Asher's friend, Carl H. Mote, is president and general manager of the Northern Indiana Telephone Company, th Commonwealth Telephone Corporation and has other utility business connections. He is an attorney and a former newspaper editor. Mote wrote at least three articles for Pelley's Roll-Call which appeared in the February 17, March 3 and March 24, 1941 issues. All were true to the Pelley pattern and one was so "good" that Pelley placed it on the front cover. Mote branded the President's message to Hitler at the time of the Munich appeasement as "an impudent telegram." [Hello Columbia U. -S] And his apology for Hitler in Roll-Call was far from subtle:

Whatever may be said against the morals of Adold HItler, no one has ever dated accuse him of having had any part in the destruction of Germany which began with the Versailles Treaty and continued to the first months of 1933. [Hello Pat Buchanan. -S]

Judged purely by the amount of abuse and vindictiveness in his writing for Pelley's magazine, Mote hated the President and the Administration infinitely more than Hitler and National-Socialism. This note was implicit during my talk with him as we sat at the Antlers Bar in Indianapolis...

...Doubtless Mote thought himself on the right side when he objected to peace-time conscription as a measure of national defense. Whether he realized it at the time or not, Mote was actually paraphrasing the Nazi short wave broadcasts when he wrote in Pelley's Role-Call:

We are spending billions for peace-time conscription, for airplanes and for ships, when most everybody suspects, though few will dare say, that the "defense program," including peace-time conscription, is the master hoax of the New Deal. It takes rare impertinence and bold hypocrisy...

Mote claimed he was not anti-Semitic, and yet he spoke constantly of the "Jewish League of Nations," referred to "money changers" and "internationalists" -- popular Park Avenue terms for "Jew"; harped on Jewish surnames to the exclusion of others, and indulged in such cheap Pelley devices as ridiculing Willkie by calling him Vendell L. Villkie [Hello BBC. -S]. Mote further insulted Mr. Willkie by calling him "more alien than American" and branded his repudiation of Father Coughlin's support (which Coughlin offered voluntarily during the 1940 elections) as "asinine," because Willkie had said: "I consider anti-Semitism in America as a possible criminal movement and every anti-Semite as a possible traitor to America."...

...In a vicious booklet he circulated after Pearl Harbor, Mote quoted Mrs. Dilling, fascist Lawrence Dennis and even the discredited Protocols to support his contentions. Mote looked upon all Jews as "war mongers," but he said nothing about Hitler's gigantic preparations for total war, or his extensive conspiracies for territorial and world ideological conquest.

And in the booklet quoting Dennis and the Protocols as authorities, Mote made "predictions" of violence and a military dictator I have heard a hundred times at Nazi meetings:

Unless there is a shortage of rope, at the end of five years human necks will be more talked about than bottlenecks...If and when a Caesar appears, he is likely to come from the Army. the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines...

If you had been there with me at the Antlers Bar, you would have found it hard to believe that these threatening and vengeful utterances could have been voiced by the mild-mannered man who faced me. It became all too apparent to me that Mote was the sad victim of a complex: the hate-Roosevelt complex. Hate the President at any cost. Hate everything he does, hate them even before he does them. Hate him more than you hate Hitler and Stalin. Hate the very ground he walks on and curse the very bed he sleeps in. Hate till you blind your own reason and reduce yourself to the level of a Bundist who knows nothing but hate and sees nothing but revolution and pogroms ahead.

As I left Mote I experienced a sadness which is difficult to put into words. Sleep was out of the question. I had met personally a fine man who doubtless loved his family and country. What a shame, I thought, that a man of Mote's calibre and interests would reduce himself to the level of a vile Pelley. What a blow to Democracy to have Mote on Pelley's side. What a blow to Democracy to have Mote on Pelley's side, rather than on the side of those who were fighting for a world of decency and equality and justice for all men. I regarded Mote as a tragic victim of the most ruthless, hateful, soul-searing propaganda machinery the world has ever seen!