Word: localism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Mitchell wants the Labor Department to deny U.S. agricultural labor recruitment services to farm employers who do not pay migrants the prevailing local wage rates, do not provide adequate housing or safe transport facilities. In two days of public hearings in Washington last week, farm employment groups battered his plan (earlier 29 farm-state Congressmen, mostly Southern Democrats, had branded the proposal "illegal, immoral and impracticall"). Alone among farm organizations, the National Farmers' Union came to Mitchell's aid, and the Very Rev. Msgr. George G. Higgins, of the"National Catholic Welfare Conference, praised Mitchell for "the greatest...
...Charlie recalls. "Some would bring their guitars, and there would be a lot of singin', playin' and spittin' tobacco juice. It was a real stompin' brand of music." Charlie's father taught his son the guitar, and at twelve Charlie was playing on a local radio show. World War II saw Charlie in Special Services, touring Europe as an Army showman. One day in Paris he met the legendary Belgian-born gypsy guitarist, Django Reinhardt, then and there decided to become a jazz musician...
...scene is a sun-drenched Aegean island. The central character is a blonde, green-eyed girl, found as a baby by a drink-fuddled Greek fisherman and grown into a woman who has the local boys dreaming. By most fictional standards, this should be the cutoff point, the end of any sensible man's interest in a novel called The Mermaid Madonna. No one should make that mistake. Author Stratis Myrivilis is probably the finest of living Greek writers. The Mermaid Madonna is the first of his books to come to the U.S., and even with its liberal dash...
...villagers are not only poor, they are refugees from Turkish Anatolia. They are superstitious, backbiting and Christian to the point of worshiping a mermaid Madonna whom a passing fisherman has painted on a wall of the local church. Their life comes from the sea, and it is the sea that dominates the novel. The heroine worships it, the hero dies in it, and the plain villagers are bounded by it as their neighbors are bounded by olive groves. The young men may lust for Smaragthi. but they lust even more for the sea and the role of boat...
...cloy. The reason is quite simple: that is how things are. Smaragthi remains consistent to the end, unmarried, herself a sort of mermaid Madonna who rolls naked in the sea like a porpoise but shrinks with revulsion from a man's touch. The fishermen soak up the local booze, beat their wives, and listen with awe to the tavernkeeper's yarns about the wonders of America, where he made his pile. An ancient crone tells wondrous fairy tales. A pathetic schoolmaster dreams of the great day when Greece will rise and take Anatolia from the Turks. But above...