Word: devoto
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...such a well-mannered magazine as the Saturday Review of Literature, the experience was a shock - but the shock was not limited to the magazine. In 1936 a scrappy, pug-nosed man from Utah took over as editor. His name, Bernard DeVoto, soon became a synonym for the atrabilious type of crusader who seems perpetually to be throwing a tantrum. Sinclair Lewis, one of his early targets, called him "a tedious and egotistical fool . . . a pompous and boresome liar." "What," asked Critic Edmund Wilson, "is Mr. DeVoto's real grievance . . . this continual boiling up about other people...
Over the years, Bernard DeVoto did indeed strike wildly, but more often than not he struck home. On speakers' platforms, in his books, and from "The Easy Chair" in Harper's Magazine, he lectured the nation on everything from its airplane service to its conservation policies to the methods of the FBI. He deplored, denounced, defied, but he seemed to do so out of a passionate fondness for America that made even the tiniest fault seem an outrage. He called himself a "critic of culture." He was actually a challenge. "We have fought at Arques," he recently told...
Shortage of water will soon stop the increase in population and industry in the West, DeVoto claimed. "Either Arizona or California will have to stop expanding, and then both will," he said...
...therefore essential to retain the the vast forests on mountain sides, the only natural watersheds of the West, DeVoto said. Special interest groups have always sought to destroy these natural protections, however, and today under the Republican administration they have obtained powerful influence in the governmental control agencies, he added to the audience...
...special interest groups get control of these lands the West will be bankrupt in less than a generation," DeVoto predicted. "The problem is that of preserving the West, not just the beauty of the forests. If the West goes bankrupt, so will the rest of the country," he said...