Word: lashing
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Full of the eager anticipation which all playgoers (except dramatic critics) share, Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt taxied up to New York's Mansfield Theater. With her were her secretary, Malvina ("Tommy") Thompson and a onetime youth leader, pinko Joe Lash. The play they had come to see: In Time to Come. As Mrs. Roosevelt stepped out of her cab, to her horror she came face to face with a picket line...
...pickets were unfair, Mrs. Roosevelt answered firmly: "Fair or not fair, I cannot cross a picket line." Pausing to point out to Band Leader Meyer Davis (who also arrived full of anticipation) that the play was being picketed, she skittered across the street to a musical, show, trailing Thompson & Lash. Mr. Davis, who has occasionally played at the White House, got his money back...
These words, written in 1937, came back last week to roost on their writer, apostolic Joseph P. Lash, onetime boss of the left-wing student union. They also brought uneasiness to the U.S. Navy. For 31 -year-old Joe Lash, having split with his pinko friends, had shucked his antipathy for war. He had applied for a commission in the Naval Reserve...
...Lash had been a great fomenter of student anti-war strikes, a burning critic of the R.O.T.C. ("What is the R.O.T.C. but a vast propaganda effort to make the war system . . . colorful and appealing . . . ?"). He had written for the Commu nist New Masses, had been a May Day parade speaker. And, of course, he always religiously denied that he was actually a Communist...
What flabbergasted the Navy most about Joe Lash's attempt to get into its officer body was what they read about his sponsorship. His application, according to the New York World-Telegram, was backed by his No. 1 patroness: Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt...