Word: humbugs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Humbug Harvest. In his usual high-binding style, Nikita tried to turn a defensive outburst into a strident success story, covering 6½ pages of Pravda. When he took over five years ago, he said, Soviet agriculture was in "a very bad state," its grain output so low that cities suffered from bread shortages, its livestock population dying by the millions for lack of fodder. Only the year before, Malenkov, "to conceal the failures under his direction," had "dishonestly" put out "humbug" figures purporting to show that the country had produced 145 million tons of grain, when in cold fact...
...attempt to outlaw cartels in 1950, Erhard tried again, finally got a bill drawn up this year. At the hearings, industrialists who furnished the C.D.U. with much of its funds pleaded that cartels were necessary for times of recession. Erhard leaped from his chair, exploded: "That, gentlemen, is economic humbug." The industrialists suggested interpretations of the law be left to the courts. Snapped Erhard: "Courts are not fitted to judge whether a cartel is harmful to the economy or not. That is my job." Only Adenauer's intercession forced Erhard to accept a compromise bill permitting exceptions for "crisis...
...when Arthur Kallet co-authored a bestselling exposé of dangerous drugs hidden in popular products (100,000,000 Guinea Pigs), advertisers turned apoplectic and many a consumer turned pale. Kallet, a dark, intense young M.I.T.-trained engineer with a talent for pricking advertising humbug, had learned much of his lore by working with co-author Frederick J. Schlink's Consumers Research, Inc. which reported on the quality of consumer products...
...charge of promoting annual, trumped-up presentations of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. For the first of this season's versions, televised last week, the VP persuaded CBS and Chrysler's Shower of Stars to turn the durable old holiday cliche into elaborate but dismal humbug...
Critic KENNETH TYNAN, also in the Observer-He was without doubt a great writer ... He attempted, and almost pulled off, two mountainous tasks: he cleared the English stage of humbug, and the English mind of cant ... As a demolition expert he has no rivals: and we are being grossly irrelevant if we ask a demolition expert, when his work is done: "But what have you created?" It is like expecting a bulldozer to build the Tower of Pisa; or condemning a bayonet for not being a plough. Shaw's genius was for intellectual slum-clearance, not for town planning...