Word: pegler
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...bear was back on the growl. From Tucson, where he holed up after Hearst's King Features syndicate fired him last summer for daring to attack the boss (he wrote that William Randolph Hearst Jr. was wanting in "character, ability or loyalty''), onetime Hearst Columnist Westbrook Pegler. 68, let it be known that he had found a new vent for his wrath. Beginning in February, said Pegler, he will write one political column a month for American Opinion-the house organ of the John Birch Society...
...Birchers. who hold, among other convictions, that former U.S. President Eisenhower was a "conscious" Communist "agent," regard Pegler as a major journalistic haul. "Mr. Pegler will not be restrained in any way." said American Opinion Managing Editor Scott Stanley Jr. And Columnist Pegler, who in his days of relative silence on the desert has found little better to do than dash off a piece on pugilism for Show magazine, bared his fangs in anticipation. "I'm not a member of the Birch Society," said he, "but I have seen nothing in their program or their policies to offend...
Heavy Editing. In his earlier days, Pegler distinguished between good and bad labor leaders. In 1941 he won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing labor racketeers, who later went to prison. After that, he soon decided that the whole labor movement was "incurably vile," delivered the opinion that packinghouse workers on strike in 1949 "deserved to be clubbed senseless or if it were necessary to be clubbed to death in the interest of public order and Government...
...None of Pegler's legion of enemies turned out to be thornier than Correspondent Quentin Reynolds. After Pegler attacked Reynolds in print for "nuding along [with] a wench" and cowardice. Reynolds sued. In court in 1954, Reynolds' attorney, Louis Nizer, forced Pegler to admit that 130 statements he had made about Reynolds were untrue, and Reynolds was awarded $175,001. After that, the list of newspapers that carried Pegler gradually dropped from more than 200 to 140, and the columnist was tamed by heavy editing from Hearst...
...last couple of years, Pegler has largely confined himself to innocuous columns about George Spelvin, a Peglerian prototype of an average American: grumpy, antisocial and suspicious as a kulak. George still has a small, eccentric following, and chances are that he (and Pegler) will be kept by some papers even though he has been dropped by Hearst. But the demand is likely to be small. By week's end, the Hearst papers had received only a handful of letters and a few phone calls protesting the loss of their onetime titan...