The Press: Mister Pegler

Between Columnists James Westbrook Pegler and Heywood Campbell Broun there had long existed a somewhat strained out-of-print friendship. In print, “Old Peg,” ever scornful of anything that looks like uplift, called his friend “old Bleeding Heart Broun,” “the fat Mahatma.” Two months ago, Columnist Pegler jabbed a particularly tender spot. American Newspaper Guild President Broun was operating a scab shop, he wrote, because the Connecticut Nutmeg, of which Broun is one-tenth owner-editor, had hired a non-union reporter. Next week, from his regular page in the New Republic, President Broun heatedly denied he had anything to do with hiring, pointed out that the reporter had immediately joined the Guild, scolded Guild rank-&-filer Pegler for not coming to meetings more often, announced it was the end of their beautiful friendship.

This week, ex-Friend Pegler’s book, The Dissenting Opinions of Mister Westbrook Pegler, was published.* Of its 85 reprints of his daily diatribes, only two were written without his scalpel. One is an ecstatic appreciation of Walt Disney. The other, a testimonial to telegraph operators, amazed even its author. “I am not very good at singing praises,” he concludes, “having very little practice, and I hardly know what has prompted me to this extraordinary outburst of sweetness toward my fellow man. Just call it a change of pace.”

At the age of 44, Mr. Mister 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.

Being a kind and patient man in private life, it would take what Pegler calls a “Viennese head-feeler” to explain his acidity in print. Born in Minneapolis, he worked for the United Press in the U.S. and abroad, wrote a column of sports comment before Roy Howard brought him to the New York World-Telegram in 1933 and made the universe his beat. Pegler is a laborious writer; his brisk, integrated sentences are the result of patient rewriting. Most of his turbulent columns are composed in the seclusion of his Pound Ridge, N. Y. estate, near the haunts of the Nutmeg intelligentsia whom he includes among the “Doubledome Babbitts.”

Columnist Pegler’s standing with the Doubledome Babbitts has shifted often. They have never forgiven him for an early column in which he indirectly justified lynchings in San José, Calif. But two years ago, when he went to Europe and wrote a series of searing attacks on Hitler and Mussolini, his standing was ace high. They deplored his sneers at “Mahatma” Sinclair and his “Brainstorm Trust,” reveled in his fury at Huey Long, cooled off again when he began taunting the New Deal about the “Second Louisiana Purchase.” Today, “Old Peg” is in bad odor among the intellectuals because of his attacks on the C.I.O., his open redbaiting, his disrespect for Franklin Roosevelt— ”mama’s boy.”

The current collection of Peglerian dissents is a monument of gall. He writes about the New Deal, crime, dress suits, American cooking, English cooking, the Ku Klux Klan, hotels, tree surgery, Hollywood, the income-tax collector, and he resents them all, especially the income-tax collector. In the manner of the old sporting man, he is for Womanhood, but he is against women in politics, women in bars, pictures of women in bathing suits. He is for Love, but he is against books about it: “We-all, baby-havin’, ‘tater-hoein’, homespun folks of the great American majority—well, stranger, we don’t regard sex as any fittin’ topic for a book, and it’s our view that any grownup man or woman who has got to read a book about it ain’t going to be any wiser afterward than what they was before.”

His irritation extends to his own profession, and finally and logically to Westbrook Pegler. In the column that opens his book, the adder stings himself:

“Of all the fantastic fog-shapes that have risen off the swamp of confusion since the big war, the most futile and, at the same time, the most pretentious, is the deep-thinking, hair-trigger columnist or commentator who knows all the answers just offhand and can settle great affairs with absolute finality three days or even six days a week.”

*Scribner ($2.50). Two years ago ‘T Aint Right, Pegler’s first collection of columns, was published.