Word: plebeian
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...Louisiana as in Russia the play concerns a dying class of charming, weak, self indulgent aristocrats who stubbornly refuse to face reality, and the emerging power of plebeian gogetters. Playwright Logan's most vivid achievement is atmospheric: with Negro servants and songs, with Jo Mielziner's handsome set and Lucinda Ballard's elegant costumes, The Wisteria Trees has its own strong sense of period and place. And in Louisiana as in Russia, the family will not sell off some of the land they love in order to survive, so that in the end their plantation goes under...
...Subcommittee No. 5 of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and published as a supplement to the committee's report on world Communism (Feb. 29). * Who, according to Aristophanes, persuaded the women of Athens to stage a strike against their husbands. * The ill-clad French revolutionaries who wore plebeian long trousers instead of upper-class culottes (knee breeches...
Land to the Tillers. But not leathery General Li Tsung-jen, the dark horse from Kwangsi. He broke boldly with the Chinese custom of never praising oneself: "My election would symbolize the triumph of the common people." He boasted of his plebeian origin. As a farm boy he had tended water buffalo, plowed paddy fields, split kindling; so he understood the hardships of the peasants. "Without solving the peoples' livelihood," he declared, "all military ventures are doomed to failure." He urged "land to the tillers," an end to "bureaucratic capital," cleanup of corruption, more capable men in government, frank...
Winter Meeting (Warner) tells about a brief encounter between an "aristocratic poetess" of old New England stock (Bette Davis) and a plebeian war hero of Polish immigrant stock (James Davis, no kin). For 104 minutes they do almost nothing but talk-and then finally decide not to get married. The decision saves them from a life of such boring conversation...
Only conceivable democrat among them was the Ko-Ko, Martyn Green. Green's plebeian shenanigans evoked, as of yore, the loudest applause, the greatest lifting of eyebrows. His adroitness, especially his scissors-like legwork, was beyond dispute. But whether all his mugging, prancing and capering was entirely seemly-or entirely successful-continued to be disputed...