Word: modernizing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Modern man, the only living species of a once numerous human family, is as definitely pigeonholed in the animal world by taxonomists (biological classifiers) as is Sylvilagus floridanus, the cottontail rabbit. The gun-shooting, crystal-gazing, ballot-casting species-called Homo sapiens by taxonomic courtesy-belongs to the genus homo, the family of Hominidae, the order of primates, the class of mammals, the subphylum of vertebrates, the phylum of Chordata, and to the animal kingdom...
After some uncertainty over nomenclature, Dr. Broom has settled on the exciting names Plesianthropus ("Near-Man") and Paranthropus ("Beside-Man") for his finds. Their brain capacities were small, 600 and 440 cc. as against about 1,400 cc. for modern man. But when Dr. Broom had had a good look at their teeth he sent excited reports to the British journal Nature claiming that these old creatures must be assigned a place very close to the point of human divergence from the parent primate stock...
...late in the Glacial Age, by which time definitely human types such as Peking Man, Piltdown Man and Heidelberg Man had already appeared. Plesianthropus and Paranthropus thus appeared as laggard survivors of a much earlier evolutionary spurt-"conservative cousins of man," says Dr. Gregory, "and progressive cousins of the modern apes...
...small-brained . . . man-apes of South Africa," observed Dr. Gregory, "now add their mute testimony that man, like his less ambitious cousins, the modern anthropoid apes, is a descendant of the late Tertiary dryopethicine ape stock of Europe, Asia, and Africa." In Dr. Gregory's opinion, indubitable apes evolved into indubitable humans during a profound structural upheaval compassed within the past ten or twelve million years...
Franklin D. Roosevelt is an Episcopal churchwarden and an occasional worshipper, but he has never been so prone to invoke his Maker as were Calvin Coolidge and Warren G. Harding. To many devout churchmen he appeared to have the failings of most modern political liberals - a secular conception of political morality, an indifference about religion's place in the modern state. Last week, as Franklin Roosevelt delivered his message to the 76th Congress, it was evident that he, like other liberals, had come to feel differently about religion in the world about him. His opening words were texts...