According to Time Magazine the quote from Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech is : "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity". Though she was careful not to cite the original author, the subsequent provenance of this phrase is a tale unto itself. Here is the source document, page 31
When Truman came into the Presidency, Pegler welcomed him "We grow good people in our towns, with honesty, sincerity and dignity" he wrote, but earlier, Pegler had told his readers the man from Missouri was someone to watch out for "This Truman", he wrote, when Harry was nominated for Vice President "is thin-lipped, a hater, and not above offering you his hand to yank you off balance and work you over with a chair leg, a pool cue or something out of his pocket."
Well innat sweet? I know a thing or three about small town people and I do not mince words. Small town people don't conform to Norman Rockwell clichés, though in fairness, Rockwell never condescended to his subjects.
People in small towns know each other far too well, an environment which does not lend itself to much honesty or sincerity. As for dignity, appearances are deceiving in small towns. It's much easier to be different in the city, gotta trust me on that one. Westbrook Pegler was from Minneapolis, not from a small town. He never lived in one and probably never saw one except through the window of a train car.
In the rough and tumble world of Depression-era journalism, Westbrook Pegler stood out. He is still found in the odd dewlaps and unwashed armpits of the Internet. It is therefore a surprising quote source. I can't imagine sitting down to write a generic speech for a modern political convention, rubbing my hands together and reaching into quotes.txt for a Peglerology. Yes, it used be a fairly common word, like Bushism or Dittohead.
I give you The Lynching Story Pegler's most famous essay, defending a lynch mob. It containing his signature quote: I am a member of the rabble in good standing.
The whole piece is some of the most bilious cant I've ever read, and I have read (and written!) more than most. Here's a goodly chunk thereof.
Well, the city editor tells the fellow to get about a column of horror and indignation over the lynching, and he goes into the phone booth and comes out about a half-hour later with a mess of copy-paper all scratched up with chicken-track notes. He has nailed the president of the university, the head of the Bar association, a couple of publicity-crazy judges, the governor, the head man of the local crime committee, and several prominent ladies who go in for right-mindedness and good works in a grim way.
Then the editorial page cartoonist, if there is one, draws a picture of a robust female in a loose wrapper with her head bowed and a broken sword in one hand and an apothecary's scale, with the chains all tangled up, in the other. Or, if there isn't a cartoonist in the house, a drawing drops in by mail from the big syndicate. Now the storm of right-mindedness is gathered together in the forms, and a little while later it begins breaking over the community.
But all the time the two men who kidnapped the young fellow and took him out on a bridge, where they knocked him on the head with a concrete block and threw him into the water, are permanently dead. They did it, and they got theirs and however hard the storm of right-mindedness may blow up, one certain thing is that no lawyer is ever going to get them loose on a writ of habeas corpus or a writ of error based on the fact that some stenographer, in typing the indictment, hit a comma instead of a semicolon. Neither is any Len Small, come to the governor's office ten or fifteen years later, going to turn them loose in payment for some service which some hoodlum politician performed for him in the last election or might perform in the next. Not even Ma Ferguson, of Texas, can pardon a corpse.
The fine theory of all expressions of horror and indignation is that punishment is not supposed to be vengeance but a protective business, whereas the rabble, which constitutes by far the greatest element of the population want to make the murderer suffer as the victim or his family did. And, though they would be willing to let the Law do it for them if the Law could be relied upon, they know too well what lawyers will do when they get a chance to invoke a lot of legal technicalities which were written and passed by lawyers to provide lawyers with opportunities to make money.
I claim authority to speak for the rabble because I am a member of the rabble in good standing, and I claim to know how lawyers work because I have worked around the Courts in the newspaper business long enough to observe that there is never a criminal so vile but that his lawyer, under the pretext of obedience to his duty and by virtue of a lawyer's law enacted to help lawyers cheat other laws, will try to get him loose.
I suspect Scully, at the ripe old age of 49, never read Pegler's philippics in the original. Scully would have been four years old when Pegler was fired from King Features Syndicate after losing a libel suit and biting the hand which fed him. Even the John Birch Society cast Pegler from their ranks for his raucous antisemitism.
It is more likely Scully pulled the quote directly from Pat Buchanan's book "Right From the Beginning". Thus it is that we find the Hockey Mom's squeaky little voice uttering Peglerology in modern times.
But it was ever so: if Liberalism is cursed to discard the wisdom of the past, Conservatism is cursed to cling to to the evil and stupidity of the past. Pegler is not a stuffed crocodile: words live on like land mines, waiting to detonate under the feet of the hapless traveler off the trodden path. That old scamp Pat Buchanan knew who he was quoting, and the younger scamp Scully knew better than to cite the original source.
But we must not be surprised, for Pat Buchanan was an able slime peddler, all on his own. Nobody could shovel the merde like Mr. Inside, and Scully obviously admires that tapeworm Buchanan. In time, future little Conservatives will grow up big and strong: nourished on the pithy epithets of Mr. Inside. I give you one such, for your edification, from the same book from whence the Pegler quote was pulled, Pat Buchanan’s autobiography, Right from the Beginning.
"There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The 'negroes' of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours."
Liberals, at first glance, don't have a lock on intellectual or moral superiority. We are people of ideas and abstract justice. Often our causes are embodied in manifestly awful people like Rodney King. That's why Conservatives hate the ACLU so much: they can't see past the criminal to the underlying injustice meted out. Yes, we Liberals have occasionally been seen within arm's length of many sinister ministers in our time, discreetly shying away from their more obnoxious utterances, viz. Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Our saving grace is that in time, what once seemed radical becomes the norm. There are some pretty funny lawyer jokes in my own repertoire, but nobody can tell me, at any point in time, that a nation of laws could tolerate an extrajudicial execution. Matthew Scully is the latest in a long line of rabble rousers. Gustave le Bon wrote of them
As soon as a certain number of living beings are gathered together, whether they be animals or men, they place themselves instinctively under the authority of a chief.
In the case of human crowds the chief is often nothing more than a ringleader or agitator, but as such he plays a considerable part. His will is the nucleus around which the opinions of the crowd are grouped and attain to identity. He constitutes the first element towards the organization of heterogeneous crowds, and paves the way for their organization in sects; in the meantime he directs them. A crowd is a servile flock that is incapable of ever doing without a master.
The leader has most often started as one of the led. He has himself been hypnotised by the idea, whose apostle he has since become. It has taken possession of him to such a degree that everything outside it vanishes, and that every contrary opinion appears to him an error or a superstition. An example in point is Robespierre, hypnotised by the philosophical ideas of Rousseau, and employing the methods of the Inquisition to propagate them.
The leaders we speak of are more frequently men of action than thinkers. They are not gifted with keen foresight, nor could they be, as this quality generally conduces to doubt and inactivity.
They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness. However absurd may be the idea they uphold or the goal they pursue, their convictions are so strong that all reasoning is lost upon them. Contempt and persecution do not affect them, or only serve to excite them the more. They sacrifice their personal interest, their family -- everything. The very instinct of self-preservation is entirely obliterated in them, and so much so that often the only recompense they solicit is that of martyrdom. The intensity of their faith gives great power of suggestion to their words. The multitude is always ready to listen to the strong-willed man, who knows how to impose himself upon it. Men gathered in a crowd lose all force of will, and turn instinctively to the person who possesses the quality they lack.
Nations have never lacked leaders, but all of the latter have by no means been animated by those strong convictions proper to apostles. These leaders are often subtle rhetoricians, seeking only their own personal interest, and endeavoring to persuade by flattering base instincts. The influence they can assert in this manner may be very great, but it is always ephemeral. The men of ardent convictions who have stirred the soul of crowds, the Peter the Hermits, the Luthers, the Savonarolas, the men of the French Revolution, have only exercised their fascination after having been themselves fascinated first of all by a creed.
They are then able to call up in the souls of their fellows that formidable force known as faith, which renders a man the absolute slave of his dream.