Milquetoast Gets Muscles

Four men jumped out of a car beside a house in Darien, Conn., banged on the door. A dignified, goat-tufted little man peered out. William Dudley Pelley was under arrest.

Thus the FBI caught up with the wiry, white-haired leader of the Silver Shirts, who once boasted that he was "the first to come out openly and unabashedly for the policies of Adolf Hitler." Sentenced to prison three months ago for violating North Carolina's blue-sky laws governing sales of securities (TIME, Feb. 2), Fuehrer Pelley was out under $10,700 bail, waiting an appeal.

G-men did not even give him time to shave. They hustled him off to New Haven, charged him with sedition. In a Silver Shirt magazine, The Galilean, two months after Pearl Harbor, Pelley had written: "The typical American . . . gloats when any of the Axis powers reports success abroad--even against our own forces." Pinched, he pouted: "There hasn't been a damn thing in the magazine that Boake Carter, 'Ironpants' Johnson, Father Coughlin and many others haven't also said."

That the blandest, most brazen U.S. Naziphile was out of circulation was good news for the U.S. But even better was the news that bald, bantam-beaked Attorney General Francis Biddle was cracking down at last on U.S. citizens who love the Axis.

Franklin Roosevelt's legal eagle has been mild as mush, meek as Milquetoast. Ever since Dec. 7, the President has been waiting for him to wade into the ranks of known U.S. Bundists, Fascists and Axis sympathizers. Finally the President could wait no longer. He told Attorney General Biddle to rise up and smite all heathen idolaters.

Francis Biddle. stiffening, lifted up his voice and spoke. The Justice Department, said he, will henceforth "denaturalize" all disloyal alien-born U.S. citizens. Most "denaturalized" citizens will become enemy aliens, can then be interned for the duration.

Meanwhile Francis Biddle's agents became busier than bird dogs. Silver Shirt Pelley was not the only bird they flushed. Several native-born Axis lovers were on the list.

> Robert Noble, onetime promoter of a California pension plan ("$25 every Monday morning"), and Ellis O. Jones, chief of the isolationist National Copperheads, were picked up for sedition last December, soon freed. Francis Biddle said then: "Free speech as such ought not to be restricted." Last week the State of California accused Jones and Noble of criminal libel. In a Friends of Progress publication they had written that General Douglas MacArthur, when he moved from Bataan to Australia, "just ran out in the dead of night. ..." Fuehrer Noble fumed in Los Angeles County jail: "I was amazed. . . . I made a thorough study of the sedition laws after my arrest in December, and I am positive I have violated no law. . . ."

> Gaunt, intolerant George W. Christians, leader of the Nazified Crusader White Shirts, was arrested in Chattanooga, Tenn., charged with sedition for allegedly sending a letter to officers and soldiers inciting them to revolt. Wrote White Shirt Christians: "Does our Commander in Chief have ideas or is he just the world's greatest humbug?" In another handbill, Christians wrote of the President: "Some neck--for a rope."

> Rudolph Fahl, onetime physical-education instructor at a Denver high school, was arrested for sedition, accused of telling officers at Lowry Field that the U.S. was not fighting for democracy, that soldiers were a bunch of "suckers."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.