Word: popular
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Latching onto the mantle of a popular President should not be so difficult. Clinton has gladly shared kudos for the economy with Gore, handing off such happy tasks as announcing fresh indicators of how rosy it all is. But cloning works only to a point. Clinton won voters' hearts with his poll-tested, microbrewed policies, but it can be jarring--or laughable--to see someone with a reputation for deep thought on arms control and the environment elbow aside Cabinet Secretaries to take a bow for improving concrete pavements, increasing lost-luggage compensation and offering a three-digit phone number...
Much of this chapter is devoted to President Woodrow Wilson's steadfast and not entirely popular efforts to keep the U.S. out of the conflict between the Allied and Central Powers. There is nothing new here, but there is value in being reintroduced to an American leader whose every move was not dictated by public whim. This installment, in addition to offering moving reflections from still-living World War I veterans, also features an appearance by Wilson's grandson, the Rev. Francis Sayre. He talks about how his widowed grandfather fell for Edith Galt, a woman he met golfing...
...great sorting out of the population, so that young people would be assigned on the basis of their scores to particular levels in the school system, which would lead to corresponding socioeconomic destinations in adult life. The beginning of the IQ-testing movement overlapped with the eugenics movement--hugely popular in America and Europe among the "better sort" before Hitler gave it a bad name--which held that intelligence was mostly inherited and that people deficient in it should be discouraged from reproducing. The state sterilization that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes notoriously endorsed in a 1927 Supreme Court decision (with...
Science fiction is a native 20th century art form that came of age at the same time as jazz. Like jazz, science fiction is very street-level, very American, rather sleazy, rather popular, with a long and somewhat recondite tradition. It's also impossible to avoid, no matter how hard...
Huxley and Orwell, of course, didn't think of themselves as science-fiction writers. The true artists of the genre are a tribe apart. Many created "future histories" that are worked out in exquisite detail. Robert A. Heinlein, for instance, was a hugely popular SF writer but of a surprisingly gloomy and gothic cast. His prediction for the late 20th century was summed up briskly: "Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation and social institutions, terminating in mass psychosis." It was hard to watch the Clinton impeachment trial without feeling...