(1) Westbrook Pegler, The Lynching Story (1936)
As one member of the rabble, I will admit that I said "Fine, that is swell," when the papers came up that day, telling of the lynching of the two men who killed the young fellow in California, and that I haven't changed my mind yet for all the storm of right-mindedness which has blown up since. I know how storms of right-mindedness are made.
The city editor calls a fellow over and tells him to call up a lot of names on the office right-mindedness list and get about a column of expressions of horror and indignation.
There are various standard lists in all shops. One is the list to be called up when some police captain in Boston bars some dirty book from public sale. This one includes a lot of one-book novelists who will say that the Boston police captain undoubtedly is just an ignorant cop who ought to be out shooting hoodlums.
There is another group to be called up for expressions on the restlessness of modern youth when some drunk guy falls out the window of a penthouse while drunk. There is a feminism list, a nudism list, an is-jazz-music? list, and so forth.
Well, the city editor tells the fellow to get about a column of horror and indignation over the lynching, and he goes into the phone booth and comes out about a half-hour later with a mess of copy-paper all scratched up with chicken-track notes. He has nailed the president of the university, the head of the Bar association, a couple of publicity-crazy judges, the governor, the head man of the local crime committee, and several prominent ladies who go in for right-mindedness and good works in a grim way.
Then the editorial page cartoonist, if there is one, draws a picture of a robust female in a loose wrapper with her head bowed and a broken sword in one hand and an apothecary's scale, with the chains all tangled up, in the other. Or, if there isn't a cartoonist in the house, a drawing drops in by mail from the big syndicate. Now the storm of right-mindedness is gathered together in the forms, and a little while later it begins breaking over the community.
But all the time the two men who kidnaped the young fellow and took him out on a bridge, where they knocked him on the head with a concrete block and threw him into the water, are permanently dead. They did it, and they got theirs and however hard the storm of right-mindedness may blow up, one certain thing is that no lawyer is ever going to get them loose on a writ of habeas corpus or a writ based on the fact that some stenographer, in typing the indictment, hit a comma instead of a semicolon. Neither is any Len Small, come to the governor's office ten or fifteen years later, going to turn them loose in payment for some service which some hoodlum politician performed for him in the last election or might perform in the next. Not even Ma Ferguson, of Texas, can pardon a corpse.
The fine theory of all expressions of horror and indignation is that punishment is not supposed to be vengeance but a protective business, whereas the rabble, which constitutes by far the greatest element of the population, want to make the murderer suffer as the victim or his family did. And, though they would be willing to let the Law do it for them if the Law could be relied upon, they know too well what lawyers will do when they get a chance to invoke a lot of legal technicalities which were written and passed by lawyers to provide lawyers with opportunities to make money.
I claim authority to speak for the rabble because I am a member of the rabble in good standing, and I claim to know how lawyers work because I have worked around the Courts in the newspaper business long enough to observe that there is never a criminal so vile but that his lawyer, under the pretext of obedience to his duty and by virtue of a lawyer's law enacted to help lawyers cheat other laws, will try to get him loose.
I have talked this over with several men who took part in the preparation of the recent storm of right-mindedness over the California lynching, and every one of them said that he and his wife, both, said, "Fine; that's swell," or words to that effect, when they first heard the news.
But they distinguish between their private, personal feelings and opinions in the matter, as spiritual members of the rabble, and their public actions and utterances as members of the right-minded element. Having no public position myself, I can be consistent.
I am told there have been other lynching since those in San Jose and that the approving statement of the Governor of California probably acted as incitement in these cases. These lynchings will be matters of horror to the right-minded group, the more so if there happened to be an innocent man among them. But in the same period of time since the California case there will have been probably fifty murders in the country, and the victims will include quite a few innocent men and women, too.
I would pay more attention to storms of right-mindedness if they ever blew against the attorneys-at-law who argue and plead that one-to-ten years is a fair price for a good man's life, and play dirt tricks on the law to cheat the rabble of even that little if they can.
(2) Westbrook Pegler, Evolution of the Liberal (1942)
In the United States, prohibition appeared as a little red blotch, later to develop into a horrible corruption, which left permanent damage in contempt for law and suspicion of public officers long after repeal cured the disease itself, and great was the resentment against prohibition on the ground that a few politico-religious organizations and rich industrialists were trying to force most of the people to abide by the rule and conform to the tastes and an extreme moral verboten of a few.
Of course, there was much more to liberalism, but the kernel of it was individual rights and rebellion against compulsion beyond the minimum restraints necessary for the regulation of traffic.
Little did we think then that liberalism would curl up its tail and sting itself full of poison in its angry threshing before two decades had passed, but now ain't it the truth?
For today the surviving members of the group who fought most angrily against goose-stepping in the early 1920s are almost all to be found in that element who hold that any worker who prefers to remain a loner, or individual, is a pathetic coward, a dirty traitor to his fellowmen, in receipt of secret pay from his boss, a mulish and selfish parasite, enjoying the benefits of other men's struggle and peril of a Fascist.
Whatever he is, he has no right as an individual to conduct himself as an individual, and by trying to do so he exiles himself from human society, sets himself against his fellowmen and deserves any harm that befalls him in a contest of his own choosing. If he is thrown out of his job, in which it has been contended by the liberals that he has a property right, that is his own fault. If his family suffers mental and physical harassment and goes hungry and cold, that again is his fault, and the failure to protect and provide is his to answer for. If, by the verdict of a union of which he is not a member, after a trial in his absence, his is forever barred from all employment where unions govern the work, that again is his own lookout. He could avoid all these penalties, theoretically, if he would but join the union or walk the goose-step.
The day came when liberal who had fiercely hated the goose-step, goose-stepped in a sort of prisoners' march before premises struck by minority vote to revile individual men, stone them and beat them, for their refusal to submit to regimentation and discipline. And men who had insisted that they placed truth above all things so far abandoned their liberalism that they plainly admitted that they preferred to suppress, ignore or deny truths about corruption and a thousand forms of oppression in labor unions rather than hurt their new cause of regimentation or goose-stepping.
(3) Westbrook Pegler, The Washington Post (12th February, 1942)
For all the gentle sweetness of my nature and my prose, I have been accused of rudeness to Mrs. Roosevelt when I only said she was impudent, presumptuous and conspiratorial, and that her withdrawal from public life at this time would be a fine public service.
That is just an opinion, and there may be other opinions on the subject, but I maintain that it is expressed in chaste and gentlemanly language and with no more vigor than most of us are used to in our discussion of controversial subjects.
This lady is a meddler in many matters which are very improper business for the wife of the President of the United States, a status which is constantly invoked for her lest her activities be objectively discussed as those of an ordinary citizen.
Long ago Mrs. Roosevelt meddled in the Newspaper Guild, which was a Communist organization. Absolutely ineligible even on the pretext of her public diary, which is not her principal occupation, Mrs. Roosevelt nevertheless accepted membership to which she was not entitled and immediately became the political foe of all those American newspapermen and women who knew the character of the Guild, detested and resisted the dirty work of tireless Muscovites and bravely suffered its heartless persecutions.
She was granted membership because she was the President's wife and for no other reason, which meant that the Communists wanted to make use of her position. Thus the victims of the plot could not but feel the highest office in their own country, the Presidency, was permitted to be used against them in the interests of men and women whose mission was not to improve the lot of reporters but to establish the Soviet system of government here, and they were absolutely right.
Legally Mrs. Roosevelt, even as the wife of the president, has no more authority than any other citizen of the Republic. She is on a common footing with Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Jones and Mrs. George Spelvin, but we always treat our Madame President with a special respect because the office of her husband, which she partakes of, is the highest temporal authority in our country. But when our first lady commercializes that respect for profit and in competition with the rest of the people by her association with persons who associate with enemies of the American system, antagonizes the people, it is she, not her critics, who fails in respect for the office.
Mrs. Roosevelt's quiet salting around of her personal friends in the Government employ is no new thing. The Dies Committee has known of this for a long time, and has muttered about it, but the Dies Committee lives under a political sword and has had to speak softly lest Mrs. Roosevelt exert her influence to starve it of money with which to continue its work. Mrs. Roosevelt has openly used her office against this committee of the United States Congress.
Mrs. Roosevelt has absolutely no right to appoint anyone to any public position, but now it comes out that she has named one actor, one eurythmicist, or dancer, and one secretary from her private payroll to paid jobs in the Office of Civilian Defense, and one professional to an unpaid position in the same important department. The youth, incidentally, formerly was a fair haired boy of the Communist Front, married a young campus cutie who has been infected with the Moscow principles and celebrated her marriage with a piece in a Muscovite paper, entitled "My Father was a Liar" was divorced, and now, at the age of 32, is held up to the American people by Mrs. Roosevelt as a person fit for leadership of American youth. He, also, is on Mrs. Roosevelt's private payroll, the money for which is derived from the commercialization of the Presidential office.
One day in London, during the last war, one of the tabloids came out with a shocking scandal, exposing the fact that "petticoat government" had been established in Whitehall, and especially in the war office, whereby certain favorites of an influential lady were planted in safe and cushy jobs in Blighty. Winston Churchill would remember it well, for the lady was a relative of his. The British reacted calmly, the lady's ears were slapped down and Britain got into the war.
Still scrupulously avoiding impoliteness, I insist that Mrs. Roosevelt's activities have been not helpful but, on the whole, very harmful, that she has been guilty of imposition and effrontery that, for all her pleadings against discrimination for creed and color, has herself actively encouraged cruel discrimination against Americans refusing to join unions wherefore she should retire.
(4) Irwin Edman, Saturday Review of Literature (26th September, 1942)
It is difficult to write about Westbrook Pegler without being as unfair, as intolerant, and as rambunctious as he is. One is tempted to try to imitate his epithets, which would not be easy, and to emulate his intellectual morals, which would be nothing short of scandalous. Perhaps I should yield to the temptation of paying him as nearly as I could in his own bright but dubious currency. I am restrained only by the fact that I have a qualified admiration for his style, vigorous often to the point of unconscious burlesque. And I cannot deny that Mr. Pegler has an ear for the dialogue of what he thinks is the man in the street - really the man in the golf club locker room or the bar of resort hotels. In his Mr. George Spelvin and Mrs. George Spelvin he has created believable myths. Through them he has uttered with fidelity the prejudices, the limitations, the he-mannish and she-womanish snobberies of the well-heeled commuters who to Mr. Pegler's mind retain all the virtues of the homely backwoodsmen and all the liberty-loving enterprise of the frontier.
Mr. Pegler's syndicated popularity - these collected pieces are, one presumes, an anthology of his best pieces or what he holds to be such - is not hard to understand. He has kept the flair of the gifted sports writer he once was, and in a two-fisted, pulling-no-punches, hairy-chested, pastiche-Hemingway fashion, lashes out at everything he thinks wicked in the world. Preeminent among such evils are the Roosevelt family and all their works and days, all labor leaders, all intellectuals, poets, and radicals. To read Mr. Pegler you would think there was something prima facie hypocritical about having a mind and something criminal about using it. Words of more than five letters seem to Mr. Pegler almost as suspicious as words of four letters, which, by the way, seems as far as one can make out, from his essay on the subject, to constitute Steinbeck's whole contribution to modern literature. "Intellectual" seem to be for Mr. Pegler a synonym for a life compounded of silliness and foreign rascality. I suspect Mr. Pegler would not have been much impressed by Socrates's "Apology" for his life. Mr. Pegler is busy these days passing out hemlock to anyone trying to lead anything like a Socratic life.
Of course in Mr. Pegler's well known and well twisted ideology - sorry, in his log cabin noodle, any radical is by definition filthy. The reader may think I am exaggerating, that even Mr. Pegler would be "fair enough" to recognize that a man might have ideas quite revolutionary and be physically quite clean and in manners quite decent. But Mr. Pegler pulls no punches, even when they are below the belt. In a profound meditation called "Radicalism and Hygiene" our Hegel in homespun opines:
"Probably it is not so much the radical ideas but offensive personalities and on warm days an odor as of something not quite fresh, which have made most Americans suspicious of radicalism. There is also a deterrent in the apparent though not quite real requirement that to sympathize with radical ideas one must give up hygiene, become personally filthy and, as between husband and wife each agree that the other may jump the fence whenever he or she is troubled by a dream."
Neat, what? Radicalism and psychoanalysis and divorce all impaled on one paragraph. Mr. Pegler doesn't have a good memory though (probably too intellectual a habit). He can't remember that on an earlier page he had practically made Mrs. Roosevelt out a communist and yet I am sure he knows she is not divorced and is quite hygienic.
Mr. Pegler is equal death on "high class thinkers," on people who spend weeks, as he puts it, on one neat little job of ratiocination, on people who use five or six-letter words when they are not using those exclusively of four. And he is withering in his scorn of poets. He writes that
"I owe it to myself to show something of my esthetic nature, but, as a preliminary, would like to explain that poetry is a great fake, at once the most pretentious and the least respectable method of literary expression... You start with no idea, and write in all directions from a point some distance off center, and your work can ask no higher praise than the verdict that it doesn't seem to mean anything."
One can just see the permanent adolescents around the bar, the Philistines of fifty, lapping that one up along with the fifth Scotch and soda. They knew back in college that poetry was rot, and here is a fifty thousand dollar a year writer who says so too.
Mr. Pegler would, perhaps, not be so deplorable an enemy of civilization in this country if it were only liberals, intellectuals, and poets he inveighs against. Mind has survived barbarians before this. But sneaking through his philippics, while we are in the midst of a global war, come sneers at everyone who takes seriously the thought that the world is now, for better or worse, one; who regards "foreign" problems as in a very real sense American problems, and who dares to think of the war in terms of an eventual world order that will make war again impossible. Because some radicals do not wear clean linen, because Mr. Pegler cannot understand poets and philosophers, because some labor leaders are criminals, Mr. Pegler sets out to indict the whole of intellectual, of liberal radical opinion, of poetry and philosophy. He has become the animated defense-mechanism of all the sleazy little prejudices of the Philistine and the reactionary. And all, mind you, in the name of simple downright honesty and of the great "American" tradition. It's a pity, for in his hurly burly way, Pegler can write. As he himself puts it, about something else than his own methods: "The ball-bat and tire iron, the meat hook and the brick are effective weapons for organization, but they do not appeal to reason."
(5) Westbrook Pegler, Jackson Daily News (16th June, 1961)
It is a mocking comment on the mawkish generosity of the American character that the bands of insipid futilities of the type called bleeding hearts can invade one of the finest American cities and arouse a howling national uproar of indignation, disgust, pity and shame. This the so-called freedom riders have done in Jackson, a really fine American city.
Its history and moral and patriotic traditions have been watered by the blood of heroes who have defended their homeland against a hot-eyed aggressor, incited by blood-thirsty Boston patrioteers, and its reputation has been smeared by enemies in New York who live by hate while yowling their pity for victims of hatred.
In Montgomery and Birmingham, Ala., surprise caught the police off guard, and these errors were studied in Jackson for the peace of the community and the pride of a sensitive homeland. There may be other American cities as tender of their precious heritage, but New York in not one of them. There are only a few native families whose members love New York with the unspeakable affection that inspires Jackson, the capital of Mississippi.
I know of Irish in New York whose immigrant forebears were socially and racially almost unemployable within the last century who still doggedly love their harassed and degraded city, but every hour, and at almost every corner, they seem to remember tha New York is not a beloved home of conscientious people as Jackson is, but a mysterious labyrinth of sinister strangers who fear one another.
Today I went to city jail to try to learn from some of the prisoners taken in the miserable fraud called Freedom Riders just what freedom they desired that was denied them.
Most of them come from Northern communities where they may associate freely across the color line, which has no existence. A white man or woman can go to a public toilet in a bus station without the slightest notice, to say nothing of opposition. So they decided, under organized incitation from offices in New York, to travel a thousand miles to deprive themselves of that freedom and invite personal assault by taunting the people of Jackson.
Mr. M. B. Pierce, the chief of detectives, took me up to the city jail and the first prison who was let into a little bare room was a pale, frail boy of 21, Charles David Myers, of Noblesville, Ind. He had sprigs of wispy whiskers and the start of beatnik sideburns although they all are allowed to shave. He said he was a Quaker whose soul suffered at the thought of someone (God, of necessity) had created a difference between him and his dark brethren. So he put himself into Central State College at Wilberforce, Ohio, with 2000 students, formerly all Negroes but now infiltrated with 200 whites.
It does not follow that 1800 Negroes enjoy such a bore or feel that assimilation to Myers improves their condition.
His father is a laborer and his mother is a household servant. Their family life is pleasant and poverty is not their lot. Why had he come to Mississippi – possibly to strike a spark of hatred to light a holocaust in an innocent community of human beings? I asked him if he had ever heard of the Chicago race riot stated by such a spark when a white boy hit a Negro boy with a thrown stone at Hyde Park beach. Did he know that 500 innocents were hurt and 30 died for that mere mishap? He had never heard of it.
(6) George Frazier, The New York Times (4th August, 1963)
It is sad to realise that Americans who remained unexposed to the daily press until the nineteen-forties knew him only as a columnist consumed with calumay toward certain idols and ideologies of our time. To them he is a writer who condoned lynching, lacerated the labor movement, and indulged in unpardonably personal abuse of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
(7) Alex Constantine, Westbrook Pegler (16th September, 2008)
In her convention speech a fortnight ago, Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin quoted an unidentified “writer” who extolled the virtues of small-town America: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” (9/3/08) The unidentified writer was Westbrook Pegler (1894-1969), the ultraconservative newspaper columnist whose widely syndicated columns (at its peak, 200 newspapers and 12 million readers) targeted the New Deal establishment, labor leaders, intellectuals, homosexuals, Jews, and poets.
Palin certainly didn't write her speech, and even her distinctly dismal assembly of words in her ABC interview with Charles Gibson were probably not hers. Apropos the wisdom about small towns, her staff also did not trust themselves to do a sentence approximating the thought. So they went to... well, not a treasury of great quotations. It is, after all, a rather banal thought, banally expressed. They went to Westbrook Pegler.
You have to be pretty old to know that Pegler would be a treasure house of right-wing populist jargon. The fact is - and I've been checking this all day - no one under 65 with whom I spoke had the slightest idea who he was. So who, then, would know to breeze through the writing of Westbrook Pegler, of all people, in search of what is, after all, just a cliche? Surely only someone knowledgeable (and sympathetic to?) native American fascism.
There were many native American fascists around during the thirties: Father Coughlin, Senator Bilbo, Charles Linndbergh, just to mention a few. And, of course, Pegler himself. A popular journalist, he was syndicated by the Hearst chain, which in those days shared the kind of patriotism articulated by fascists. I knew Pegler as a child from my mother's curses, although she did not read the Journal American which was the Hearst outlet in New York. He was also published by The Washington Post. (For liberals and for Jews "Pegler" was a symbol of everything truly hateful, a not inappropriate approximation.) Pegler was so bad that, when already in his dotage, even the John Birch Society refused to be embarrassed by his writing and pushed him out the door.
