Westbrook Pegler

James Westbrook Pegler (August 2, 1894 – June 24, 1969) was an American journalist and writer. Known early in his career as a fierce opponent of both fascism and communism, he was later sometimes attacked as fascist, pro-Nazi, and antisemitic. The Catholic Pegler was married to Julia Harpman Pegler, a onetime New York Daily News crime reporter who came from a Jewish family in Tennessee.

Biography

Pegler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota; his father was a prominent editor. While working for United Press, young Pegler was the youngest American war correspondent in World War I. After the war, Pegler started off as a sports columnist, but later wrote general interest articles. In 1925 he moved to the Chicago Tribune. In 1933 he moved to the Scripps Howard syndicate, where he worked closely with his friend Roy Howard. In 1942 he was named one of the nation's "best adult columnists." His columns went out six days a week to 174 newspapers that reached about 10 million subscribers. He moved his syndicated column to the Hearst syndicate in 1944. Pegler's career ended 30 years later under the auspices of a sect of neo-Nazis and professional racists from the White Citizens Council and the Rev. Billy James Hargis' Christian Crusade. This was the same White Citizens' Council that launched a campaign against "bop and Negro music" and opposed the implementation of the Brown decision.

He initially supported President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but after seeing the rise of fascism in Europe he returned to warn against the dangers of dictatorship in America. He became one of the Roosevelt administration's sharpest critics over what he saw as its abuse of power. He rarely missed an opportunity to criticize Roosevelt, his wife Eleanor Roosevelt, or Vice President Henry A. Wallace. Pegler was known for openly wishing for the assassination of FDR. The New York Times pointed out, in its obituary of him in 1969, that Pegler once lamented that a would-be assassin "hit the wrong man" when gunning for Franklin Roosevelt. His views—always expressed in vehement, and colorful language—became more conservative. Pegler was especially outraged by the New Deal's support for powerful labor unions that he considered morally and politically corrupt.

The headstone of Westbrook Pegler in Gate of Heaven Cemetery

In 1941 Pegler became the first columnist ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for reporting, for his work in exposing racketeering in Hollywood labor unions, focusing on the criminal career of William Morris Bioff. As historian David Witwer has concluded, "He depicted a world where a conspiracy of criminals, corrupt union officials, Communists, and their political allies in the New Deal threatened the economic freedom of working Americans." [Witwer 551]. Along with Walter Winchell Pegler libeled the United States Merchant Marine.

At his peak in the 1930s and 1940s, Pegler was a leading figure in the movement against the New Deal and the labor unions which it supported. This anti-Roosevelt front included many of the country's major industrialists, the Chicago Tribune, Jeffersonian Democrats such as Al Smith and John W. Davis and also Congressman Martin Dies' House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Pegler became a supporter of the campaign to portray the New Deal as an internationalist Communist plot. Pegler compared union advocates of the closed shop to Hitler's "goose-steppers." (In his view, the greatest threat to the country was the corrupt labor boss.) By the 1950s, however, Pegler was showing some nostalgia for the Third Reich. His proposal for "smashing" the AF of L and the CIO was for the state to take them over. "Yes, that would be fascism," he wrote. "But I, who detest fascism, see advantages in such fascism."

In the 1950s and 1960s, as his conservative views became more extreme and his writing increasingly shrill, he earned the tag of "the stuck whistle of journalism." He denounced the civil rights movement, embraced anti-Semitism, and in the early 1960s wrote for the John Birch Society —until he was invited to leave for his extreme views.

His assertion in November 1963 (at the height of the civil rights movement) that it is "clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry"; his embrace of the label racist, "a common but false synonym for Nazi, used by the bigots of New York"; or his habit of calling Jews "geese," because, "they hiss when they talk, gulp down everything before them, and foul everything in their wake," characterized his beliefs in the latter portion of his life.

Pegler criticized every president from Herbert Hoover to Franklin D. Roosevelt ("moosejaw") to Harry Truman ("a thin-lipped hater") to John F. Kennedy. He also criticized the Supreme Court, the tax system, and labor unions. His attack on writer Quentin Reynolds led to a costly libel suit against him and his publishers, as a jury awarded Reynolds $175,000 in damages. In 1962, he lost his contract with King Features Syndicate, owned by Hearst, after he started criticizing Hearst executives. His late writing appeared sporadically in various publications, including the John Birch Society's American Opinion.

Pegler's distinctive writing style was often the subject of parody. Wolcott Gibbs of The New Yorker once imagined a Peglerian tirade to a little girl asking whether there was a Santa Claus. In the Gibbs/Pegler version, "Santa Claus" was one of several aliases used by an old Bolshevik with a history of union racketeering. "Yes, Virginia, you bet there's a Santa Claus. He is Comrade Jelly Belly."

The Chad Mitchell Trio's satirical song about the John Birch Society contains the line, "We think that Westbrook Pegler doth protest a bit too much."

Mad Magazine once ran an article on how a routine happening (a little boy taking another child's tricycle) would be treated by various print media and columnists. Under the heading of "As Pegler Sees It," the magazine ended this hypothetical column with

"...which brought together such Commie-loving cronies as you-know-what-I-think-of-Eleanor Roosevelt.

It stinks. The whole thing stinks. You stink." (This last one-line paragraph is sometimes erroneously quoted as being actualy written by Pelger),

He died of stomach cancer and is interred in the Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, New York.

Writings

Pegler published three volumes of his collected writings:

• The Dissenting Opinions of Mr. Westbrook Pegler
• T'ain't Right
• George Spelvin, American and Fireside Chats

References

• Farr, Finis (1975), Fair Enough: The Life of Westbrook Pegler.
• Oliver Pilat (1973), Pegler, Angry Man of the Press, Greenwood Press.
• David Witwer (2005), "Westbrook Pegler and the Anti-union Movement", Journal of American History 92.2.
• Diane McWhorter (2004), Dangerous Minds, William F. Buckley soft-pedals the legacy of journalist Westbrook Pegler in The New Yorker., slate.com.
• Oliver Pilat, "Westbrook Pegler: Over the Edge," ADL Bulletin, 21 (Jan. 1964), 4–5
• "Pegler Again Man without a Publisher," Kansas City Star, April 9, 1964
• folder: Communism—Opponents of, John Birch Society, 1960–1966, box 21, (James) Westbrook Pegler Papers (Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa)

External links

• Westbrook Pegler's Photo & Gravesite