Word: closers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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What Mark Twain Meant. Since 1937, the Nine had taken themselves pretty well out of the headlines, but they had made news nonetheless. Closer to the tradition of Holmes and Brandeis than to that of Hughes, they had plowed under old and respected landmarks; they had overturned, altogether, some 30 previous decisions of the Supreme Court; they had struck out boldly, sometimes brashly, into new grounds. Other courts had split more violently, but no court had quarreled so continuously and rambunctiously with itself, Whereas in the '20s and '30s the courts found themselves in solid agreement some...
Remarkable Reform. By 1947, some of the boys were running wild enough-gambling and crapshooting in dark corners of the Capitol-to make Congress yank the rein. The old school was replaced by the present District branch; an age limit of 14 to 18 was set; closer control was imposed on after-hours activities. At the same time, tuition was dropped, salaries boosted, and uniforms of all pages made uniform, except for the knee-breeches which the Supreme Court still requires...
...read it to find out what happened to the grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It is a more orderly and down-to-earth book than its predecessors, its characters more credible, its melodrama more restrained. But it is oddly less interesting for being more plausible, and less convincing for being closer to a recognizable environment. Part of the difficulty is that the plot seems to have been trimmed down to the proportions of a cinema scenario. Part of it is that the flamboyance and stage effects of the earlier books do not mix with the doings of backwoods storekeepers or squabbles...
...Clark did not meet squarely the original question of Communists as teachers, but he did show eloquently the danger of Mr. Ober's philosophy: ". . . How could an effective 'closer watch' on 'extracurricular activities' be maintained unless the watch extended to conversations and correspondence? . . . What sort of a place would Harvard be if it went down this road? It would . . . not require six months to destroy the morale of both our teachers and students, and therefore our usefulness to the country...
...Clark and the Corporation have now told Mr. Ober and others who would use Mr. Conant's stand on Communism as an excuse for heresy-hunting that at Harvard "there will be no apparatus of inquiry and 'closer watch.' The harm done by the effort to discover even a single clandestine Party Member would outweigh any possible benefit...