Word: portentions
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...When the portent of the impending life struggle between democracy and dictatorship first dawned upon our nonchalant minds, we "looked upon ourselves and cursed our fate" for having been born to bear the brunt of mistakes other than our own. But that has all changed. We now feel privileged to have been conceived in a period when we can not only watch, but take an integral part in, the awakening of a great democracy. Like the painful mass reactions of a newborn babe, the movements of our democracy are quick and wasteful, but we students are doing everything...
...Roosevelt had become more than a phenomenon: by last week she was a portent. With U. S. industry beginning to hit its stride in the production of everything, with thousands of men going back to work, and consumption zooming, Mrs. Roosevelt warned housewives to start thinking about doing without new automobiles, aluminum kitchen utensils, etc., warned housewives' husbands to change those items on the family budget into Government securities. For once, Washington and Wall Street winced as one. The Wall Street Journal voiced a shadowy but growing fear: "Mrs. Roosevelt is increasingly active; watch her for tips on policies...
Hitler and Roosevelt came to power at almost the same time. It was that spring in which all banks were closed in the country where dollars mattered. Few businessmen could read that portent. Most businessmen retained their faith that this depression would pass like others. Not until the Second and Third New Deals did businessmen begin to suspect that the New Deal was splitting the Money-Power atom; that henceforth money would be just money, while Power was going to belong to politics. A.D. 1940 was the year in which that suspicion was confirmed...
...Martin said it was a rebuke to Franklin Roosevelt. Other Republicans found in it a happy portent for Republicanism in general, tried to get Hiram Johnson to endorse Wendell Willkie. Hiram Johnson himself said: "Of course, if they hadn't agreed with my views, they wouldn't have voted for me." All explainers ignored the fact that when a State once acquires a solid admiration for the gnarled-hickory character of an elder statesman it often continues to vote for him regardless of issues -as Idaho did for Borah, as Virginia has done for Glass...
...Lawrence preachings on sex. As Elizabeth Bowen says, "the disabusedness, and the absence of conflict, make this un-English writing"; as she does not say, they make it something like French writing. And this un-Englishness may be the book's most obvious aspect as a portent of things to come, if the war in Europe should (improbably) lead to a genuine interpenetration of English and French cultures...