Word: sheean
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Astronomical Remoteness. The unbridgeable distances dividing class from class were emphasized for Sheean by a conversation between the Duke of Windsor, Lloyd George and Winston Church ill. Subject: compulsory baths for British miners. The Nazis had just shown the Duke such baths in German mines. Churchill observed that he had proposed compulsory baths in 1911, but the miners refused. Quite rightly, said Lloyd George, because the miners wanted the mine own ers to bear the full cost for installing the baths. "I've always heard," said the Duke seriously, "that the miners' wives didn't want baths...
...Says Sheean: "I sat there musing. . . . The seriousness of their interest in the question could not be doubted, and yet it was confounded with an incurable frivoli ty owing to their astronomical remoteness from the conditions of life of which they spoke. . . . In the exquisite little room, gleaming with glass and silver, over the flowers and champagne, all so enclosed and private and secure, one who had been King, one who had been dictator, and one who was to be: what did they have to speak of but the dirt on a miner's neck? In the realm...
Look Out, Jock. Sheean got to Paris just before the Nazis. He saw the confusion that centered around Helene de Portes, Premier Reynaud's mistress, whom Sheean believes to have been the shrewish organizer of defeat. In Britain, Sheean walked past the workmen stringing barbed vire around the Houses of Parliament. "So it's come to this, has it?" said Lady Diana Cooper, "in that curiously husky voice;" Inside Parliament Sheean heard history made by "a colorless voice." It was Clement Attlee reading the one-sentence law which declared that for the duration all persons and property were...
...Sweet Adeline. Back in the U.S. for a lecture tour, Sheean strongly disapproved of the Roosevelt-Willkie election campaign. It was "perfectly clear" to Sheean that no Republican administration would "dare" repeal the New Deal's social legislation, so "what was the sense of the argument?" The only person Sheean met in those days "who did not talk about this election as if the fate of humanity depended upon it was the President himself...
Gloomily, Sheean flew back to England and accompanied a British patrol to a North Atlantic rendezvous with a convoy of "the dirty little tramps that saved the world." Then he went out to China. It was a return to his youth of Personal History. He still has snide innuendos for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Government, pleasant things to say about Chinese Communists, and fine passages on the misery and grandeur of the Chinese people...