Word: pegler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Only Defense. Mrs. McCullough, cheered on by Society Columnist Igor Cassini ("Cholly Knickerbocker" of the New York Journal-American), Columnists George Sokolsky, Westbrook Pegler, Bill Cunningham and Radiorator Fulton Lewis Jr., and backed by some $28,000 (mostly in small bills) from thousands of sympathizers, had made the only defense she could: that her charge of pro-Communism against Adler and Draper was the truth...
Columnist Westbrook Pegler predicted that the present literary scene "might fairly be labeled by critics in the future, the golden age of garbage." Anyway, said Pegler, who used to be a good reporter himself, and careful of his facts, "fiction is a cowardly medium. The fictioneer needn't defend his position or accept the responsibility for the harm he does...
...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...
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...