Westbrook Pegler - Parodied

Parodied

Pegler's distinctive writing style was often the subject of parody. In 1949, Wolcott Gibbs of The New Yorker imagined a Peglerian tirade to a little girl asking whether there was a Santa Claus (parodying the famous "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" letter). In the Gibbs/Pegler version, "Santa Claus" was actually Sammy Klein of Red Hook, Brooklyn, and had raped a six-year-old as a deliberate strategy to avoid being drafted into World War One. After joining the Communist Party, he adopted his alias and began his Christmas racket by hijacking trucks with toy shipments. Gibbs' parody opens:

"You're damn right there is a Santa Claus, Virginia. He lives down the road a piece from me, and my name for him is Comrade Jelly Belly, after a poem composed about him once by an admiring fellow-traveller now happily under the sod.."

Mad Magazine ran a Pegler parody in its February 1957 issue (#31), using the actual title of Pegler's own column from 1944 on, "As Pegler Sees It". Starting with a report on a little kid stealing a bike, it devolved into a long tirade against, among other targets, Roosevelt, Truman, the Falange, organized labor, municipal corruption and Abeline's Boy Scout Troop 18 (AKA the Abraham Lincoln Brigade). The mock column ended with:

"... which brought together such Commy-loving cronies as you know what I think of Eleanor Roosevelt.

It stinks. The whole thing stinks. You stink."

This last one-line paragraph is often mis-cited as a real Pegler quote.