G. Washington Assailed

Last week Rupert Hughes, novelist, was invited to speak at a dinner given in Washington, D. C., by the Sons of the American Revolution to honor the 197th anniversary of the birth of Edmund Burke. It was a solemn occasion. Starched faces and haughty shirtfronts hedged the board. Over the coffee cups, Senator Simeon D. Fess of Ohio and Representative R. Walton Moore of Virginia recited fine phrases in praise of Burke. Rupert Hughes got up. He passed quickly from the career of Burke to that of George Washington.

"Washington," he said, "was a great card player, a distiller of whisky and a champion curser, and he danced for three hours without stopping with the wife of his principal general. As for religious tendencies, Washington never prayed and consistently avoided participating in communion."

The school children of the U. S., declared Mr. Hughes, should be taught the historical truth, and in none of the many textbooks could this be found.

Mr. Hughes sat down.

A man with a stony countenance rose from his place across the table. He was Albion K. Parris, onetime president of the District of Columbia Society. Glaring at Mr. Hughes and speaking in a voice thickened and knotted with emotion, he told the company how deeply he regretted the aspersions which their honored guest, the novelist, had cast upon a stainless memory. He said that he did not believe that George Washington was immoral. . . . Down the length of the white cloth, angry heads nodded agreement. Nobody was looking at Mr. Hughes now. The men who sat on each side of him pretended each of them to engage his other neighbor in conversation. It was not that they differed with him in their scholastic findings; they were not familiar with the musty documents from which he had drawn his conclusions; but they had read about George Washington in school and--well, they did not like what he had said.

As the membership was filing out of the room, Mr. Hughes approached Mr. Parris and offered a courteous personal apology. If his remarks had offended Mr. Parris, he was sorry. He had no grudge against Mr. Parris or against George Washington. He had merely been stating what he believed to be the facts.

" You apologize, sir?" boomed Mr. Parris in a voice of thunder. " Apologize, do you?" he shouted, speaking as if for George Washington himself against all the derisive lexicographers of eternity. " Then let me tell you, sir, that I refuse to accept your apology."

Later, the New York World, said: " It would be hard to say which was the sillier--Rupert Hughes . . . or those other guests of the occasion who took the outbreak seriously enough to get vocally angry about it. ... [In addition to what Mr. Hughes said,] Washington also kept hens and a dairy. He was thus a rich butter-and-egg man from the South; but so to describe him would be a long way from characterizing the Washington that matters."

A few hours later Mr. Hughes had an appointment to lecture in Manhattan on current literature. He prefaced this lecture with a description of the " sick tomato" cast at him by Washingtonians and repeated what he had learned from George Washington's diaries.

A voice in the audience shrilled out: " Well, why shouldn't he [curse, dance, distill] ? He was the Father of Our Country!"

And an elderly woman, flustered with indignation, stamped out of the hall. As the ripples of her passage subsided, Mr. Hughes talked on.

*Born in Missouri in 1872, of Virginia and Kentucky stock, Rupert Hughes" passed his boyhood by the Father of Waters, attended Western Reserve University and Yale University, switched from planning to be a professor of English to " doing creative work." He followed the customary course with indefatigable energy, surviving newspaper work, amateurish verse and theatrical failures to "get a success" with a Capital-and-Labor play (The Man Between) in 1909. He wrote boys' books, novels, musical criticism and biography; he edited magazines and encyclopedias, composed popular music, wrote and directed cinemas; he served in the New York National Guard. He married in 1908 (Adelaide Mould), was widowed by suicide in 1923, remarried (Cinema Actress Elizabeth Patterson Dial) last year. He loves cities, realism, excitement. He is acquainted with a wide variety of subjects--from botany and numismatics to Greek literature and Hollywood--but is too versatile to have become known as an authority on any. Tireless, he writes, talks, plays, works continually, alleging that he hates, above all else, to go to bed.