Pigeons & Peace

By a remarkable hookup among churchmen, politicians and pigeon-fanciers, some 3,000 pigeons winged industriously over large parts of the U. S. for several days last week. In Washington Representative Pehr G. Holmes helped Secretary-Treasurer Frank Morrison of the American Federation of Labor attach a little tube to the leg of a pigeon which promptly took off for Manhattan, carrying a message to England's grizzled old George Lansbury, onetime Laborite leader. In Philadelphia arrived two birds named Paul Revere and Betsy Ross. One fluttered aimlessly around City Hall before it was captured, handed to Mayor Samuel Davis Wilson, who held it in one hand while with the other he bonged the Liberty Bell 19 times with a mallet. In Manhattan, in El Paso, in Phoenix and elsewhere, pigeons were released to fly somewhere else. In Miles City, Mont, a pigeon-fancier named Walter Dyba, who had shipped four birds to Washington, waited for one of them to make a record flight home. Said Mrs. Dyba: "It'll be a miracle if any of them ever get here."*

The pigeon flights were staged by the Emergency Peace Campaign with the help of Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Each of the 3,000 birds carried to its home city a misspelled flimsy-paper message expressing the First Lady's approval of "this campain."

Besides pigeons, the church bodies in charge of the two-year Emergency Peace Campaign (TIME, March 16) had a prime ally in 77-year-old George Lansbury. This Christian Socialist is a devout Anglican who lately remarked: "I get tired of being told what a nice, good fool I am." Nice, good "Old George" fought against conditions in British workhouses, fought for women's suffrage, twice went to jail, attempted, as Laborite Commissioner of Works (1929-31), to realize his dream of a happy, beautified London. A single-minded and uncompromising pacifist, Lansbury yielded what crumbs remained to him last autumn when he resigned as the Labor Party's floor leader in the House of Commons rather than go along with his colleagues' approval of Sanctions (TIME, Oct. 21).

To George Lansbury in Manhattan last week the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom gave a blue-&-white silk scarf, with an all-over design featuring the letters PAX. Before donning his scarf, and heading westward for peace meetings in 18 cities during the next month, Pacifist Lansbury spoke at a large gathering in Carnegie Hall. Quavered he: 'If all of us old men and old women were put in the front rank, I'm not sure there'd be a war. ... I advocate a slogan, 'Old Uns First.' Why not? We've had a good inning. The young 'uns haven't had any. And any old man can learn to work an airplane after awhile. . . . We haven't paid for the Crimean War yet, or for Waterloo yet, and we never will. But did any one say they settled anything? . . . Wars have always left behind the seeds of future wars."

*Into a cote in Freeport, L. I. one morning last week flew a pigeon, tripping a switch which set a bell ringing in the nearby headquarters of the Freeport Boatmen's Association. Within ten minutes a Coast Guard launch was off to rescue a fishing boat, grounded in Great South Bay, whose captain had released the bird bearing word of his plight. This quick rescue was the first performed since the Freeport fleet of fishing vessels acquired 40 pigeons, to be used not only to carry emergency messages but also to report on fishing conditions.

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