Westbrook Pegler - Life and Career - Journalism Career

Journalism Career

Westbrook was the youngest American war correspondent during World War I, working for United Press. He became a sports columnist after the war but soon wrote general interest articles.

He moved in 1925 to the Chicago Tribune and in 1933 to the Scripps Howard syndicate, where he worked closely with his friend Roy Howard. He built up a large readership for his column 'Mister Pegler' and elicited this observation by Time magazine in its October 10, 1938 issue:

At the age of 44, Mr. Mister Pegler's place as the great dissenter for the common man is unchallenged. Six days a week, for an estimated $65,000 a year, in 116 papers reaching nearly 6,000,000 readers, Mister Pegler is invariably irritated, inexhaustibly scornful. Unhampered by coordinated convictions of his own, Pegler applies himself to presidents and peanut vendors with equal zeal and skill. Dissension is his philosophy.

In 1941, he won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing criminal racketeering in labor unions. The same year, he finished third (behind Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin) for Time Magazine's "Man of the Year". In 1942 Pegler was named one of the nation's "best adult columnists." At that time his columns were distributed six days a week to 174 newspapers that reached about 10 million subscribers. He moved his syndicated column to the Hearst syndicate in 1944.