Word: commoner
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...words have been carefully chosen and oft-times repeated. His initial task, as he states it, is to awaken Massachusetts to its precarious financial situation. He blames the Republicans for leaving the "largest budget, the greatest debt, the biggest deficit and the worst state credit rating" in the Common-wealth's history, but at the same time he is seeking increased state spending for social services and access to new sources of revenue. "Our financial situation," he concluded in one of his three inaugural messages, "is the worst it has been in the history of the Commonwealth...
...that war has been healed by the international crisis, which has placed us all in the same sinking boat, by the spread of liberal education, and by the comforting new ministrations of religion and political philosophy. Today, out of many, we are one. This reunion may have enriched the common stock, but it has also certainly eliminated the cream...
...regards a soldier's calling as holy, for he believes that God is a fellow Prussian. When his monocle glints, junior officers blanch. But just as no man is a hero to his valet, so no general is a demigod to his driver. Sergeant Major Horlacher is as common as dirt, and plays an ironic Sancho Panza to Von Puckhammer's Don Quixote...
...Franklin Delano Roosevelt of Herbert Hoover: "He is certainly a wonder and I wish we could make him President . . . There could not be a better one." By 1932, no two men lived in colder enmity. In F.D.R.'s view. Hoover had become a dragon who was devouring the common man. To Hoover, Roosevelt was at worst an economic madman, at best a mere "featherduster" (the nickname had been devised by kindly friends who considered F.D.R. a mental lightweight, a view then shared by Mr. Justice Holmes and Pundit Walter Lippmann. among others). In the first of four volumes...
Black & White. Schlesinger lays down a line that many historians will find hard to toe: business during the early years of the 20th century pretty much ran the U.S. Under Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, the common man had found champions whose influence petered out after World War I. Prosperity left the liberals crying in the wilderness, and businessmen plundered and ruined the economic system. The big boys were so greedy that they not only killed the goose that laid the golden egg but ate it without offering the ordinary man so much as a bone. The country...