Word: plea
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Michigan. When the state senate balked at seating Democratic Senators Charles C. Diggs and Anthony Wilkowsky because each had previously served a prison term, Democratic Senator Robert A. Haggerty made a plea for tolerance: "I don't know any politician who wouldn't do what Wilkowsky did. I think they called it ballot-box stuffing...
...executive committee of the National Union of Mineworkers to a conference at 10 Downing Street. Because four or five members of the executive are Communists, including N.U.M. General Secretary Arthur Horner, Attlee did not appeal for more coal for defense; Horner was primed to resist any such plea. Instead, Attlee's Colonial Secretary, ex-Miner Jim Griffiths, gave the executive a comradely pep talk, said the government wouldn't let the miners down. At meeting's end, Attlee promised to redress the miners' grievances in return for their pledge that they would...
...vigor. But Miller has given the play a more agitated but less striking face. His version is not so much bitter satire as topical melodrama (with some of the new blood smeared on the characters' foreheads). It is not so much an affirmation of minority rightness as a plea for minority rights; it suggests a man persecuted less for telling the unpalatable truth than for having unpopular opinions. It is livelier theater, but it seems even more contrived as a play, and is sometimes very dubious Ibsen...
...author chosen to give this attack on authority a look of authority was Yuri Zhdanov, a biologist and son of the late Andrei A. Zhdanov, member of the all-powerful Politburo. In his plea for intellectual unorthodoxy he quoted texts by the leading authoritarians of Communism, Premier Joseph Stalin and China's Mao Tse-tung. Obviously, the scientific "line" is still in the same strong hands...
John Steinbeck fared even worse, but made less fuss about his failure. His novelette, Burning Bright (produced also as a play that flopped), was a slick but transparently thin plea for universal love. Robert Penn Warren went back to his native Kentucky for a frontier novel of violence and tortured emotions, World Enough and Time. It had power and murkiness in about equal proportions...