Word: pretext
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Screwiest mixup was in Baltimore, where the voters had authorized a $10,000,000 bond issue for new schoolhouses in May 1939. But dawdling Mayor Howard W. Jackson, having spent less than $100,000 of it, seized upon national defense last week as a pretext for halting school construction altogether. His excuse: building costs were high; labor and steel were scarce; it would be better to spend the $10,000,000 after the emergency to relieve unemployment. Informed of the mayor's action at a press conference last week, youth-minded Eleanor Roosevelt exclaimed: "Horrible...
...underground Communist Party in both zones of France. Warned he: "[We] will not permit a political group that was most bellicose before the war, but defeatist throughout the war, now to wrap itself in the Tricolor and provoke incidents between the people and occupation troops on the pretext of patriotism...
...vied with the Tribune's bitterest, Anglophobe, Roosevelt-hating, gallows-dancing, isolationist editorials, cartoons and news. One News editorial played variations on the theme: "[The Administration] is accused of keeping the war scare pumped up to frightful proportions in order that it may quietly and under pretext of wartime emergency transform our democracy into some sort of totalitarian state, before many of us know what is happening...
...more than one non-fascist country, Abend finds that in Japan the war is being used as a pretext for setting up totalitarian socialism. In Japan, socialism is the old army game. "Capitalistic and liberal elements are to be driven to earth ... all initiative is being stifled, and Government control is being ruthlessly extended into every branch of industry. Exchange control, production limitations, restrictions on the purchasing and shipment of supplies, rationing of raw materials-these are among the means. . . ." "A mere whispered threat" by the Army to repeat the 1936 Tokyo mutiny keeps politicians and financiers in line...
...American way of life, one citizen doesn't try to force his personal way of life down another citizen's throat. I hope that this nation will not try to force its way of life on other nations under pretext of defending it, instead of letting other nations come around to it if they will...