Word: rootlessness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...that Dirt. One thing wrong with Americans, in Lewis' view, is that most of them fail to realize what a magnificent future they are building. Tied to petty, European standards of measurement, Americans keep thinking that they are a great nation, instead of "an advance copy" of the "rootless Elysium" that is to come. They worry because their cities are "irresponsible, dirty, corrupt," when in Lewis' opinion such conditions are "like nature," and therefore highly admirable. Americans even suspect their gregarious habits and glad-handedness, when, as Lewis sees it, they should be reveling in their "beautiful human...
...Rootless Family. Eleanor Roosevelt's first installment does have some of the rambling, gossipy quality of a club-car conversation on a long train ride. But from it emerge poignant flashes of the confusion of life with a man who had also married destiny. "As I saw it," she wrote of her reactions to FDR's first election as President, "this meant the end of any personal life for me." She blames her children's early unsuccessful marriages on the fact that in all its peregrinations the family was "not really rooted in any particular home." Surprisingly...
...first rumblings can already be heard. Bavaria's prewar population of some 7,000,000 has now hit the 9,000,000 mark. The new millions, reversing the Teutonic movement that for decades pressed eastwards, come from the once-great pockets of German population in East Europe. Impoverished, rootless, and angry with the world, they present smug, insular Bavaria with a screaming problem of psychological and physical adjustment. They need jobs, housing, security...
...while Hitler drilled his bullies, Ernst Juenger greased their path to power with his doctrine of total nihilism. Rejecting both traditional Christian and humanist values, he expressed the kind of diseased fascination with violence that led Germany's rootless youth into the Führer's ranks. "All Freedom, all Greatness, all Culture," he wrote, "are only maintained and spread aloft by wars...
Mississippi-born Playwright Williams, 33, perhaps the surest weaver of vapors now writing for the U.S. stage, is a stocky, rather intense-looking fellow. He got that look, he explains, during his many years as a "rootless, wandering writer . . . clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers"-years in which he worked as bellhop, elevator operator, movie usher, teletypist, warehouse handyman and verse-spieling waiter in a Greenwich Village bistro...