Word: parvenues
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...amazing address to the New York Chamber of Commerce, except a certain notorious prayer. The author of that prayer also thanked God he was not as other men are, and recorded with the same smirking self-satisfaction his financial righteousness and his virtuous self-restraint. No rich parvenu can ever have addressed his humblest poor relation in a tone of more offensively oleaginous patronage than this...
...bowels of the Square to collide with the Cambridge Savings Bank an architectural grotesque. A bloated "Coop" first jars him; next the Harvard Trust, also pluetocratically swollen. College House seethes with life like a rabbit warren. Beyond, a "movie Palace" Spews forth vibrating masses. Old Massachusetts arrogates, like a parvenu with a monocle. In the offing two small prototypes have popped into being. Next to Matthews there issues the golden clang of the Counting House...
...sober thoughtfulness, against that youthful, grand, and awful Widner; that sprawling, showy presence whose mere thought has oft inspired a nightmare in the midst of daydreams. What perturbers of the sprit these winged devils are! More rumors still, though less distinct, of other changes to be wrought, more parvenu intruders in the moss-grown ranks. They come, these leser rumors, to confirm the growing strife of mind that sets on to rebellion 'gainst the whole regime of change. For alas! the habits of three hundred years are not with ease to be cast off, like cobweb fancies...