Columnists: Master of the Epithet

At the peak of his parabolic career, Westbrook Pegler was among the best-known figures in U.S. journalism. Carried by 186 newspapers, his column reached 12 million readers, who reacted with anger or admiration or a blend of both. When he died last week in Tucson at the age of 74, Pegler had long been in eclipse. Only a handful of newspapers bothered to remark editorially on his passing—the ultimate slight to a journalist whose caustic style enlivened his times.

Iconoclastic, irascible, Pegler abused his abundant talents. His mastery of the incisive phrase and his flowing yet sardonic style made his opinions, however outrageous, a triumph of readability. At times he could be engagingly funny. He struggled over every phrase and constantly rewrote himself. He scoffed at the “deep-thinking, hair-trigger columnist or commentator who can settle great affairs with absolute finality three days or even six days a week.” Yet Pegler recurrently passed devastating judgments on men—or women —with a damning epithet. Sometimes his stiletto was properly aimed. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1941 for exposing the shakedown racket of George Scalise, a New York union leader, who was subsequently imprisoned.

Up from Sports. Born in Minneapolis, the son of a British-born newsman, Pegler dropped out of high school and landed a $10-a-week job as a United Press office boy at the age of 16. After World War I naval service, he turned to sportswriting, first for United Press, then for the Chicago Tribune. His flair for words made him a success. By 1929, he was earning $25,000 a year. In 1933, Scripps-Howard enticed him to write a more general column, and a dozen years later he shifted to Hearst’s King Features Syndicate, where his income soon reached an estimated $90,000 a year.

Pegler reigned as the nation’s most controversial pundit for three decades. As a name caller he had no equal. To be “Peglerized” became almost an honor. To Pegler, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was “little padrone of the Bolsheviki,” Walter Winchell a “gents-room journalist,” and Henry A. Wallace a “slobbering snerd.” His most abiding hatred was for the Roosevelts. Berating F.D.R. and his family in column after column, he termed the President a “feebleminded fiihrer” and found it “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara hit the wrong man when he shot at Roosevelt in Miami.” He waged a vendetta against Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he dismissed as “La Boca Grande” (the big mouth). Pegler once defended such tactics with a confession: “My hates have always occupied my mind much more actively than my friendships.”

The Turning Point. Pegler’s peculiar blend of talent and choler eventually became his undoing. He not only carried vituperation too far but became an advocate of far-right causes. As a result, he lost first his friends, then his readers, and finally his outlets. The turning point came when Pegler accused his onetime friend, Author-Journalist Quentin Reynolds, of “nuding along the public road” with “his wench, absolutely raw,” and of bearing a “yellow streak.” In the ensuing 1954 libel trial, Reynolds’ lawyer, Louis Nizer, humiliated Pegler by reading him unidentified writings that Pegler dismissed as “the Communist line”—only to learn that they were his own prose from the 1930s. Reynolds won a $175,001 award, paid by Hearst.

Shy Inside. Pegler’s career as a columnist ended in 1962 after he told a right-wing group in Tulsa that his Hearst bosses were censoring his columns in “a coercion as nasty and snarling as Hitler’s.” When Hearst, in effect, fired him, Pegler turned to writing for the John Birch Society journal, but quit when even Robert Welch rejected some of his articles.

Pegler’s only biographer, former New York Post Reporter Oliver Pilat, suggests that Pegler’s tough-guy cynicism was only a professional pose, wholly out of character with his personal feelings of shyness, insecurity and educational inadequacy. He vented his frustrations at the typewriter. Those who knew him best preferred the private Pegler. “Somebody should take the hide off Peg,” wrote Fellow Columnist Heywood Broun when Pegler was on top, “because the stuff inside is so much better than the varnished surface.” Pegler’s professional hide seemed mainly to toughen as he grew older. When it finally cracked under the pressure of lawsuits and frustration over his advocacy of lost causes, only anger spilled out.