Word: ethical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...active, too witty or too cheerful. Praise is reserved for the young lady whose "gentle bosom burns,/ Like lamps plac'd near sepulchral urns,/ Or like the glowworm in the night,/ It gleams with melancholy light." Although John Adams is not an avowed adherent of this ethic, its influence is apparent in his recent explanation of why women should be denied the vote: "Their delicacy renders them unfit for practice and experience in the great businesses of life...
...most prevalent type of academic dishonesty, however, is plagiarism. As U.C.L.A. Dean of Students Byron H. Atkinson notes, plagiarism "has always been something in the scholarly ethic that transcends rape and murder." Harvard students talk of the undergraduate who made five copies of a friend's paper on "The Nature of War," used it unchanged in five courses ranging from Sociology to Morals, and got grades...
...victim of this plague of sophistication is Farmer Herkimer ("Heck") Brown, Ma's son-in-law, who has taken up with a fast crowd in Middle City. Heck now wears E.E. Cummings T shirts, affects an "inner-city laugh" and argues that both monogamy and the Puritan work ethic are strictly for the crows. When Wife Hattie asks him to dust the crops, Heck quips, "Oh, the maid will dust them...
...return for these wordly advantages, the Puritan ethic dictates the covenant's quid: a sense of mission, "presumably divinely inspired," engendered in each Winthrop as expiation or compensation for his headstart in life. That mission takes many forms. To Governor John Winthrop (1630), the mission entails hounding a religious non-conformist out of the young Massachusetts Bay Colony, in the interest, he believes, of public welfare. To Adam (1902), it means maintaining the standards of Society and the elitism of the Patroon Club by throwing a judicious blackball. Later, John (1967) serves as an advocate for the status quo, hawkishly...
Unfortunately, the author's deep involvement with his novel transforms his work from a historical chronicle of a distinguished New England family to a pointed deposition--sketched on yellow legal paper--on the Puritan ethic. Through all his talk of covenants, missions and Puritan ideals runs an annoying smugness. Novelists John Marquand and John O'Hara also assayed the WASP upper crust in their writings, but rarely presumed to give their characters a moral or aesthetic superiority over the Great Unwashed. Auchincloss, on the other hand, hints that his Winthrops are not only different from you and me, they...