Pegier Attacks Anti-defamation League and Anti-nazi League; Wants Congressional Probe

Vitriolic attacks against the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith and the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League are contained in a series of articles by Westbrook Pegler, distributed by the Kings Features Syndicate and published in numerous American newspapers.

Demanding a Congressional investigation of the Anti-Defamation League, Pegler says: “It is time to stop this spying on citizens by self-appointed vigilante outfits…and this keeping of ‘dossiers’ susceptible of abuse for blackmail and boycott. It is not good for any such organizations to be held in fear as though it were a Gestapo. Such fear inevitably becomes resentment and will explode.

“Unquestionably,” Pegler continues, “the Anti-Defamation League had legitimate reason to exist when it was founded and for a long time afterward. There are many distinguished high-minded citizens in its membership. But such organizations, left to the management of professional, job holding executives, have been known to slide off into the very practices which they were established to oppose.”

Terming the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League “a smear-bund which stimulates friction between Christians and Jews,” Pegler directs his fire especially at Professor James H. Sheldon, administrative chairman of the organization, and Isidor Lipschutz, well-known philanthropist who has contributed generously to the Anti-Nazi League and the Society for the Prevention of World War III. “The Anti-Nazi League,” Pegler writes, “is a secret service maintained by Lipschutz to spy on Americans who have the effrontery to maintain their own ideas on American foreign policy.”

In the same column Pegler also speaks of the “Frankfurter-Laski-Niles combination which planted Frankfurter on the Supreme Court, Alger His in the State Department and David K. Niles in the White House.”