Westbrook
Pegler was born in Minneapolis in 1894. Pegler was originally a sports
journalist who was initially sympathetic to Franklin
D. Roosevelt and
the New Deal.
In
the 1930s he became a controversial newspaper columnist with the Chicago
Daily News and The Washington
Post who openly expressed right-wing
views. In
one article published in 1936 he praised a lynching
that took place in California. As Irwin Edman remarked. Pegler's main
targets were the "Roosevelt family and all their works and days,
all labor leaders, all intellectuals, poets, and radicals".
Pegler published three
collections of his articles: The Dissenting
Opinions of Mister Westbrook Pegler, T
Ain't Right and George Spelvin,
American and Fireside Chats. In
1940 Pegler won the Pulitzer
Prize
for
journalism for a series of articles exposing trade union racketeering.
Pegler
was an avid supporter of McCarthyism
and
gave information to Joseph McCarthy
advice
on left-wing writers and artists. Westbrook Pegler
died of stomach cancer in 1969.
(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 '20s 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, Mrs. Roosevelt's Private Life, 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, The Pegler Phenomenon, 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."
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
