Word: debauch
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Think of a government spending nearly $20,000,000 to debauch its youth!" cried Mrs. Alice Foote MacDougall, famed operatrix of tea and coffee shops in Manhattan, in a Plain Talk article...
...possible that Thomas Whelpley experienced the episodes which he described. But to many a newspaperman it seemed clear that in the present debauch of "ghostwriting" a depraved press had gone so far as to persuade a preacher to join the ranks of sporting characters and society women who lie for money...
...century ago, the gangster appeared in Manhattan's congested "Five Points" and "Paradise Square," near the Tombs of today. Collect Pond was draining so poorly into the canal that is now a street, that respectable citizens left the swamps to low-class Irish and Negroes, companions in debauch. Fighting in their undershirts, with brickbats, bludgeons, paving stones, knives and guns, the sluggers ganged up: Plug Uglies, Dead Rabbits (then slang for rowdy toughs), Shirt Tails, Roach Guards, Gophers. Besides aimless roughhouse, just for the hell of it, they conducted elaborate hold-ups with prostitutes as decoys, robbed ships...
...whose love-antics are the most varied and delectable. But the gods, jealous of mortal contentment, sent a pestilence-the evil of goodness. Infected by goodness, mortals grew dull and spiritless as they debated dismally the line between good and evil. Their old tendency toward pleasures took vent in debauch, and the gods cared no longer to consort with them...
...states have abolished capital punishment, there remaining forty that have preserved it, although they differ in procedure, most of them favoring electrocution or hanging. In any of these states when an execution takes place publicity is not lacking and the readers of the press are treated to an emotional debauch. In the eight states that deprive their citizens of the thrills attendant upon an execution, there is substituted the fascinating possibility that the offenders may some day again be at large to provide a little more entertainment. The result is pretty much the same. Violent death seems consistently exciting...