The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 2/New York World on Charles Pergler
NEW YORK WORLD ON CHARLES PERGLER.
It has long since become impracticable to keep track of all that is being written about the Czechoslovaks in the American press. We can only attempt now and then to reprint something that may be of special interest to our readers.
The New York World of September 1st has the story of Charles Pergler, written in a bright, clever manner, characteristic of the author, Rowland Thomas. Mr. Pergler is well known to the readers of the Bohemian Review, being the most prominent American worker in the cause of the Czechoslovak independence. It is hardly necessary to reproduce his biography here. We shall only quote a few particularly witty paragraphs.
"The correspondents down in Washington, and the newspaper and magazine men who are on various service with the Committee on Public Information, get excited when they talk about Charles Pergler. They try to impress it on you that this young country lawyer from some place or other in Iowa, who in less than two years has made himself recognized as the storm center and dynamo of the Czechoslovak activities in the United States—who, without previous training or experience finds himself the diplomatic and political and financial representative here of a budding nation of a dozen millions of people—who is working with all the cool foresight of a statesman and the shrewd practicality of a trust builder and the ardor of a prophet to erect in Central Europe a non-Teutonic state which shall end forever the dreams of dominance of Junkers and Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs—and all this after finding himself, only a score of years ago, the orphaned son of a poor Bohemian immigrant in the stockyards end of Chicago—those correspondents, to take another toe-hold for this sentence, will tell yu that this man is one of the Miracle Men of the War.
Before they are done talking about him, you will get excited yourself.
But does Charles Pergler himself get excited about it? He does not. At least, he did not when I accused him to his face. He just let loose a silent, crooked smile of infinite amusement.
That smile is characteristic and extremely attractive. Everything else about him is very straightforward—gaze, speech, thought, hearing—straight as shooting ought to be. But when he is amused, the left half of his mouth quirks at one elevation and the right half at another.,
So his smile is crooked and attractive. It is as if he saw the ludicrousness of events from two different angles at the same time, and responded doubly and simultaneously. He is like the youngster who sits through two runs of the film. He gets two amusements for only one price of admission. . . .
“And you”, I asked, “what is your ambition?”
“To get back to my office and perhaps, some day, work up my way to a seat in Iowa’s highest court.”
“Rather that than have a share in constructing the new Bohemia?”
Charles Pergler smiles his crooked smile.
“There are plenty of Bohemians to do that work,” he said. “I am an American.”