Word: dreamer
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Back in September 1929, when world prosperity still nourished world idealism, that great dreamer Aristide Briand started talking about "The United States of Europe." He even went so far as to send a circular to 26 Governments asking them what they thought about federation. Only three were enthusiastic. Their names are significant: Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Yugoslavia...
Henry Wallace, 51, Secretary of Agriculture, author of Corn and Corn Growing, onetime editor of Wallace's Farmer, has a reputation as the dreamer of the Roosevelt Administration. He is, says Arthur Krock, "a high-minded, thoughtful man, a progressive, one of the best writers in the New Deal, compassionate and intelligent." But, adds Mr. Krock-like many an observer before him-the Secretary has no sense of timing. When the slaughtered pigs are better forgotten, according to all New Deal strategists, he delivers a carefully phrased explanation of the policy that led to their slaughtering; addressing restive, hard...
Transcendentalists complained that he was too practical ("Strictly speaking," said Henry, "morality is not healthy"). Religious folk called him an infidel ("One world at a time," said Thoreau when a friend came to his death bed to talk about the next world). "Practical men" called him a dreamer and escapist, were annoyed at his criticism of their pioneering ("a filibustering toward heaven by the great western route"). Poets thought him too science-minded, his language too earthy. Conservatives thought his Civil Disobedience revolutionary ("I do not care to trace the course of my dollar . . . till it buys...
...metaphysics." One night in 1933, he now recalls, he woke up with an idea for an economic cureall, forthwith explained it to his wife and two daughters. They did not understand it. Minor Pierce Long nevertheless went ahead with his Ray System Corporation, Inc. As has many another fiscal dreamer, he proposed to issue patented, pink & blue Raychecks in denominations of 50? to $10, have merchants redeem them in goods or U. S. currency at face value. Redemption funds would come from consumers, who would have to buy stamps and paste them on their Raychecks each week...
...Joyce's method is new. Dreams exist as sensation or impression, not as speech. Words are spoken in dreams, but they are usually not the words of waking life, may be capable of multiple meanings, or may even be understood in several different senses by the same dreamer at the same moment. Since dreams take place in a state of suspended consciousness, out of which language itself arises, Joyce creates, in Finnegans Wake, a dream language to communicate the dream itself...