Word: inertia
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...without the impetus of Puritan vitality, with the righteous middle class living in suburbs "the bedrooms of Boston" --outside the municipal limits where they have neither votes nor interest in reform, and with the working class content in its slums. Boston lacks the seed of initiative to overcome its inertia. In other cities a Joseph Pulitzer or a Mark Eldridge has crusaded through the newspapers and found something dynamic in the community to complement its editorials. In Boston, how ever, the press takes its lead from the community, and Boston must rest in its circle torpor...
...decade ago a gloomy band of British socialists met in Edinburgh. The Ramsay MacDonald government had collapsed. Their movement was wasted by feuds, weighted by inertia; socialism in Britain was moribund. Something had to be done. In desperation they decided to start a tuppenny weekly. To get it going, people like Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan, Ellen Wilkinson, George Russell Strauss and John Strachey chipped in ?10 apiece to buy stock...
Although 25 percent of the undergraduates in a poll last month said that the College policy affected them adversely, the failure to follow up the opinion with letters to the Council was attributed by Robert S. Sturgis '44, on behalf of the Council, to possible inertia in cases of minor injustices and to a certain amount of liberalization in Dean's Office handling of individual petitions...
Uphill Fight. Later in the war Zacharias was called back to Washington as second in command of the Office of Naval Intelligence, under Rear Admiral Harold C. Train ("who had never had one day's experience in intelligence work"). It was an "uphill fight . . . against obstruction and inertia." Then, "just when I was at the top of my successes, and was planning new ones ... I was ordered to sea in command of the battleship New Mexico. All of my subordinates were amazed . . . and so was I. . . . It will have to be credited to the fact that I was moving...
...events, the burden of proof has now been placed on the delegates and on the Conference which opens in Chicago eight days hence. It is a tricky row they must hoe to prove themselves, avoiding the pitfalls of hysterical red-baiting on one side and fearful inertia on the other. But show themselves to be hard-headed they must...