Word: puritan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...family tree included two millionaires, and Demarest grew up in England, attending private schools with "the peerage and the beerage." Demarest notes a difference between European and American rich: "Many Americans don't know how to spend their money. Perhaps it is in part a result of the Puritan work ethic...
Douglas reasons thus: the stern, rigorous theology of the Puritan fathers was eventually weakened by the less demanding beliefs of such sects as Congregationalism and Unitarianism. Women, once full working partners in clearing and planting the New World, were turned by industrialization and commerce into homemakers and clotheshorses. Shunted to the sidelines, these women and the liberal clergy sought power as guardians of art, literature and refinement. America's sentimental education began. Feeling became more prized than thinking. Popular literature grew trashier at the same time that magazine and book publishing was burgeoning. Narcissism flourished, and with...
...maybe Puritan Frost was merely reverting to form. The only son of a church-mouse-poor Methodist minister, he was at 17 a spellbinding lay evangelist. He preached love and practiced thrift. He still does. Almost uniquely among showfolk, Frost seldom has been known to throw tantrums. He is almost as solicitous toward employees as he is toward celebrities, and treats autograph hunters as tenderly as his audiences or his relatives. He is indiscriminately ingratiating. Not since Ed Sullivan has anyone on television back-patted, hugged and smooched so rapturously. His wide-eyed, basset-unctuous, hand-kneading style...
Sociologically, Playwright Eichman is most astute in suggesting that the transfer of power from the Boston "blue-bloods" to the Irish Catholic majority has actually accentuated New England's narrow puritan ethic. As Ned ("Scooter") Ryan, Dzundza viscerally endows the prosecuting attorney with the instincts of a fox in a hen coop. Always grave and commanding in presence, Earle Hyman has to wait to the end of the play to deliver the doctor's passion ate plea for the right of a woman to terminate her own pregnancy...
...scenes with Robert and his father ring true, the dialogue between Robert and Kate doesn't ring at all. The exchanges are cliched, wooden, alternately boring and unconvincing. Kate's parents are conservative, blame Robert for their daughter's "condition," and seem paralyzed by shock and Puritan indignation. As such, they are stereotypes, merely providing a field for Robert and his father to joust upon...