RABBLE-ROUSER.

I mentioned his name recently, apropos a recent book on F.D.R., and got back: "Westbrook Pegler? Who is he?" I was speaking with Roger Kimball, an author who is encyclopedically informed. On the other hand, Kimball, the managing editor of the New Criterion, is only fifty years old. Westbrook Pegler died in 1969, leaving no major work, and is only slightly noticed in the standard references. In the National Archives Learning Curve, one sentence (the philosophy professor Irwin Edman is quoted) sums up the accepted Pegler legacy: "Pegler's main targets were the 'Roosevelt family and all their works and days, all labor leaders, all intellectuals, poets, and radicals.' " The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, in West Branch, Iowa, stocks the Pegler archives, donated to it by his widow, Maude. (Pegler was childless; his third wife survived him.) It is superbly organized, stretches sixty-two linear feet, and contains ("approximately") 44,500 items. Turning to the Internet, one finds "An Interview with Murray Kempton," which proves to be a broken link. And "a picture of Pegler's grave" and one or two other points of interest.

Some who remember Pegler's singular invective think of him as simply another actor of his age, one more of the unbound journalists who hammered home their complaints and objurgations, breathing out vitriol, unhampered by the least inhibition of political correctness. A. J. Liebling once wrote in The New Yorker of "Pegler's Rhadamanthine face, with eyebrows fiercer than Hussars' mustaches. . . . He is the kind of writer who depends a lot on mugging, and when you take his face away, it is like stealing every third predicate."

It is true that in the period Pegler wrote his columns (1933-62) the language of journalists tended to be lustier than today's. Pegler was sui generis, the unschooled cousin of his contemporary H. L. Mencken, who didn't attend college but was soon translating Nietzsche. Yet I'd guess a rediscovery will happen, and that, while scholars will dutifully record the enemy (Wilson, Coolidge, Wallace, Roosevelt), literary pleasure seekers will care not at all about what were his prejudices, no more than readers of "The Dunciad" care who it was, exactly, who annoyed Alexander Pope.

James Westbrook Pegler was born in Minneapolis in 1894, a willful son of a straitened, itinerant journalist. After eighteen months of prep school (Loyola Academy, Chicago), he set out, in 1916, as a war correspondent on the European staff of the United Press. His temperamental impiety was soon evident. In France, he observed what he thought was a gross act of disciplinary excess by Commanding General John J. Pershing. "Many of these boys and their captain," he wrote of the chastised company, "may have died in battle within the next year. If they died forgiving Pershing, they let me down."

He did a brief stint in the Navy, where he served as a clerk; after that came sportswriting for the United Press and the Chicago Tribune. Even as a young sportswriter, Pegler attracted the attention of acclaimed and observant writers, including Edna St. Vincent Millay. Carl Sandburg (quoted by the Pegler biographer Finis Farr) wrote to him, "I have told my publisher, Alfred Harcourt, that you may go big in the literary racket some day, having a keen eye, and wide curves." According to another Pegler biographer, Oliver Pilat, the author and screenwriter Ben Hecht wrote of Pegler, retrospectively, "He slipped occasionally, for he fought on muddy grounds. . . . But when he finishes his stint and the editorial shears take him over, he will emerge as one of the brightest of the prose lighthouses in a time darkened by the pall of government."

That decade of journalism led to a syndicated column of general commentary for Scripps-Howard, under the patronage of Roy Howard, who acclaimed him a writer whose work showed "the drollery of Ring Lardner, the iconoclasm of Henry Mencken, the homely insight of Will Rogers."

Back then, Pegler had no observable political bias. He had voted for F.D.R. in 1936, though with caution--Roosevelt being President, he was ex officio suspect as a person who exercised authority. The two men met soon after the new President's Inauguration, in 1933. F.D.R. was princely. Cigarette holder aloft, he sought colloquialness with his visitor, and addressed him by a reasonable nickname. But it was one that Pegler had never heard from the lips of anyone else, family, schoolmates, or friends. Gesturing with his cigarette, the President had said, "Now look, West--"