From nojo:
Westbrook Pegler, a name you may barely recognize at best, coined the term “bleeding-heart liberal” in 1938. The occasion was a bill before Congress, proposing an action he felt unnecessary.
Curbing lynching.
“I question the humanitarianism of any professional or semi-pro bleeding heart,” he wrote in his syndicated column, “who clamors that not a single person must be allowed to hunger but would stall the entire legislative program in a fight to ham through a law intended, at the most optimistic figure, to save fourteen lives a year.”
It’s not that Pegler was racist — heavens, no! — but that the bill pandered to “crowded northern Negro centers”.
That’s what he said, anyway.
It’s also what he said twenty-three years later, this time aiming at Freedom Riders in Jackson, Mississippi:
“It is a mocking comment on the mawkish generosity of the American character that the bands of insipid futilities of the type called bleeding hearts can invade one of the finest American cities and arouse a howling national uproar of indignation, disgust, pity and shame.”
Again, not racist! Just questioning their tactics! Just a coincidence that the tactics involve responses to white terrorism and oppression!
Pegler all but owned the term until the 1960s. Folks who have looked into this can find only one other significant early citation — Joe McCarthy in 1954, describing nemesis Edward R. Murrow as “a member of the extreme left wing, bleeding-heart element of radio and television”.