Westbrook Pegler
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Westbrook Pegler (2 August 1894 - 24 June 1969) was a United States journalist and writer.
Pegler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He served as a war correspondent in Europe for United Press during World War I. After the war, Pegler started off as a sports columnist, but later wrote general interest articles. He became a syndicated columnist for the Hearst Corporation in 1944.
He initially supported President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but grew to become one of the Roosevelt administration's most vocal critics over what he saw as abuse of power by the administration and the New Deal. He rarely missed an opportunity to criticize Roosevelt or his wife Eleanor Roosevelt. His views became increasingly conservative and right-wing. He praised a lynching in one article.
In 1941 Pegler won the Pulitzer Prize for his work in exposing racketeering in labor unions.
He wrote against every president from Herbert Hoover to John F. Kennedy. He also hated the Supreme Court, the tax system, and labor unions. His attack on writer Quentin Reynolds lead to a costly slander suit against him and his publishers. At the end of his career, he lost his position as a national columnist, and his writing appeared sporadically in obscure publications.
He died of stomach cancer and is interred in the Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, New York.
Pegler published three volumes of his collected writings:
- The Dissenting Opinions of Mr. Westbrook Pegler
- T'ain't Right
- George Spelvin, American and Fireside Chats
External links
- Westbrook Pegler on geocities.com (http://www.geocities.com/westbrook_pegler/) contains quotes and vintage text. May have pop-up ads on JavaSript enabled browsers.