Word: autocrats
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Wrens and Marmalade. Young Wendell was raised among Boston's Brahmins by a father whose eccentricities plagued his son more than a storm of briefs. Dr. Holmes was noted professionally for his researches into puerperal fever. But he was famous as an indefatigable essayist and light versifier. His Autocrat of the Breakfast Table had impressed even the Germans - who read it under the some what imperious title, Der Tisch-Despot...
...Autocrat Holmes presided over a family (he had two boys, one girl) who chattered like "a nest of wrens" (whoever was wittiest at table was awarded an extra spoon ful of marmalade). "Don't take it so hard, Wendell," said Uncle John Holmes when the doctor wrote whimsical articles about his son in the Atlantic Monthly. "You will get used to your father. I did, long...
...autocrat to his finger tips, Cardinal O'Connell was a remote figure to most of the 23 million U.S. Catholics. But they heard him often. He thundered against Hollywood ("the scandal of the nation"), Albert Einstein's theories ("authentic atheism, even if camouflaged as cosmic pantheism"), radio crooners ("whiners crying vapid words"), mercy killings ("suffering is the discipline of humanity"), morals in general ("women are becoming masculine and the men effeminate"). He denounced immoral styles, told his priests they might refuse Holy Communion to women with lipstick...
...columnist is the autocrat of the most prodigious breakfast table ever known. He is the voice beside the cracker barrel amplified to transcontinental dimensions. He is the only nonpolitical figure of record who can clear his throat each day and say, 'Now, here's what I think. . .' with the assurance that millions will listen . . . [but] in a sense he is irresponsible. No newspaper stands or falls by his words. In him . . . the newspapers have found a method of restoring their lost personal fire without possibly awkward aftermaths...
Oberndorf's interpretations of Holmes's words sometimes seem farfetched. But in the light of Freudian psychiatry many of Holmes's aphorisms assume striking new meanings: e.g., "The woman a man loves is always his own daughter." The autocrat of the breakfast table, says Oberndorf, well understood the Oedipus and other complexes...