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Westbrook Pegler and the Anti-union Movement
David Witwer
| In late December 1941, the editors of Time announced, "Reader nominations for Time's Man of the Year are now closed. Latest tabulations showed President Roosevelt in front, Comrade Stalin second and Columnist Westbrook Pegler third." For those who still remember him, such an indication of Pegler's prominence might seem surprising. A self-described "professional dissenter," he built a journalistic career that stretched from the 1920s to the early 1960s by taking iconoclastic stands. In the 1950s and 1960s, as his conservative views became more extreme and his writing increasingly shrill, he earned the tag of "the stuck whistle of journalism." He denounced the civil rights movement, embraced anti-Semitism, and in the early 1960s wrote for the John Birch Society—until he proved too cantankerous for even its members. Those later years make it easy to fall into the mistake of dismissing him, but in 1941, as Time magazine's readers made clear, Pegler's long slide into decline remained in the future.1 |
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In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Pegler commanded respect and wielded great influence, a fact acknowledged by his friends and enemies alike. In an age when Americans were devoted readers, newspaper columnists exercised the kind of influence later reserved for radio shock jocks and television news shows. In a field of influential columnists in the 1930s and 1940s, Pegler stood out. In 1941 he became the first columnist ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for reporting. A year earlier the Saturday Evening Post described him as "undoubtedly one of the leading individual editorial forces in the country." A survey of five hundred editors of daily newspapers, conducted by the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism in 1942, ranked him the nation's "best adult columnist." In the early 1940s his columns went out six days a week to 174 newspapers that reached an estimated 10 million subscribers.2 |
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A 1942 article by George P. West in the liberal journal the New Republic referred to Pegler's widespread influence by asserting sadly, "What we are up against is the Westbrook Pegler mind." West blamed Pegler for "giving greater aid and comfort to our domestic fascists than any other one man in the United States." But in the same article, West wrote that "in spite of the exasperation and disgust that his column often inspires when he either shows a perverse failure to see straight or hits below the belt in true guttersnipe fashion," he still considered Pegler "my favorite reactionary." He meant that as more than faint praise. "Pegler is an artist, a man of great courage, a hater of tyranny," West explained, "and he calls the shots as he sees them."3 |
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In the late thirties and early forties, Pegler's most pressing topic was union corruption and, by extension, what he considered a dangerous growth of union power fostered by the New Deal. In 1939 and 1940, he unmasked the criminal past and association with organized crime of two prominent union officials, William Bioff and George Scalise. He drew on those exposés to justify a campaign against union corruption, which he depicted as a rising scourge that stemmed from the New Deal's National Labor Relations Act of 1935, better known as the Wagner Act. The law made collective bargaining a right for the nation's workers, but Pegler argued that it also granted too much power to union leaders, a group he depicted as irresponsible and rapacious. Hammering away at this theme in his daily columns, he also used the anticorruption campaign to justify a broader critique of the New Deal. Pegler thereby helped formulate and popularize some of the key emerging conservative arguments against the growing role of the federal government. A study of Pegler's campaign and its impact highlights the central role of corruption scandals in a counteroffensive mounted to push back the gains organized labor had made in the 1930s. Such a study also offers an important reminder of the way a new conservative movement, born of opposition to the New Deal, placed organized labor at the top of its agenda. Finally, it demonstrates the power of the journalistic exposé to focus public attention on a particular issue and thereby shift the country's political landscape. |
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