The Press: Who's a Rascal?

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Who's a Rascal

In his syndicated (250 newspapers) column, Westbrook Pegler last week set out to prove that Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt was descended from a thief and traitor, succeeded only in proving that Pegler had been careless with the facts.

Wrote Pegler: "The Empress Eleanor recently made a sentimental journey to the Deep South, and [it] prompted her to prattle discreetly about her fine old aristocratic Southern background. 'My grandmother was a Bulloch from Georgia,' she wrote . . . Nowhere [did she name] that fine old Southern aristocrat who was the father of the Bulloch belle who married the first T.R. . . . The reason . . . might be that his name was Rufus Bulloch, sometimes spelled Bullock, one of the foulest rascals of a day when rascality was truly in flower; a thief, embezzler, grafter, a veritable Quisling, and ... a scalawag."

Pegler's genealogical low-down ran for two editions in the Atlanta Constitution, which was soon besieged by calls from angry Atlantans pointing out how low-down it really was. (King Features had also spotted the error, sent a belated "kill" order.) Two days later, the Constitution sternly corrected Pegler. In his "zeal to defame the Roosevelts," said the newspaper, Pegler had confused the "distinguished Bulloch family of Georgia"-with Rufus Brown Bullock, no Southerner but a damyankee from New York who was the "detested" governor of Georgia in Reconstruction days (1868-71). Mrs. Roosevelt was a Bulloch, not a Bullock.

Caught up, Pegler retracted his error with a sleight-of-hand pass designed to be quicker than readers' eyes. ("Only recently [I] caught myself in the mistaken belief that Rufus Bullock . . . was the great-grandfather of the Empress Eleanor.") In doing so, he pulled another mudball out of his hat. Demanded Pegler, with the air of a man getting to the heart of the matter: "But who, then, was Rufus the rogue? What kin, if any, was he?"