Word: curmudgeon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Like Fenimore Cooper, Strong was something of the professional old codger, the cultured curmudgeon who stands in fierce, often prejudiced judgment on his age. At times, as when he declares Americans "the windiest people extant" and deplores the inclination of democracies to undervalue great men, he resembles Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America). And when he lambastes his native land for coarse materialism and imperialist forays ("Texas is annexed. I think I'll expatriate myself"), he anticipates Henry Adams. But what makes his diary good reading for Americans is its reflection of an individual mind which...
...long and highly articulate career ended with death in Washington of "the Old Curmudgeon," once F.D.R...
Early one morning this week, Harold Ickes, ill for many weeks, lapsed into a semicoma at Headwaters Farm, his 200-acre Maryland estate, 15 miles outside Washington. He was rushed to Washington's Emergency Hospital with a fast-weakening heart. A few hours later, the Old Curmudgeon died...
...Chicago ran the vast domain of the Department of the Interior, and anything else he could get his hands on. He was "Honest Harold," bristling with incorruptibility, and so suspicious of everybody that he organized a private detective force to keep his department straitlaced. He was the "Old Curmudgeon," with a belligerent aggressiveness, a flair for day-to-day administration, a childish temper and a tongue like a branding iron...
Died. Harold Leclair Ickes, 77, self-styled "Old Curmudgeon," longtime New Deal hatchet man and Franklin D. Roosevelt's only Secretary of the Interior (1933-46); of complications from arthritis; in Washington, D.C. (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS...