Sometimes pressure group lobbyists receive government favors and privileges denied the less favored. An intensive lobby was conducted against the Mundt-Ferguson anti-Communist bill by a former senatorial employe who was not registered as a lobbyist.
He is Palmer Webber, who was staff director in 1943 for Sen. Pepper (D) of Florida, and chief economic adviser in 1944 to Sen. Kilgore (D) of West Virginia. Webber bore down on his Senate contacts from a rent-free office in the Library of Congress. How he got it free nobody knows.
For two years Webber held a job as “legislative correspondent” on Capitol Hill for the Federation for World Government. Records in the office of the secretary of the Senate show Webber was not registered as a lobbyist for the federation and the organization is not registered to conduct a lobby. In addition to his arduous efforts to defeat the anti-Communist measure and his work for the federation, Webber was a demon, worked for votes for passage of the fair employment practices bill.
Webber was transferred by the World Government Federation from Washington to New York “to do research.” The shift was for “political reasons.”
He is an errand boy for the Lawyers Guild, which the House Un-American Activities Committee cited as a “front” organization. It has also been active in another “cause” sponsored by Webber—the drive for an investigation of the F.B.I.
In 1947, Webber, a Ph.D., conducted a class in political philosophy at the King Smith school, where the democratic form of government was smeared to GI and other students.
A reporter attended Webber’s class on May 27, 1947, when Senator Pepper was a guest. A woman student referred to J. Edgar Hoover as the American Gestapo head and declared the Catholic church was leading a crusade for war.
A woman in the audience, a secretary to a Republican Senator from the Midwest, jumped up and shouted, “Thank God for the F.B.I.”
Webber was arrested in Charlottesville, Va., for distributing Communist Party literature. Police records show he paid a forfeit rather than fight the case.
He was at one time a research director for the CIO Political Action Committee in Washington and in 1948 was a paid director in charge of activities of the leftist Progressive party in 11 southern states.