Word: algerisms
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Eros and Violence. During the first of these interruptions, West wrote a capitalist Candide called A Cool Million (1934). Political in intent, the book puts a cute left spin on the old Horatio Alger story and burlesques the American Dream as a horribly funny fascist nightmare. West was never a Communist but in 1935 his radical sympathies were strengthened by the experience of being down and out on the seamy side of Hollywood. Supported by S.J. Perelman, who had married his sister, West lived in the Pa-Va-Sed, a scabby little apartment hotel in the lower depths of movieland...
Haldeman joined the advertising firm of J. Walter Thompson in 1949, just as the Alger Hiss trial was in full swing, and again found himself under the spell of a crusading Nixon. By 1956 he had joined Nixon as an advance man and within four years, he was chief of the advance men in the presidential campaign. "I labeled him the chief of the frogmen because he and his crew were always hopping about," says Herb Klein. "His wife collects artificial frogs even...
...when Chambers testified that Alger Hiss had been an espionage agent of Moscow, he hoped to awaken America to the relentless political struggles of the era. The country was not ready for the revelation. What resulted was no intellectual inquiry but a raw political charade of blame and guilt. The Left was deeply discredited. The Right was besmirched and divided by the tac tics of Senator McCarthy. Almost everyone, liberals in particular, heaped abuse on Chambers, who was regarded, at worst, as some sort of a malignant monster; at best, as an informer who had nothing to offer...
What makes the case of the Chicago Seven special is the breakdown of discipline in a court of law, a problem unparalleled even in celebrated trials of this century that carried strong political overtones-Sacco and Vanzetti, Alger Hiss, the eleven Communist leaders in the 1949 Dennis case. Undoubtedly a greater share of the blame for the breakdown rests on the defendants than on the judge. Still, Boston Attorney Herbert Ehrmann, who defended Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the 1920s, says of the Chicago trials: "The conduct of the judge and the actions of the defendants were all disgraceful...
...Middle American strategy. The South is only one part of the Middle America that Nixon has installed in Washington. His Administration?with such exceptions as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Henry Kissinger?is like the reunion photograph of a Depression class that rose to the top by Horatio Alger virtues. Interior Secretary Walter Hickel arrived in Alaska at the age of 20, with 37¢ in his pocket. George Romney, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is the son of a Mormon who was driven out of Mexico by Pancho Villa and supported his ten children for a time...