Word: firsts
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week, 64 years after he arrived in the U.S. from his native Germany and 44 years after he undertook his first public office (as a New York State assemblyman), 72 year-old Senator Robert F. Wagner said his farewell to politics. The famed old liberal, long disabled by the infirmities of age, wrote: "My turn has come to step down ... I have had my fair share of shining hours when the country approved my labors and when I saw the reforms for which I struggled so firmly established that many took them for granted...
...headlines, did not speak for Alabama. By an 84-to-4 vote, the state legislature made it a misdemeanor ($500 fine, or a year in jail) to appear in public wearing a mask. The bill, quickly signed and put into effect by Governor Jim Folsom, was the first anti-masking law enacted in the deep South since reconstruction days...
Trojan Horse. Dimitrov was "born (1882) in the village of Radomir, Bulgaria; his parents were among Bulgaria's few Congregationalists. Georgi's first rebellion was refusal to go to Sunday school. At twelve he went to work in a print shop and at 15 became active in the printers' union. His mother remembered him as a good boy whom she rarely had to punish because "he never lied...
...became a Communist, spent years in jail for his revolutionary activities. Forced to flee Bulgaria in 1923, he first went to Vienna, later to Berlin. After the Reichstag trial, he became a Soviet citizen. As chief of the Comintern (1935-43), he propounded the Popular Front policy with extreme candor. "Comrades," he told the Comintern's 7th World Congress, "you recall the old legend of the Conquest of Troy . . . We revolutionaries should use the same strategy...
...first year of Marshall Plan grants the U.S. had tried to spice its aid with a small inducement to encourage intra-European trade. Some $800 million of the U.S. grants were conditional. To get them, the receiving country had to surrender an equal amount of its own currency to a third nation. Thus Britain, in order to receive ECA dollars, made sterling available to France, enabling France to buy British machinery. Such secondary grants were known as drawing rights...