Word: proletarian
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Cronin is a first-rate literary craftsman with an honest love of simple humanity and a sure feel for trends. Result: during the threnodic '30s he wrote best-selling proletarian novels so much better than the professional proletarians that people did not realize what they were. Critic Robert Forsythe had to apologize before recommending The Stars Look Down to readers of the Communist New Masses. But the art of trending, like bronco-busting, lies in knowing when to fall off and catch another horse. The Keys of the Kingdom finds Author Cronin firmly riding a trend that promises...
Coney Island was not always the garish proletarian mecca it is today. Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Sam Houston, other aristocrats disported themselves on its then remote plage. Walt Whitman too was crazy about it: "The long bare unfrequented shore ... I had all to myself . . . where I loved after bathing to race up and down...
...those who make it hard were the two forces that explained the past and propelled history. Environment, as in Darwin, was made up of things . . . man responded like a machine, and out of this same physical necessity ... a perfected society was produced. History was a sieve that worked. The proletarian Utopia was the residue...
...River Rats are a shabby proletarian confraternity, loosely organized into canoe clubs, whose lives and small earnings are wholly focussed on the floats, canoes, club dances, coving (river talk for necking et seq.} and races. To Ralph they represent that lowbrow, duty-destroying athletic aristocracy among whom most "nice" boys long to qualify. He wants intensely to be accepted as a rat. Harriet, who knows on which side of the tracks her future lies, wants him not to. Then Dutchy appears. A nice, hard blonde, the daughter of a fireman who drowns in the Charles, Dutchy is the essence...
Jesus is reduced in this type of thought to the stature of a leader of a proletarian revolt against the rich. . . . Capitalists are not greater sinners than poor laborers by any natural depravity. But it is a fact that those who hold great economic and political power are more guilty of pride against God and of injustice against the weak than those who lack power and prestige. A too simple social radicalism does not recognize how quickly the poor, the weak, the despised of yesterday, may, on gaining a social victory over their detractors, exhibit the same arrogance...