Westbrook Pegler (2 August 1894 - 24 June 1969) was a United States journalist and writer.
Pegler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota; his father was a prominent editor. Working for United Press young Pegler was the youngest American war correspondent in World War I. After the war, Pegler started off as a sports columnist, but later wrote general interest articles. In 1925 he moved to the Chicago Tribune. In 1933 he moved to the Scripps Howard syndicate, where he worked closely with his friend Roy Howard. In 1942 he was named one of the nation's "best adult columnists". His columns went out six days a week to 174 newspapers that reached about 10 million subscribers. He moved his syndicated column to the Hearst syndicate in 1944.
He initially supported President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but after seeing the rise of fascism in Europe he returned to warn against the dangers of dictatorship in America. He became one of the Roosevelt administration's sharpest critics over what he saw its abuse of power. He rarely missed an opportunity to criticize Roosevelt, his wife Eleanor Roosevelt or Vice President Henry A. Wallace. His views --always expressed in vehement, shrill and colorful language--became increasingly conservative and right-wing. Pegler was especially outraged by the New Deal's support for powerful labor unions that he considered morally and politically corrupt. Pegler saw himself a populist and muckraker whose mission was to warn the nation that dangerous leaders were in power.
In 1941 Pegler became the first columnist ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for reporting, for his work in exposing racketeering in Hollywood labor unions, focusing on the criminal career of William Morris Bioff. As historian David Witwer has concluded, "He depicted a world where a conspiracy of criminals, corrupt union officials, Communists, and their political allies in the New Deal threatened the economic freedom of working Americans." [Witwer 551]
Pegler criticized every president from Herbert Hoover to FDR ("moosejaw") to Harry Truman ("a thin-lipped hater") to John F. Kennedy. He also criticized the Supreme Court, the tax system, and labor unions. His attack on writer Quentin Reynolds led to a costly slander suit against him and his publishers, as a jury awarded Reynolds $175,000 in damages. In 1962, he lost his contract with King Features Syndicate, owned by Hearst after he started criticizing Hearst executives. His late writing appeared sporadically in obscure publications, including the John Birch Society's American Opinion.
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: