Word: gold
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...prominent figure in fashionable salons," who got across the border into Germany just in time. Unnamed secret policemen conferred with Scotland Yard. A suave and charming investment broker ("known in political circles throughout Europe") ran luxurious offices in the Place de la Madeleine, had $13,250,000 in Nazi gold to spend, used two or three clever and beautiful women, two clever private detectives, and a Dictaphone, in carrying on his devious and expensive work...
After 1850 Western mines produced an average $50,000,000 a year in gold and silver. That golden figure is the key to the uneven lives and works of San Francisco's frontier writers. With few exceptions, gold brought them West. Gold brought the sophisticated, cosmopolitan population, the wealth and leisure that make readers, writers and publishers. Because gold was elusive, restlessness and skepticism became a familiar literary tradition. Because male Argonauts outnumbered female twelve to one, traditions of rough-&-ready humor and violence grew apace...
California gold and Nevada silver built the mansions on Nob Hill (where Mark Twain dreamed of living some day), bought the elegant, satin-lined carriages that rolled over San Francisco's plank streets. They paid for San Franciscans' one-pound gold watches, their champagne (seven bottles to Bostonians' one), their imported building stone from China, accounted as well for San Francisco's 1,000 yearly suicides...
...Gold gave San Francisco 13 dailies, several times as many weeklies, literary journals which flourished without advertising. These combined serious poems with miners' correspondence, frontier burlesque and tall tales with such polished articles as "An Epitome of Goethe's Faust," pirated novels such as Bleak House with condensed news columns called "Eastern intelligence." ("One of the pioneers of Washoe, James A. Rogers, blew his brains out, September 2nd. Cause: discouraged...
Editors of the Pioneer, the Golden Era, the Overland Monthly, the Californian were such resourceful amateurs as Sam Brannon, wildcat Mormon leader who got rich collecting tithes from gold prospectors; Ferdinand C. Ewer, tall, goateed, atheist Harvardman who later became an Episcopal rector; Charles Henry Webb, lisping, redheaded ex-sailor and miner, wit and lady-killer, who fled to California to escape the Civil War. (In the second year of the war, 100,000 army deserters and pacifists rolled into California. Among them was a slouchy ex-river pilot named Samuel Clemens...