Word: peglerizing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...have never yet retracted a word of . . . fair comment," boasted Columnist Westbrook Pegler one day last week. Next day, in the New York Journal-American and 249 other papers carrying his column, he retracted a thousand words of unfair comment. As a legal settlement of several multimillion-dollar libel suits, Pegler published a 98-word apology to Delaware Businessman Abram N. Spanel for implying that he was "a Communist or fellow traveler...
Effusive Abe Spanel, board chairman of the International Latex Corp. (baby pants, girdles, pillows), likes to buy space in newspapers to print his own opinions and those of people he admires (e.g., Sumner Welles, Robert M. Hutchins)-and incidentally to plug his company. In March 1945, Pegler took off on Businessman Spanel and his ads, saying one was "a poetic construction well expressing the attitude of some demagogues of the extreme left ... A native of Russia and an admirer of the Soviet system might be pardoned in the error." The Journal-American headlined the column: AMERICAN PAPERS SELL ADVERTISING SPACE...
When Spanel, born in Russia but a U.S. citizen for about 35 years, won court rulings that it was libelous to imply that a man was a Communist and that the suits should go to trial, Pegler quit. Wrote he: "I gladly concede that the editorial advertisements ... were not Communist inspired and that Mr. Spanel is not and never has been a Communist or fellow traveler...
...Manhattan for the World Series, ex-Sportwriter Westbrook Pegler had lunch with some oldtime sport stars and felt a strange, sentimental feeling taking possession of him. Last week, Pegler told about it in an off-form column without a single word of abuse for anybody: "I felt a little bashful, a little estranged . . . wondering whose feelings I might hurt ... by failing to recognize him on the instant . . . and a little sad, too . . . Unquestionably, the champions are special. There is a style and a look to them. They wear greatness as a habit...
Unemotional Editor McGill ran the Pegler column in its usual space, appended a tolerant editorial note: "We often get a bang out of some of Mr. Pegler's strange obsessions . . . Somehow it was not at all surprising to find him . . . using [Miss Mitchell's] death as a vehicle for rebuking the Roosevelts. We knew [her] well enough to know she made up her own mind . . . Certainly she would not [have been] swayed by the influence of an unwise, emotional Westbrook Pegler, an insensate Roosevelt-hater, whose column [may] have swayed and-deprived inferior minds...