The Age of Fatuous Windbags (1921-2021)

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Before he called Franklin D. Roosevelt a “feeble-minded fuhrer,” and before he referred to a Supreme Court justice (ironically enough) as a “fatuous windbag,” and before he espoused the desire, in 1965, that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter (Robert F. Kennedy’s) spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies,” and before an old friend sued him for libel and won, Westbrook Pegler was a sportswriter.

You have probably never heard of Pegler; most people who don’t consider themselves William F. Buckley Jr. superfans probably haven’t, either. But in the early-to-mid 20th century, Pegler was one of the most widely-read newspaper columnists in America, referred to as “the angry man of the press.” And in the years after serving in World War I, Pegler began his career as a sportswriter; he wrote about sports, he said, because “the big salaries in newspapers usually were paid to sports men,” which, if you are or were or ever aspired to be a sportswriter in the 21st century, is perhaps the cruelest statement of Pegler’s career.

A Pegler column from 1921 about a boxing match

“From the Depression through the Cold War,” wrote J.C. Sharlet in The Baffler, Pegler “tilted at suspects familiar to Rush Limbaugh’s fans: foreign subversives, swindling politicians, the First Lady, corrupt union bosses, the elite, the effete, and, of course, homosexuals.”

Pegler did not invent this brand of patently vitriolic writing; I imagine that kind of furious cynicism has existed since cavemen were scrawling on walls. But at the very least he perpetuated it, and at a moment when it increasingly feels like the entirety of the public discourse is now grounded in Pegler-esque insults fueled by our mediums themselves, it is worth wondering how much his roots as a sportswriter set him on that path. It is worth wondering, in other words, whether the entire American argument has now been reduced to the same bullshit framework through which we view sports.