Word: basest
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last month, a few days before he was formally received among the "forty immortals," Charles Maurras was challenged to a duel. Challenger was Jean Prouvost, publisher of Paris-Soir, whom Maurras had charged with "flattering the basest instincts of the masses." Maliciously courteous, Publisher Prouvost offered, in view of Maurras' extreme age and deafness, to fight any proxy he might name. Academician Maurras declined the challenge, but not because of old age. "So far as my age is concerned," said he, "M. Prouvost can rest assured that it has left me all my strength. But I shall not employ...
...nervous, embattled Tom Watson of Thomson, only nine years old when the war ended, who began as a champion of the poor farmers, became a Populist candidate for President, and wound up as a rabble-rouser, an anti-Semite, anti-Catholic, defender of lynching, with a reputation as the "basest, most depraved, most poisonous man in Georgia...
...punch of that fine old vituperator, David Lloyd George. Once more, the fiery Welshman wagged his forefinger in the faces of members of the Cabinet, calling them "Yellows!" "The London Committee on Spanish Non-Intervention" (see p. 21), shouted Orator Lloyd George, shaking his hoary, tousled head, "is the basest fraud ever perpetrated by great nations on a weak people...
...that their predicament is a common complaint: they seem to be the offspring of a whole town full of vandeville players who hit the road and leave the children to fare for themselves or go to the governmentally sponsored "farm", where, it is universally agreed, nothing obtains but the basest of slavery. So the youths rise in arms. Their actions are not youthful or particularly appropriate to any stage of human life for that matter, and their speech, nothing if not funny, is not even that save in two or three eminent instances. But the exuberance is there in full...
Same year New York's President of Police Commissioners Theodore Roosevelt took a leaf from current melodrama, declared: "There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American . . . bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses-whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter...