Word: shrewdly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gerard connection did not last but James continued the insurance business with John Sargent, a shrewd Harvard-man, as Roosevelt & Sargent Inc. Son James sold a $2,500,000 policy to the American Tobacco Co. on the life of its President George Washington Hill. The Columbia Broadcasting System bought a like amount of the Roosevelt brand of insurance. In his first year with Sargent, James acquired $67,000 worth of independence. Business improved each succeeding year until James-now the richest of the Roosevelts excepting possibly his grandmother-is estimated to be worth half a million dollars...
William Herndon's life of Lincoln is one of the great neglected books of U. S. literature. It belongs with the best biographies by virtue of its accuracy, its almost unique tone that manages to combine veneration for a great man with shrewd understanding of a human being. But in addition to these qualities, Herndon's Lincoln is a document as essentially American as Whitman's poems, not only in its grasp of the tough frontier world in which Lincoln grew, but in its belief in U. S. democracy, its recognition of democracy's weaknesses...
Lincoln was a man, Herndon wrote again & again, a great man, a noble man, but also a human being, ambitious, shrewd, successful, passionate, with a man's share of disappointments, of humiliations, of unhappy love affairs, and with more than most men's share of melancholy. He was a foolish father, a browbeaten husband, at once sentimental and hard; a secretive man with his human share of stupidities and perplexities, his career marked, like all men's, with its broken friendships and its grotesque blunders. The Lincoln Herndon knew was a thoughtful, dry man whose wife...
Herndon himself was well-read, a student of Darwin and Feuerbach, an admirer of Whitman, a man of the world in his understanding of men. He could turn out gnarled sentences as strong as Whitman's: "The great, keen, shrewd, boring, patient, philosophic, critical and remorselessly searching world will find out all things, and bring them to light," he wrote. "I know Lincoln better than I know myself. He was so good and so odd a man, how in the hell could I help study...
Although too voceriferous and heedless of parliamentary form, America's little business men displayed in the recent Washington conference a shrewd understanding of government. In their report to the President, the tone of which, but not the sentiment, was modified by the Resolutions Committee and Secretary Roper, they showed that neither the depression, recession, nor world unrest has upset their balance and destroyed the American's most characteristic virtue: his common sense. Their suggestions, by no means perfect and complete, seem to crystallize public opinion as well as any other twenty-three remedial proposals have done...