Pegler at his axe.
I read that that a famous conservative columnist once called Ridgefield home. Who was he?
Westbrook Pegler, a caustic columnist who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing labor union racketeering, lived here from 1941 to 1948.
The nationally syndicated writer started out as a sports columnist in the 1920s, but soon turned to politics and labor. He was famous for his conservative and anti-Communist writings — he “used his typewriter like a meat ax,” said one critic.
He probably reached his peak of popularity and power in the early 1940s when he helped expose a New York City racketeer named George Scalise, a union boss who happened to own a home in Ridgefield — what is now the St. Ignatius retreat house on Tackora Trail. An associate of mobster Dutch Schultz, Scalise was arrested in 1940 by the crusading district attorney Thomas E. Dewey, later governor of New York and almost-president, and was charged with extorting $100,000 ($1.7 million today) from hotels and contracting firms. But the arrest came only after Pegler had exposed Scalise in a series of anti-racketeering columns that won him a Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1941.
In a 1940 piece, Pegler described how Scalise had used union funds to acquire the 27-room mansion on Tackora Trail. He also noted that just across North Salem Road was the town poor house.
His research on Scalise probably introduced him to Ridgefield, and in 1941, he bought a 100-acre farm on Old Stagecoach Road.
During his first few years here, he seemed more famous locally for his attacks on local building codes than as a national columnist. While expanding his house, Pegler wanted to use cheaper, unlicensed plumbers, but the town plumbing code — modeled after the state’s and supported by unions — required licensed plumbers. Pegler, who did not have a high regard for unions, called it discriminatory and tried to get the Town Meeting to abandon the code. He failed.
Pegler was more successful in his campaign to get people to turn in steel car bumpers for the war effort — the cover of Life magazine once featured him removing his own bumper in front of town hall.
In 1950, two years after he left town, Pegler described Ridgefield as “an old aristocratic town of moldering white mansions on a white main street” that “has quietly become infested with wealthy Sixth Columnists” (supporters of communism).
By the late 1950s he had fallen out of favor, and his columns appeared only in the magazine of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society. He died in 1969 in Arizona, aged 74.—J.S.
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