Not since the days when Red Grange was roaming the gridirons has ex-Sports-writer Westbrook Pegler found much to admire in men on the public stage. But last week Hearst Columnist Pegler, on a trip to the Dominican Republic (pop. 2,200,000), found a new hero: Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. In a series on Trujillo and the country he rules, Pegler wrote:
“Rafael L. Trujillo is one of the great men of his time in the Western Hemisphere … I tell you the so-called dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in this island fortress against Communism is much better than ours in one particular . . . Trujillo is much more sensible, practical and helpful to his people than Roosevelt,
Truman or Eisenhower has been to ours [in that he] just won’t let any . . . bums call a strike. How does he handle such things, then? Well, he just doesn’t give union officials the power to call strikes . . .
“The people, too, are clean and laundered. There is a spirit and appearance of happiness and friendliness unlike any that I have ever seen anywhere else . . . [At one party] Trujillo and his brother, who is now President of the Republic, Trujillo’s son, who is a general, and numerous other members of the family were up and down the board and I hadn’t seen so much gold braid and stuff since the lying-in-state of George V. But why shouldn’t they put on some dog? They have a flair for it, and the Court of St. James’s is no more authentic than this one . . . Trujillo’s enemies say that he and members of his family have reaped great financial profit. Well, so did the Roosevelts.
“You take a chance of being knifed or garrotted [in] New York and the streets are a filthy disgrace, but there is almost no crime here and you could eat your lunch off any street in town.
“Trujillo’s wage level is low, but he is raising it … and anyway these people have simpler needs than ours and hardly have any of our expensive foibles such as boozing and gambling and ‘entertainment.’ [Trujillo] is constantly quoted . . . and is almost invariably referred to as the Generalissimo . . . That, however, is only a native foible at worst and there is absolutely no doubt that he is a benefactor of the republic.”
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