Seaman Joe & the Scuttlebutt

An American merchant ship was on the high seas this week carrying the highest-paid able seaman in U.S. maritime history: tough, balding Joe Curran, $5,200-a-year president of the C.I.O. National Maritime Union.

Seaman Joe, who wants to see battlefront ports in England, Africa and Russia, had waited for two months for a passport. While his application lay in the doldrums, he hopped a boat for his first job as a working seaman since 1936.

Behind him, on dry land, Seamari Joe's aggressive, left-wing union made more history. It threw the longest picket line of World War II (1,500 men) around the boxlike World-Telegram building in lower Manhattan to protest the labor-baiting writings of Scripps-Howard Columnist Westbrook Pegler.

No one has belted N.M.U. harder or more consistently than Columnist Pegler. He has pictured N.M.U. as a Communist cell attempting to convert all of U.S. labor; has accused Joe Curran of draft dodging. (Curran, married but childless, was deferred as an essential worker, i.e., labor leader.) But what most infuriated N.M.U.ers--who boil over at the mere mention of Pegler's sleeping-car first name--was the columnist's revival of the old scuttlebutt, repeatedly and officially denied, that U.S. merchant sailors mutinied at Guadalcanal.

The pickets, joined by A.F. of L. printers from the World-Telegram composing room, circled the building for two hours, chanting: "We're out to win the war, what the hell is Pegler for?" Then an N.M.U. committee tramped to the office of Lee B. Wood, World-Telegram executive editor, handed him a statement which protested the "vile, Nazi-like statements by ... Westbrook Pegler." When Editor Wood had no comment, he was threatened by an N.M.U. spokesman: "You people better watch out. If you don't remove this guy you'll have more than picket lines around this office."

Columnist Pegler was not there to see the show. He was agonizing, as is his editorial wont, over his next day's column on his 35-acre Westchester County estate (where the pond is known to Pegler friends as Lake Malice). When Pegler heard of the demonstration he promptly wrote another fire-eating column on N.M.U., tartly reminded his readers that early in 1941 N.M.U. had picketed the

White House with signs "The Yanks Aren't Coming."

This week N.M.U. began "permanent picketing" of the World-Telegram.

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