...A master plan for the destruction of the America we love is being processed...
...Any man has a right to his opinion, but does he have a right to be persistently wrong about his facts, and to erect his errors of fact into a closed system of thought...
...Pegler added some fancy touches to the Winrod story, without mentioning Winrod, references to cabalistic material and talk about "suppression" of Philip Dru: Administrator...
...Edgar Eugene Robinson, in The Roosevelt Leadership 1933-45, published in 1955, explores the sources of Roosevelt's ideas, and estimates the relative influence of major advisers, without finding any necessity for mentioning Colonel House...
...A strong book appeared in the year 1912 which reduced the plan of attack to writing...
...Gerald B. Winrod, who had been blending Protestant evangelism with bigotry for 20 years, distributed nationally his own up-to-date version of an anti-New Deal pamphlet, called Dru Deal, which had been produced in 1940 by Walter H. Anderson...
...Sponsored by Gerald L. K. Smith's Patriotic Tract Society, these consisted of a silly exhumation of an old joke about Cadet D. D. Eisenhower as "the terrible Swedish Jew," which had appeared in West Point's Howitzer Yearbook for 1915...
...Politics is a rough game anywhere, and particularly rough under American ground rules...
...If the Dru Conspiracy is now emerging again, on the eve of another Presidential election, it is due largely to columnist Westbrook Pegler, a genuine authoritarian voice among colleagues mostly conservative or middle-of-the-road in approach...
...Winrod and his friends attracted attention, and were spanked, first by the late Bert Andrews of the New York Herald Tribune, then by Frank Coniff, a Hearst bellwether, and other journalists...
...Winrod's 1952 pamphlet described Colonel House as "the representative" of an international Jewish banking fraternity whose members were supposed secret Communists...
...Both Mussolini and Hitler became the 'instruments' of a brutal scheme hatched by Colonel Edward Mandell House, of Texas...
...Other elements of the nation's hate press joined in the chorus...
...The text was meant primarily as a guide for top level promoters of the Conspiracy...
...During 1954 and 1955, Pegler devoted a dozen full columns to this conspiratorial version of history, carrying it beyond Eisenhower by involving Presidential possibilities like Governor Harriman of New York...
...The President referred to him jokingly as "Colonel Mouse...
...Pegler made his first reference to Philip Dru on July 29, 1954, a few days after he revealed that his employers had prevented him from telling all he knew about Eisenhower during the 1952 campaign because, he said, they were more interested in having a friend in the White House than in disclosing the truth...
...Only a few copies were printed...
...The Rev...
...Westbrook Pegler and the Rev...
...He said "they" went around buying up all stray copies at $40 apiece...
...The national nominating conventions themselves focus many pressures...
...Named for its hero, a sort of 20th century Napoleon with a West Point background and an odd social conscience, it would have been forgotten except for later hints by House himself that it revealed his secret thinking...
...By the time Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, Colonel House was a rather futile man of 75...
...The plot thickens," began Pegler's column on August 28, 1954...
...Other leaders of both parties denounced bigotry...
...They" must have been wealthy, as well as sinister, to pay a price like that for a trashy old novel, curiosity though it might have become...
...Philip Dru: Administrator was a rather feeble novel written by Colonel Edward M. House of Texas, whom Winrod called "Colonel E. Mandell House, the Rasputin of the Wilson administration...
...At Philadelphia in 1948, delegates found mysteriously-deposited racist tracts on night tables in their hotel corridors...
...adlai and ike marxist stooges"--but the general public had stopped listening...
...Jim Farley doesn't mention House either in his book...
...Conde McGinley's Common Sense came out with a shrieking headline in mid-August--"invisible government rules both parties...
...When a new Presidential season rolled around, Gerald L. K. Smith promptly exhibited in public anti-Eisenhower elaborations which had been getting increasing play from his private sucker list...
...The late Senator Taft, at a press conference called on June 23, 1952 to condemn "smearing tactics," specifically mentioned Winrod's fairy tale...
...The Colonel continued to hover about the fringe of events until he died in 1938, but he really does not qualify as a master-spider of the Roosevelt-Truman era...
...Gerald B. Winrod may be equally wrong about Colonel House, but Pegler has the greater responsibility because of his wider acceptance in respectable homes...
...National Reports 'Peg' and the Ghost of 'Colonel Mouse' By Oliver Pilat New public-relations techniques may have spread American political life somewhat more evenly over the years, but the competition for popular support still quickens in particular ways during a Presidential election period...
...It bore the abstruse title: Philip Dru: Administrator...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 5
