When
legendary American journalist Westbrook Pegler died, in Tucson, Arizona, on June
24, 1969, aged 74, newspapers across the country ran the story on page one and
paid Pegler the ultimate tributes. One paper headlined its story “Acid-pen
columnist dies”, another said Pegler was “Irascible, free-swinging”. Lauding
him as “Pegler of the Thorny Prose”, The
Cincinnati Enquirer said he “used his typewriter as other men have used a
broadsword or a meat-axe”. He had been “the master of the vituperative epithet”,
“a 50-year journeyman in the practice of invective”. For a typewriter-wielding newspaperman,
it just didn’t get much better than that.
To be “hit by Pegler’s typewriter”, in defence of his
perception of American values and the American way of life, was to be “Peglerised”, and that meant being condemned
to eternal damnation. Fellow columnist Bob Considine wrote that Pegler’s
typewriter “couldn’t write gray”, and that Pegler was both the most beloved and
hated columnist in American “at one and the same time”.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning war
correspondent (the youngest in World War I) and sports writer, Pegler was both
fearless and peerless. He had labelled Franklin D. Roosevelt a “feeble-minded
fuehrer” and “Moosejaw”, Harry S. Truman a “hick” and a “thin-lipped hater”, J.
Edgar Hoover a “nightclub fly-cop”, and Vice-President
Henry A. Wallace “Bubblehead” and a “messianic fumbler”. Roosevelt asked Hoover
to investigate Pegler, but the FBI found no evidence of sedition. Many other political and
union leaders “came out of Pegler’s typewriter no less scathed”. One can only
imagine what he would have made of Donald Trump. He might well have liked him.
Pegler’s column “Fair Enough”, which
started in the New York World-Telegram in
1933, was syndicated by United Features of the Scripps-Howard organisation and
later Hearst’s King Features to 186 newspapers until 1962. He was the first columnist
to win a Pulitzer for reporting. His career had started as a 16-year-old in Chicago
(where his father was himself a legendary journalist), covering the 1912 Republican
National Convention.
At the height of his typewriting powers,
in October 1938, Time said, “ … Pegler's place as the great dissenter for the
common man is unchallenged. Six days a week, for an estimated $65,000 a year,
in 116 papers reaching nearly 6,000,000 readers, Mister Pegler is invariably
irritated, inexhaustibly scornful. Unhampered by coordinated convictions of his
own, Pegler applies himself to presidents and peanut vendors with equal zeal
and skill. Dissension is his philosophy.”
Here is a
piece Pegler wrote from the 1936 Winter Olympic Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen,
Bavaria:
Paul Gallico
4 comments:
What would Pegler have done on Twitter?
Maybe something like this.
Perhaps we should have a few reporters like him today. I wonder what he'd write about the two nincompoops we have running for President.
I know very little about Twitter, but, yes, wouldn't he have had some fun if he was around today?
Relevant to this post? Not sure but there's a must-read for all typospherians here: https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/791709895083102209
I trust you get it because I, too, know very little about Twitter.
Good luck!
Dana
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