Word: brogans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Investigator William F. ("Bill") Brogan, tall, lean ex-rancher and newspaperman, well remembers the look of the adolescents who were hauled in after the three-sided gang-fight. "They were mighty rough kids. Under the usual procedure, I would have . . . placed them in the county jail. . . but I herded the 14 boys into the chief's office and locked myself up in there with them, removed my pistol and coat. In the bunch I had two rough gang leaders. They had attained leadership with their fists and could have torn me to pieces. One was of Mexican descent...
...Denis Brogan is a new and apparently nattering kind of debunker: he thinks that Americans have played up the romance of their history, played down the realities...
...Americans like to think of themselves as horselaughing individualists. In fact, says Brogan. ever since pioneer days the American wife, mother and schoolteacher have done a pretty successful job of making the menfolk conform. Town-proud Americans have felt that free-for-all "crab bing" is no way to build up a continent, have had short patience with individual ists and dissenters...
...American romantics like Walt Whit man have cried that democratic Americans "rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons." But the U.S., says Brogan, "was made by politicians" - types who readily indulged in romantic rhetoric but were basically "matter-of-fact men . . . with a clear head for bookkeeping." "To have created a free government . . . without making a sacrifice of adequate efficiency or of liberty is the American achievement...
...Americans have also romanticized their military qualities. The Union, says Brogan, has been admirably preserved from the time of the Indian Wars to World War II by "patience, prudence, the massing of superior forces." A soldier like General Custer is simply a "horrible example, to be digested and then forgotten...