Word: mason
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Tall, curly-haired John Mason Brown (Post) is, at 38, the youngest of the newspaper critics. Probably the ablest all-round of the lot, he combines journalistic dash ("Most Hamlets look like the original interior decorator") with analytical skill. With Anderson, he has the highest critical boiling point; brought in a plausible minority report on Abe Lincoln in Illinois. He lectures far & wide, has led Variety's boxscore for best-guessing hits and flops five times in the last nine years...
...line of treatment employed by Walter Millis in "The Martial Spirit" was the first definite attempt to relegate the Spanish-American War to the status of a slap-stick melodrama, and this attempt has proved quite successful. Likewise, Mr. Gregory Mason's account of the War has many more characteristics in common with the Gilbert and Sullivan type of opera than with an armed conflict. He has seconded Millis' motion on the subject by treating the 1898 embroilment as a schoolboy's scuffle. But, like many second-the-motions, "Remember the Maine" is at best only a weak reiteration...
...Mason apparently has two goals in his book, the first of which is to give the atmospheric background of the War, both in the United States, and in the field of military operations; and the second to give an interesting account of the actual operations and personalities of the War. The first six chapters give the reader a fairly compelling description of the temper of the period preceding the conflict, employing the well-worn system of correlating diverse events throughout the country to show the styles, manners, opinions, interests of the American people. But after Mr. Mason gets his reader...
...Remember the Maine" is distinctly inferior to Walter Millis's classic exposition, but such a statement does not imply complete condemnation of Mr. Mason's book. Mr. Mason has written in a pleasing, colorful style, and on one point he is even superior to Millis as a creator of atmospheric background for the United States' imperialistic adventure. He avoids the harsh, extreme one-sidedness of the earlier author, who in general seems to have felt that our participation in the Cuban question was due entirely to Messrs. Hearst, Pulitzer, and Remington. Mr. Mason is more concerned with the legendary Americana...
...Profoundly middle class," he states, "the West, in which I include the twenty four states north of the Mason-Dixon Line between Pittsburgh and the Pacific, are basically one, and, opposed to both the East and the South, are the strongest single force in the Senate...