Word: americans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...executive who had his parents moved from an unfashionable cemetery to a posher last resting place. The trouble is that too much of what Author Packard observes is old hat, such as the upper-class preference for old hats over flashy new ones. He over-generalizes. One dubious example: Americans of Anglo-Saxon ancestry like to point to their past by living in Early American, white clapboard houses, while Jews prefer modern architecture, since no one would credit them with an Early American ancestry anyway. And, searching for meanings, he wildly overinterprets. Example: American women do not like to ride...
...times Packard is patently misinformed, as when he asserts that class structures are more flexible in Britain than in the U.S., and he over-sentimentalizes the American past, suggesting that only yesterday Horatio Alger was king. "Status striving" to him seems to be a modern menace, and he writes of it with scant mention of Thorstein ("conspicuous consumption") Veblen or of the massive, fascinating and often exhilarating social climbs described by Balzac, Stendhal, Jane Austen...
Interesting though much of Packard's evidence may be, it never really proves his basic point that U.S. class lines are hardening. In fact it suggests just the opposite-a continually changing social scene. At one point Packard himself concedes that the "American populace [is] arranged along a continuum [with] a series of bulges and contractions." Much of what Packard describes as status seeking is indeed foolish, and some of it may be evil; but much of it is also the result of man's human status, and the product of a free and mobile society...
...husband, "cloaked inevitably and perpetually by the shadow of his father's fame," that lifts these meticulous, glittering reminiscences by Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. into the category of memorable U.S. biography. Her book is dedicated to her belief that Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (1887-1944) is an undiscovered great American...
...Smith & Ows Poll. In the T.R. tradition, Ted Roosevelt leaped into postwar politics and made a success at it. He was elected and re-elected to the New York state assembly, wife Eleanor making 26 speeches on his behalf. He also helped found the American Legion. Like T.R., he was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy-but where T.R. had used the job at century's turn to build up the fleet, Ted, in normalcy 1921-24, had to preside over disarmament negotiations. And when, in 1924, Ted put on a 15-speech -a-day campaign with the same...