Word: puritanize
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Hampered by Puritan prudery, the early presidents like the Reverend Increase Mather imposed what now appear to be ludicrous regulations. For lying, a student would be fined one shilling, a good sum. But for eating plum cake, students would be fined 20 shillings! Somehow, Mather had gotten the notion that eating plum cake was an abomination unto the Lord. His regulation, furthermore, was religiously upheld by the authorities until just before the Revolution, and naturally enough, caused students to sneak plum cake more than ever. Student complaints about the food in general never ceased...
...blues of Count Basie, do "wear Brooks clothes/ And white shoes all the time:/ Get three C's, a D,/ And think checks from home sublime." But of all U.S. campuses. Harvard is pre-eminently the land of paradox. It is the home of the Last Puritan and the first New Dealer. It has turned out Autocrats of the Breakfast Table (Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1829), the dinner table (Lucius Beebe, 1927), the atomic table (J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1926), and the timetable (President Walter Franklin of the Pennsylvania Railroad). One of its alumni, John Reed, 1910, was buried...
...Puritan. In Arlington, Texas, after telling police how he and two companions had robbed a bank of $26,000, Prisoner George Gallo declined a cigarette, primly explained: "I don't have any bad habits...
Arrest after arrest followed in the next few weeks, as the girls accused people at random during their hysterical trances. At first the victims were generally people of eccentric habits--many were not church members and the Puritan community had small sympathy for them. But as the craze spread, no one seemed safe from accusation. Even a minister, the Reverend George Burroughs, a Harvard graduate of the Class of 1670 and the former pastor of the Salem church, was seized. Soon scores of persons were under suspicion and no end was in sight. The matter became the concern...
...which had tried the Salem cases adjourned, never to sit again. No more executions took place in the colony of Massachusetts; the following spring, Governor Phips pardoned 150 people who had been imprisoned on witchcraft charges. The fury of the mania subsided as quickly as it had come, when Puritan good sense re-asserted itself. Soon the witchcraft trials were but an ugly memory, though Puritanism has never lost the stigma which the witch-hunts placed...