Word: riffraff
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...First Ward was a politician's paradise. Its bawdy districts, "Little Cheyenne" and "the Levee," were solid with gambling joints, peep shows, flophouses and saloons, and harbored the riffraff of half a continent. The First Ward's blocks of bordellos ran from haughty establishments like the Everleigh house (wine: $12 downstairs; $15 in a room), to a "Bedbug Row" of noisome prostitutes' cribs. The jangle of its pianos never stopped...
...Schacht who, so far, had been as stiff in court as his famous, forbidding four-inch collars. Always a solid citizen, a self-made man who had risen from a small clerkship to the presidency of the Reichsbank, a clubman of quiet but expensive style, he held aloof from riffraff like Göring-whom, he said, he would now gladly kill with his own hands. The record read: Schacht was host at a special meeting of German industrialists called to raise money for the Nazi Party before the March 1933 elections. If Hitler won, Göring had assured...
Geneva, instead of having a 10% influx of earnest young Americans learning to be soldiers, had a 100% influx of roughneck workmen-15,000 men, any sort of tough riffraff whom contractors could hire at high pay to build a big naval training station on Seneca Lake. All Geneva's spare rooms were let; cots filled the City Hall, an old movie house, a dance hall, hotel corridors. The once quiet, orderly town nearly went mad. Buses were so jammed that sometimes drivers had to threaten unruly crowds with wrenches in order to make them let passengers out. Decent...
...American inheritance if we restricted it beyond the immediate requirement of military censorship. But during an all-out war such as this one, we must distinguish between healthy, constructive criticism, and poisonous, Axis-Inspired propaganda. We are not engaged in a local tussle with across-the-border riffraff, nor is this a Caribbean intervention inspired by dollar diplomats. It is a world war in a completely literal sense, and we are losing it. The smug politicians in Washington who confidently assure us that we will take the offensive "late in 1942 or in the spring of 1943" and that...
...tall short-wave antennae of Zeesen, Tokyo and Rome are beamed not only at certain areas of the earth. They are beamed at the delicately balanced human mind. To the bewilderment, corruption, terrorization of that target, crews of cold theorists and insulting riffraff have devoted themselves for years. In their war, as in the braver war waged by fighting men, the U.S. is now a formidable opponent-and is being attacked with every trick in the book...