Word: genteelism
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...Genteel Socialist. He was the only child of affluent German-Jewish parents (his father was a successful clothing manufacturer in New York City). Walter's early memories were of brownstone comforts, horse-and-buggy rides through Central Park, frequent trips to Europe. He entered Harvard with the class of 1910. There he absorbed William James' challenge to test all hand-me-down truths against the pragmatic standards of experience and reason...
Lippmann left Cambridge a genteel Socialist, worked for a year on Lincoln Steffens' muckraking Everybody's Magazine. His first book, A Preface to Politics, was written after he served a brief stint as secretary to the Rev. George R. Lunn of Schenectady, N.Y., one of America's first Socialist mayors. But no dogma could contain Lippmann for long. He soon abandoned Socialism-but not all of its causes-and in 1914 became one of the founders of the liberal New Republic...
...plight of black slaves strangely blended with a massive contempt for Irish workers. By helping to create and run a society that kept poor blacks and whites fighting for its leavings, these people helped to nourish the roots of racism, even though they discriminated only in the most genteel ways--much like Harvard today, with its fashionably mild distaste for the Afro-American Studies Department and its yearly production of a crop of youth to fill the houses of suburbia. If Saturday's student marchers end up as part of that crop of youth, the march--though it will still...
Nevertheless Bland's most effective moments come when he makes a mockery of the white "attempts" at jazz. At first he cuts away from the genteel party to street scenes of lower class blacks accompanied by some appropriately blue jazz tunes. Then he wickedly splices to a serene snow scene with an unperturbed upper crust executive getting off a suburban local; next, he cuts even deeper to a white woman nonchalantly trimming the white locks of her baby poodle. All this, to a background of pristine Brubeckian pop, a cruel contrast to the rest of the film's dynamic, gutsy...
Dutch Cleanser, Jane (Carole Shelley), who treats dust spots as germs. Her husband Sidney (Larry Blyden) is a shopkeeper who seems destined for smaller things. Their guests arrive. Ronald (Richard Kiley) is an upper-class banker of such genteel indifference that he reads a washing-machine manual while Sidney smarmily courts...