Westbrook Pegler was born on August 21, 1894 in Minneapolis, Hennepin County, Minnesota, United States. He was the son of Arthur James Pegler, a journalist, and Frances Nicholson. He spent his early years in St. Paul, Minnesota, and in 1904 his family moved to Chicago, where his father worked for William Randolph Hearst's Chicago American.
In Chicago, Westbrook Pegler completed his elementary schooling but attended Lane Technical High School for only a year before dropping out. He then worked at various odd jobs, including one as office boy for the United Press, and attended a Jesuit preparatory school, Loyola Academy, for eighteen months.
In 1912 Westbrook Pegler returned permanently to newspaper work. After a stint with the International News Service, Pegler returned to the United Press, where he covered a variety of human-interest stories and won a byline for a daily sports squib. His bachelor status made him available for assignments outside Chicago, chiefly in the Middle West. In 1916, Roy Howard, the president of the United Press, offered him a post on the staff in London. After the United States entered World War I, Pegler was transferred to Queenstown, Ireland, a major port used by American warships. When he prematurely filed a news story about an American destroyer firing on a German submarine, he was reprimanded by Admiral William Sims. The altercation led the United Press to conclude that it would be wise to assign Pegler to France. There Pegler offended General John J. Pershing by making critical comments on army censorship and efficiency. At Pershing's request, Pegler's status as an accredited correspondent was revoked.
Although Pegler was not discharged by the United Press, he decided to return to London, where he volunteered for service in the American navy in March 1918. He served as a yeoman second class, doing desk work in Liverpool until the end of the war. In 1919, Pegler settled in New York City, which became his professional base for the next four decades. In 1921 he received a byline for a full-length sports column for the United Press, and in 1925 he was appointed eastern sports editor for the Chicago Tribune. A rather shy and lonely bachelor, Pegler brightened his personal life by his marriage to Julia Harpman on August 29, 1922. Although his wife was in poor health through most of the thirty-three years of their childless marriage, there is no reason to doubt Pegler's unabashedly sentimental comments to his friends that it was a loving union.
In his sports columns, Pegler showed traits that later characterized his political columns, a cynical pose, a sustained irreverence toward national heroes and institutions, and a sure instinct for uncovering hypocrisy in the righteous. His use of sports as a vehicle for making sardonic comments on Prohibition, gambling, and national politics prompted Howard to offer him a contract as a general columnist. Although Pegler initially professed to be uncertain about his qualifications, the appearance of his column, "Fair Enough, " in the Scripps-Howard newspapers in 1933 was the turning point in his career. The only change in his position as a nationally recognized journalist was his move to the Hearst chain in 1944, where his growing conservatism was more congenial to the views of the publisher. The title of the column became "As Pegler Sees It. " Pegler stayed with the Hearst organization until 1962. Pegler's strength as a columnist lay in his abilities as a parodist, an investigative reporter, and a polemicist. His spoof of Eleanor Roosevelt's newspaper column, "My Day, " while uncharacteristically gentle, reveals his talent as a parodist.
As an investigative reporter, Westbrook Pegler was particularly effective in uncovering the criminal backgrounds and activities of labor-union officials. His greatest coup was winning a Pulitzer prize in 1941 for his articles on labor racketeers in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Operators. Pegler's polemics were aimed at personalities as much as at issues. He was remembered after his death for hurling tirades and vituperative epithets at Franklin D. Roosevelt ("the feebleminded Fuehrer"), Eleanor Roosevelt ("La Boca Grande"), Henry A. Wallace ("Old Bubblehead") and Dwight Eisenhower ("a picnic pitcher in a World Series"). Pegler consistently criticized the New Deal and the Fair Deal for paving the way for Communism. He became an ardent supporter and personal friend of Senator Joseph McCarthy and regularly endorsed the idea that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations constituted "twenty years of treason. " By the mid-1950's, Pegler's biases increasingly distorted his perspective.
In several columns in 1954, for example, Westbrook Pegler asserted that Colonel Edward House's novel Philip Dru, Administrator (1912) was an actual blueprint for an ongoing conspiracy to establish a police state in the United States. In 1954 the Hearst organization had to pay a libel award of $175, 000 to the journalist Quentin Reynolds for charges against, and innuendoes about, him in Pegler's columns, which had questioned Reynolds' bravery and sexual morals. During the next eight years, Pegler attacked federal judges and Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and not only opposed American support for Israel but insisted on referring to the original Jewish names of persons who had changed them. When his increasingly restive employers changed or suppressed entire columns, Pegler protested this censorship with characteristic vehemence. When some of his private comments about the Hearst hierarchy were leaked to the press, a continuing relationship became impossible, and thus, his contract was bought up in 1962. Pegler's correspondence of his last fifteen years reflects personal bitterness and professional frustration.
After his break with Hearst, he published only sporadically, chiefly in rightwing journals. He died of stomach cancer in Tucson, Arizona on June 24, 1969.
Quotations:
"Eleanor Roosevelt is a political force of enormous ambitions. I believe she is a menace, unscrupulous as to truth, vain and cynical - all with a pretense of exaggerated kindness and human feeling which deceives millions of gullible persons. "
"Golf is the most useless outdoor game ever devised to waste the time and try the spirit of man. "
"I am a member of the rabble in good standing. "
"My hates have always occupied my mind much more actively and have given greater spiritual satisfactions than my friendships. "
Westbrook Pegler was a member of the National Press Club.
On August 29, 1922 Westbrook Pegler married Julia Harpman, a onetime New York Daily News crime reporter. In 1955, Julia Pegler died, and on May 11, 1959, he married Pearl Wiley Doane. A separation followed in 1960, and divorce, in 1961. On November 22, 1961, Pegler married his longtime secretary and assistant, Maude Towart. They had no children.
