Word: peglerizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last January, Hearst's King Features Syndicate decided to run an advertisement in Editor & Publisher for Westbrook Pegler's column. It began digging around for quotable puffs, had trouble finding any. Few people had ever said anything good about Pegler, who so seldom has anything good to say about anyone else. Finally, at the syndicate's prodding, Pegler remembered that "an old geezer named 'Seidlitz"-meaning, as everybody knew, of course, Literary Critic Henry Seidel Canby-had once cast him a few pearls of praise...
...year-old copy of the Saturday Review of Literature, the syndicate found that Canby had indeed lauded the "homely genius" of Peg's style, had even called him "that most hard-hitting and expressive of contemporary American journalists," and had gone on to quote two paragraphs from a Pegler column. The syndicate promptly slapped Canby's encomium into its ad. Just as promptly, Canby objected: "This [article] has been quoted without my permission and without the permission of the Saturday Review, where it is copyrighted...
Hearstling Columnist Westbrook Pegler carefully put tongue in cheek for a Cosmopolitan magazine article on his fan mail, entitled Dear Sir-You Cur!: "I was surprised to learn that my correspondents were friendly in overwhelming majority . . ." he wrote. "The dissenters, being obviously in error, are more to be pitied than scorned. They dodge the issues; they are ignorant victims of propaganda, and their personal comments are intemperate and vulgar by contrast with the fine taste and faultless morality of my devotees...
Westbrook Pegler was on the receiving end of a blast. Representative Arthur G. Klein (Dem., N.Y.) cried that such "scatological skill . . . could spring only from a sick mind." Klein urged the formation of the Westbrook Pegler Annual Award of Journalistic Infamy, with the nomination committee to include the poundmaster and chief plumbing inspector of the District of Columbia, and the prize plaque to be "a rectangular shield transversed by a double cross, surmounted by a turkey buzzard . . . with jackal couchant in the left upper quarter and the symbolic figures of Truth and Decency outraged supine in the lower right quarter...
...Pegler found a silver lining. "We have had two salutary killings within the last year," Pegler wrote, in which strikebreakers were acquitted of murder charges after shooting two pickets. Said he, with satisfaction: "[Each] got his picket . . . Henceforth, the good citizen under such attack . . . will have a right to pick a picket and shoot him in the head...