Word: hysterias
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Hounded by Hysteria. Palmer rose in politics as a progressive Democrat from Pennsylvania. Elected to Congress in 1908, he bravely bucked his state's powerful industrialists to join the fight for lower tariffs. He was friendly to labor and welfare legislation; his bill to abolish child labor was hailed as the "most momentous measure of the Progressive Era." When he was beaten in a try for the Senate, President Wilson consoled him with the wartime post of alien property custodian and in 1919 named him Attorney General...
Since Wilson was ill and inactive, Palmer was forced to deal with the rising hysteria. But even when his own home was bombed, Palmer hesitated to act against the radicals. He stopped prosecutions under the wartime Espionage Act. He urged Wilson to release Socialist Party, Leader Eugene V. Debs, who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for opposing the war. The popular villains were aliens, and there was a widespread demand for their deportation. But as late as October 1919, Palmer said: "We cannot be less willing now than we have always been that the oppressed of every...
...strongly developed, intrusive subliminal region, James argues, will have a proclivity for hallucinations, obsessive ideas, and automatic actions that seem unaccountable by ordinary experience. As a simple illustration, he cites the phenomenon of post-hypnotic suggestion. In addition, he refers to the work of Freud, Janet, and Prince on hysteria. Though James explicity credits this research with shedding "a wholly new light upon our natural constitution," he refuses to employ it to "explain away" conversion...
...Committee criticized Keating for not taking into account the complexity and dangers of the Cuban situation. "Responsible political leadership demands that both the administration and those advising or criticizing it not make rash, provocative, and perhaps uninformed statements. Our Cuba policy must both be conceived in an atmosphere of hysteria and jingoism," the statement said...
Along with the successes, he acknowledges a number of defeats. "I lost with Nikita Khrushchev, but there was so much hysteria attendant on his appearance that it was hopeless. My office was picketed, my children were threatened with reprisals...." He feels he also lost with V. Krishna Menon ("so disrespectful, so rude") and Adlai Stevenson ("he had been my political hero, and then, after the interview, well...