Word: defeatists
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...witnesses were nearly all defeatist about British chances or fearful of provoking Hitler. Two predicted civil war if the U. S. went to war for England. One, Dr. Charles Clayton Morrison, editor of The Christian Century, most vigorously intellectual Protestant religious magazine, and a leading third-term opponent, said that the bill was a "blueprint for dictatorship," equivalent to a declaration of war; accused the President of scaring the people, and declared: "Such a war will not be America's war. It will be the President's war. America has never fought a President...
...duty of the U. S. : to "show the world a nation clear in purpose, united in action, and sacrificial in spirit. The influence of that example upon suffering humanity everywhere will be more power ful than the combined armies of the Axis." The familiar cries of defeatist, appeaser, isolationist, rose shrilly, just as the cries of warmonger had risen after the testimony of the Cabinet officers the week before. Defenders of the bill-Dorothy Thompson. William Bullitt, Major Gen eral John F. O'Ryan-came in with more arguments, all familiar. Ex-Ambassador Bullitt pointed to one difficulty...
...seen little to admire. Dolefully they clumped together in circles like the New Republic and The Nation. Substituting a good deal of intellectual inbreeding for organic contact with U. S. life, they developed a curious cultural provincialism. The Depression came to them as a refreshing change. Fundamentally skeptical, maladjusted, defeatist, the intellectuals felt thoroughly at home in the chaos and misery of the '30s. Fundamentally benevolent and humane, they loved their fellow countrymen in distress far more than they could ever love them in prosperity. And they particularly enjoyed life when applause began to greet their berating...
Last week Britain's R. A. F. announced an important change. Sir Cyril Louis Norton Newall was replaced as Chief of Air Staff by Sir Charles Frederick Algernon Portal, formerly head of the bomber command. Sir Cyril was immediately branded by unofficial gossip as a defeatist, a Chamberlain appointee whom soft-hearted colleagues did not wish to bounce until Chamberlain was bounced, a hard worker but a man in whom the offensive spirit burned somewhat low. It was said that because he is a social butterfly and his wife an American climber, he should be a great success...
What really rubbed Britons the wrong way was enforcement. Last week 17 people were sentenced and fined a total of 123 weeks and ?162 for defeatist chatter, most of it harmless. Harry Blessingdon, a young engineer who had built an airport, was caught telling a Church of England canon about it in a hotel lobby. Sentence: three months, ?60. William Henry Garbett, a Birmingham clerk and Oxford Grouper, said over lunch: "It will be a good job when the British Empire is finished." Sentence: one year. A Leicester schoolteacher, Kathleen Mary Bursnall, got two months, ?20, for saying to soldiers...