Word: humorlessly
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...major sensations or scandals came out of Representative Smith's cool and detached political comedy; the Smith Committee, like a weary old cynic, only cast a jaundiced eye at the labor relations of these idealistic experts on labor relations. Humorless Labor Board members, forgetting industry's long complaints that Labor Board inquiries hampered work, fretted and fidgeted at the Smith investigation. It was a nuisance, they said, as irritable as captains of industry; it delayed the Labor Board's work...
...show cannot, from the fame of the old one, provide the same kind of exciting surprise. But on its merits it is a much better show. It is better put together, better paced, better performed. It has four or five downright bad numbers, but no longer any heavy and humorless ones, and it has ceased to be amateurish while remaining fresh...
Above all other men, Senator Sumner of Massachusetts was a scourge and a goad to the South, an exasperation to practical statesmen like Stephen A. Douglas. Handsome, imposing, humorless and incorruptible, Sumner stood in the Senate for years denouncing slaveholders as keepers of a nameless abomination; yet he had nothing whatever to say as to how $4,000,000,000 in slave property could be liquidated. "He seemed to insist," says Sandburg, "that he could be an insolent agitator and a perfect gentleman both at once. His critics held that he was either a skunk or a white swan...
Jeff Davis, sickly, handsome, humorless, egocentric, unimaginative, contrasted almost as sharply with Lee as with Lincoln. Almost kicked out of West Point, where he was 23rd in a class of 33, he considered himself a military genius. At West Point too began his bitter feud with Joseph E. Johnston. Cause: a tavern keeper's daughter. Elected to the Presidency by accident (delegates preferred Toombs), he was bitterly assailed by his own colleagues. ("That scoundrel Jeff Davis," said Toombs.) A bad guesser, he made his worst guess when he tried to force English recognition by withholding cotton shipments. That notion...
...Madrid one man in five; theatres shut down for two minutes at 11 p. m. for an official news broadcast and the national anthem; bullfights are suspended half way through for cheers for Franco, the anthem and the fascist salute-a ceremony that has much in common with humorless Italian and German leader-worship, and more in common with the seventh-inning stretch...