Word: duffus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...York Times, Critic R. L. Duffus examined the commission's complaint that papers judge news by " 'recency or firstness, proximity, combat, human interest and novelty.' . . . Such recommended items as 'decrease of intolerance' or 'increase in the sale of books of biography and history' do get attention when you can put a finger on them. ... A newspaper devoted largely to undramatized 'significant' news would not last long. This is human nature...
Robert L. Duffus, of the New York Times editorial staff, is a highly competent journalist and a philosophical anarchist with an acute sympathy for the underdog. He is also a living refutation of the theory that the New York Times can make no use of a journalist who is left of center...
...Duffus hails from a small town in Vermont. He got his schooling at California's Leland Stanford, worked for Editor Fremont Older's San Francisco Bulletin, the New York Globe under Bruce Bliven, and regularly comes through with a novel, a biography or some other book every second or third year, written with competence, measured skepticism and social sympathies. Duffus' latest book, The Innocents at Cedro: A Memoir of Thorstein Veblen and Some Others, suggests that he got a great deal of his color, flavor and method during a year (1907-08) spent as an adolescent dishwasher...
Father of Technocracy. The dates and facts of Veblen's life will not be found in Duffus' graceful, charming, nostalgic memoir. A farm boy from a Norwegian settlement in Minnesota, Veblen had the habit of looking at the U.S. economic and social systems as though he were an aloof and coldly calculating anthropologist from another culture. He wrote sardonic books about the workings of the U.S. economy in a style that seems "desperately accurate" to some, a sort of elephantine, academic pig Latin to others...
...Veblen is also the father of the so-called "Institutional" economists who try to describe the workings of the economic system without imputing either praise or blame. Duffus argues that Veblen was less interested in fostering a revolution than he was in describing what went on around him. Duffus recalls how Veblen shocked him one evening by remarking that there was one thing to be said for capitalism, "It works...