Word: great
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Result, in 1939: big U. S. incomes are taxed up to 75%. Within sight, if U. S. leveling tradition holds good, says Author Myers, is the time when taxation will have done for inherited wealth what the repeal of primogeniture and entail did for the great landed estates. In 1930 a Van Rensselaer heir died leaving...
...horse, Socialist-minded Chicago publisher printed a small edition of Gustavus Myers' History of the Great American Fortunes. Its author was a fact-worshipping reporter of Philadelphia and Manhattan who had spent eight years digging out his facts. No other publisher would touch it-they feared it was "of such a nature ... as to get us into a great deal of trouble." Declared a typical nose-holding review (New York Times): "It leaves such a bad taste in the mouth that readers may be cordially advised to read something else...
Most college libraries banned the book. But its word-of-mouth reputation grew; Congressmen took to quoting it; its facts were a gold mine for left-wing cribbers. By 1936 the Modern Library edition (sales: 25,000) could say honestly that the History of the Great American Fortunes was a semi-classic of research. Author Myers has never been sued for libel...
When the Romanovs 'came to the throne 300 years ago they were "provincial nobodies." They managed, in their time, to produce three colossal figures (Alexander I, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great), one kind man (Alexander II, who freed the serfs, was killed by a bomb). The rest were monsters, comic grotesques, mental cases, or blank nonentities: calf-eyed Mihaïl, who died of melancholia; Elizabeth, the hard-drinking, nominally virgin queen whose beer-barrel figure enabled her to pass off her pregnancies as "indigestion"; infantile, impotent Peter III and insane Paul, "as ugly and misshapen...
...Catherine the Great's palace was the "mechanical" wonder of the age: laden banquet tables which, on command, rose or sank through the floor. They were manipulated by "a forest of human hands" whose owners stood waist-deep in the habitually flooded basement. Frequently the ropes broke, the tables dropped, the operators were crushed to death...