Word: pushmi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...PUSHMI-PULLYUS, according to Doctor Dolittle's faithful Chronologist Hugh Lofting, "are now extinct. That means, there aren't any more. But long ago, when Dr. Dolittle was alive, there were some of them still left in the deepest jungles of Africa; and even then they were very, very scarce. They had no tail, but a head at each end, and sharp horns on each head." Last week TIME's editors discovered that Lofting had been wrong in only one respect: the Pushmi-Pullyu is not extinct at all: it was revived in the form...
...This, Doctor," said Chee-Chee, "is the Pushmi-Pullyu-the rarest animal of the African jungles, the only two-headed beast in the world...
...Domestic necessity pushed the 85th, after much hemming and hawing, into passing the first U.S. civil rights bill since Reconstruction. International tension pulled it, after much doodling and dawdling, into approving President Eisenhower's Middle East doctrine. Beyond these two significant accomplishments, the 85th Congress was a true Pushmi-Pullyu: it had trouble making up its mind, leaped in opposite directions after its two heads, and ended up hardly anywhere...
...Pushmi-Pullyu 85th was a political creature in a political jungle. Its Democratic majority, realizing it had little to worry about from a Republican President prohibited by the Constitution from running again, used this year's session to prepare for Election Year 1958-and beyond that, 1960. The Eisenhower and Old Guard branches of the Republican Party were already fighting over the 1960 successorship. Even the individual leaders of the Senate-Texas Democrat Lyndon Johnson and California Republican William Knowland-were moving ahead with their own personal plans for the White House in '60. Against such strong political...
...such changes, which may be woven into the basic fabric of U.S. political life, the 85th Congress, First Session, may be remembered longer than for its Pushmi-Pullyu legislative record...