Word: bigs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Glad-handing Louis Johnson was a big joiner; he became Exalted Ruler of the Elks, president of Rotary, national commander of the American Legion. In the Legion he first came to Franklin Roosevelt's notice by silencing a Legion outcry when Roosevelt cut veterans' pensions in 1933. After ex-Governor Harry Woodring of Kansas became Secretary of War in 1936, Roosevelt called fire-eating Louis Johnson in as his assistant, in charge of all procurement and industrial mobilization...
Afternoons, the Senate dozed through the filibuster fight, but in the mornings, in the big committee rooms on Capitol Hill, Senators worked away at writing bills. There, too, men who disagreed widened their disagreements...
Washington society persists chiefly because the capital is one of the world's most boring cities. It is a city of history, monuments and no industry. Its big men are strangers to it and to one another. Its natives live in it like caretakers in a museum, scornful of the gawking tourists, keeping aloof from the public gaze, resentful of being crowded, vaguely proud of the privilege of darting through the doors marked "private." It has no theater, little music, no night life of note, no distinguished restaurants. Washington society is an exhaustive effort of Washingtonians to have...
...Big Business. Next to Government, society is Washington's biggest business. Its annual expenditure runs to tens of millions of dollars. It absorbs the energies of 40 or 50 top-flight hostesses, debutantes, party consultants, 25 society columnists and writers, and assorted sycophants and camp followers...
...gilded, gaslight age, the cave dwellers (native Washington society) took over. The last of their queens were wealthy Mrs. John R. McLean, a Virginia lady of formidable presence, and her convivial, raucous daughter-in-law, Evalyn Walsh McLean, who died in 1947. Evalyn wore a diamond (the Hope) as big as a tiger's eye, and called men impartially "darlin' boy." At her crowded parties (at the old and new "Friendship"), men had to bring their brains with them; Evalyn delighted in pairing mortal enemies at dinner. Said an old friend, admiringly: "Evalyn had spite...