Word: slumming
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...boys, all from big-city slum areas, had many handicaps in common-squabbling parents, poverty, delinquent friends and neighbors. The delinquents did seem to have the larger share of starting handicaps. Nineteen percent of them were illegitimate, as against 13% of the non-delinquents. Nineteen percent had mentally retarded fathers and 33% had retarded mothers, as against 6% and 9% for the non-delinquents. The delinquents' parents were less congenial, poorer workers, more erratic, abusive, and neglectful of their children. Their brothers and sisters were twice as apt to be retarded or delinquent as the brothers and sisters...
Died. Edward Joseph Kelly, 74, four-term mayor of Chicago, shrewdest of the four big Democratic city bosses of the last generation;* of a heart attack; in Chicago. Born in a tough "Back of the Yards" slum, roughhewn Ed Kelly was a master of the oratorical foot-in-the-mouth. He once addressed Admiral William Halsey as "Alderman Halsey," introduced the State Department's protocol expert as "chief of portico," lauded Scott Lucas (in a speech nominating him for Vice President of the U.S.) for being "a member of no thinking group." But he had the instincts...
...Tribune does, there are inevitably many news stories connecting Negroes with such crimes. The inference is drawn by readers that Negroes have an inherent biological tendency toward crime [which] no reputable . . . scientist will support." Where the Negro crime rate is high, said the City Club, it is due to slum conditions, poverty, etc., a sociological point the Trib does not bother to make...
Life in the Harps, a teen-age Manhattan slum gang, was as rigidly hierarchical as in a primitive tribe. When the president wanted to issue a command, his personal stooge called the gang to attention by shouting "Time! Time!" If a fellow had his initials scratched on the arm of a deb (a girl member), no other Harp was allowed to touch her until she formally declared that she was through with him. Modeling themselves after such movie heroes as Alan Ladd ("The way he beats his women! He stomps them"), the Harps treated their debs with elaborately casual brutality...
Miniature Mobsters. Despite its fascinating subject, Tomboy is no great shakes as a novel. Its surface action is credible enough, but when Therapist-Novelist Ellson tries to explain what makes his little hoodlums run, he is much too pat and predictable. Unlike such other slum novelists as James T. Farrell (Studs Lonigan) and Nelson Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm), he lacks the gift for individualizing his miniature mobsters and thereby arousing sympathy for them. The chances are that Ellson, who is a better reporter than novelist, would have done just as well to turn his notes into...