The Man Who Made Bleeding Heart into an Insult

Long before there was the supposedly insulting label "social justice warrior," there was "bleeding-heart liberal."

Sarah Laskow, writing for Atlas Obscura, revealed the origins of that term.

Westbrook Pegler was extremely good at calling people names. Particularly politicians. In his syndicated newspaper column, he called Franklin D. Roosevelt “Moosejaw” and “momma’s boy.” Truman was “a thin-lipped hater.”

Pegler was a bit of hater himself. He didn’t like the labor movement, Communists, fascists, Jews, and perhaps most of all, liberals. In one 1938 column, he coined a term for liberals that would eventually come to define conservative scorn for the left. Pegler was the first writer to refer to liberals as “bleeding hearts.” The context for this then-novel insult? A bill before Congress that aimed to curb lynching....

Pegler first used “bleeding heart” in a column castigating liberals in Washington for their focus on “a bill to provide penalties for lynchings.” Pegler wasn’t for lynchings, per se, but he argued that they were no longer a problem the federal government should solve: there had only been eight lynchings in 1937, he wrote, and “it is obvious that the evil is being cured by local processes.” The bill, he thought, was being “used as a political bait in crowded northern Negro centers.” ...

Pegler was apparently pleased enough with this use of “bleeding heart” that he kept it up. He later wrote of “professional bleeding hearts” who advocated for “collective medicine” after a woman couldn’t find a doctor to help her through labor, and lobbed the insult of “bleeding heart Bourn” at a rival, left-leaning columnist. By 1940, he had condensed the phrase down to “bleeding-heart humanitarians” and “bleeding-heart liberals.”

Pegler’s usage did not immediately catch on, though. (Perhaps that’s because he went on to become so right-wing that he was asked to leave the John Birch Society.)....

“Bleeding heart” was revived in a political context in 1954, by another infamous right-winger, Joe McCarthy, who called Edward R. Murrow one of the “extreme Left Wing bleeding-heart elements of television and radio.”

So that's the company this particular phrase has kept: anti-lynching laws, access to health care, anti-McCarthyism. All causes I am happy to associate with and that were part of what I used to think was the U.S. consensus position.

Pegler's success in making up names for people he didn't like sounds an awful lot like another current political figure. Except no one thought to run Pegler for president of the United States.