Westbrook Pegler and the Rise of the Syndicated Columnist
Philip M. Glende, Indiana State University
Syndicated political columnists emerged in the 1930s in response to a variety of factors affecting the newspaper industry. Publishers were caught like other business operators in the throes of the Great Depression. They also faced challenges from the development of radio, a competing medium. Moreover, the growth of the American Newspaper Guild challenged their right to manage as they saw fit. And more subtly, the industry was going through a rationalization that favored market monopolization as journalism itself was criticized as too sensational, or, more commonly, too superficial and shallow.
Critics called for more objective reporting, a depersonalization of newspaper ownership, and more thoughtful and interpretive journalism. One product of these overlapping considerations was a boon in Washington-based political commentary. With national distribution through newspaper chains and syndicates, the partisan views of a few journalists were each placed before millions of potential readers.
Columnists offered newspaper readers throughout the country access to news laden with partisan interpretation. For the small-town publisher, the columnists were an attractively priced feature to bolster the substance of the daily paper. For others, including the editorial page editors deputized to represent the publishers’ interests, the columnists provided ideological variety, allowing publishers to claim neutrality to serve a mass audience and to fend off complaints of political bias. Readership surveys suggest the general population might not have cared that much one way or another, but political elites followed the columnists closely. Other journalists recognized that columnists brought an interpretive spin to the news at a time when they themselves were coached to be objective and caught in their own web of events, facts, sources, and attribution. In that way, the columnists were pioneers in shifting the central questions from what and when to why and how.
The conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler was one of the most visible newspaper writers in the late 1930s and 1940s. At the time, his daily columns were appearing in approximately six million papers. Pegler was a caustic critic of organized labor leaders, the Roosevelts and New Deal administrators, liberal entertainers, and anyone who seemed to lean too far to the left. He was widely condemned by liberals but correspondence from readers demonstrates he had enthusiastic support and encouragement from his fans.
Discussion questions:
- Why would a publisher who is a political conservative print a column with a liberal point of view? What are the economic motivations for publishers? In what way is the use of ideologically diverse political columns related to the practice of journalism in the 1930s and afterward?
- Is it good or bad for local newspaper readers to be given an opinion column that is published in as many as 200 other local papers at the same time? Does this serve the individual community? How about the national community?
- What newspaper industry trends contributed to the development of the syndicated political columnist?
- Did Westbrook Pegler influence public opinion about unions and the New Deal policies of the Roosevelt administration? If so, in what way? If not, why not? What can we say for sure about Pegler’s impact as a political commentator?
- How has the newspaper industry and the new media in general changed since the 1930s and 1940s?
- Is there a modern-day equivalent of the well-known commentator of the 1930s and 1940s? On cable television? Online news sites? Social media? How are the voices on those media similar to and different from newspaper columnists in the past?
Exercise 1
Have students examine their hometown daily newspaper or a nearby newspaper from the 1930s and see how columnists were used. Set a number of days, depending on how much time is available for the assignment, perhaps at least seven consecutive days. Calibrate the length of the writing assignment accordingly. To foster discussion in class, you might focus on a specific period, say the last six months of 1939. Ask students to read the op-ed pages and catalog and summarize the local editorials and the columns. If possible, determine who owned the paper and whether it was considered conservative or liberal at the time, and whether there was a competing daily in the market. Assign a research paper requiring properly documented primary and secondary sources. The questions could include:
- Based on your reading of local editorials, would you say your hometown paper was conservative or would you consider it liberal? Did it seem to lean one way or another, or was it all over the place?
- Did it, for example, generally support New Deal government programs and the Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt?
- Which columnists if any were carried on the op-ed pages? Would you consider them conservative or liberal?
- Are the syndicated columns ideologically in tune with local editorials? Why would they be in harmony? If not, why not?
Exercise 2
The cable news commentator is a modern-day version of the syndicated political columnist of the 1930s. The purpose of this assignment is to illustrate how cable pundits are in some ways similar in the freedom to be highly partisan, but also different because they tend to operate on networks that have a single ideological slant, rather than in a mass market environment, where publisher and editorial page editor might intentionally seek a variety of voices as a business strategy, where a columnist might moderate views to appeal to the broader audience, and where readers might expect to find viewpoints with which they disagree. Show students a clip of a prominent pundit, say, Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow, or both, and ask them to reflect in writing on the following questions:
- Does Hannity / Maddow have a point of view? What is it?
- How does he or she convey a point of view through choice of language, topics, delivery?
- Is he or she a journalist?
- Does he or she have an ethical obligation to be fair and truthful?
Exercise 3
Ask students to consider the modern news media. Use class discussion, perhaps with debate-style teams that have prepared a response to the following questions:
- What is different about news media now compared to the 1930s? Be specific about the differences.
- Has the news media become more partisan or less since the early days of the syndicated political columnists? Is that a good development for democracy? Why or why not? Give examples of partisan outlets. If considered less partisan, justify.
- Do journalists have an obligation to be neutral? Why or why not?
- Who is a journalist? Give examples.
Resources
Blanchard, Margaret A. “The Hutchins Commission, the Press and the Responsibility Concept,” Journalism Monographs 49 (May 1977).
Glende, Philip M. “Letters from Readers Support Pegler’s Anti-Union Crusade,” Newspaper Research Journal 34, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 6-21.
Gordon, Lynn D. “Why Dorothy Thompson Lost Her Job: Political Columnists and the Press Wars of the 1930s and 1940s,” History of Education Quarterly 34, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 281-303.
Rabe, Robert A. “Reporter in a Troubled World: Marquis W. Childs and the Rise and Fall of Postwar Liberalism,” Ph.D. diss, University of Wisconsin, 2013.
Ritchie, Donald A. Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, pp. 133-158. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Schudson, Michael. “Persistence of Vision: Partisan Journalism in the Mainstream Press,” in A History of the Book in America Vol. 4. Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940, eds. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice Radway, pp. 140-150. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)