Confessions of a Grouch

Westbrook Pegler, most glowering of columnists, suddenly bared to his readers a gentle, wistful soul. Sourball Pegler confessed that he had found his "stock of merry jape and ready wit" quite low, and was "considering steps to correct this. . . ." Whether his boss (Hearst) had told him to get off his Johnny-one-note of hate toward labor leaders, foreigners and New Dealers, or whether Pegler had decided all by himself to change his tune, no one knew. Wrote Pegler:

"Several acquaintances have said to me lately that, although to know me is to love me and I have a heart of gold, I do myself a great injustice and deny the world a measure of sweetness and laughter which it could easily absorb. . . .

"As I look back now I recall that my late colleague, Heywood Broun, who really was a friend in the old days, foreswore his sense of humor and, I thought, his sense of fairness when he became a man with a message. . . .

"Accuse me, if you will, of endorsing backwardness, indifference and ignorance, but let me ask, in return, whether we were not much happier when our rages involved [such matters as] whether the referee gave Tunney a long count or Dempsey hit Jack Sharkey low. ...

"I think . . . my little embarrassment has been the result of conditions that have had a similar effect on all of us, such as the long depression, which was a nice, upholstered euphemism for panic, our politics, the Roosevelt experiments in gentle revolution and, finally, the war, and the concurrent decline in sports and other grim frivolities on which we used to expend our passions. In other words, aren't we all and, so, why pick on me?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.