The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [98]
Howard's own writing is undistinguished. In Pegler, he evidently grew to feel, he had found his voice. Pegler was to Howard what Jenny Lind had been to Barnum. Some years ago a volume of Pegler's columns was published under the title of The Dissenting Opinions of Mister Westbrook Pegler. By a rare phenomenon, he almost always dissents from the side where the money isn't. In the last presidential campaign, for example, Pegler fearlessly dissented from the majority of his fellow citizens by plumping for Wendell Willkie. It was a happy coincidence that eightyone per cent of the newspaper publishers who buy columns were on the same side. Dorothy Thompson, whose candidate won, lost about fifty per cent of her syndication during the campaign. Pegler is a courageous defender of minorities—for example, the people who pay large income taxes. Just the same, he has devoted around twenty columns to attacking the American Newspaper Guild, which Howard loathes. Pegler's idea of a demagogue, to judge by his columns on Senator Wagner, is a senator who favors labor laws. One of the columnist's favorite irritants is a character known as “the bosshater.” On the other hand, Pegler may dislike sycophants but he never writes any columns against them. He has written thousands of words about laborunion officials who employ violence or have criminal records, but he has never touched on the incidence of criminality among company guards or strikebreakers. During the last campaign he wrote several columns about the godlike virtues of Hoosiers, without mentioning specifically either the Republican candidate or Howard. In January, shortly after Willkie split with Howard over the question of giving aid to England, Pegler wrote a column denouncing Willkie as a fake Hoosier. This was the case of dissent from himself.
Howard, in addition to sensing the ideological kinship between himself and Pegler, found in Pegler one who sympathized with his belief that ignorance is an endearing quality. This is the basis of the Artemus Ward school of humor. There is nothing, except perhaps Mrs. Roosevelt, on which the columnist can grow more bitterly satirical than the subject of college professors, who, he implies, are parasites on society and had better keep their noses out of public business. He calls psychoanalysts “Viennese head feelers,” and once wrote a column voicing his suspicion that Einstein was a fraud since he, Pegler, couldn't follow Einstein's reasoning. His top effort in this line was a column last summer fearlessly deploring false sympathy for Paris. Paris, Pegler wrote, was a city famous only for naked women.
Howard's second important addition to the splitpage menagerie was another United Feature discovery, Brigadier General Hugh S. Johnson, a Reserve officer who had been administrator of NRA for the first sixteen months of its existence. General Johnson, who had finally broken with the President, brought away from Washington a conviction that Mr. Roosevelt had fallen among evil advisers, along with a vocabulary culled from among the ruins of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The enterprising Bourjaily read a speech that General Johnson had made before a group of businessmen and went to see him at the Hotel St. Regis, where he was then living. Bourjaily told Johnson that the speech, properly cut up and pasted together again, would have made five syndicate columns and that it was