Word: smithing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Please call Mr. Smith at Mutual 6256." Last week wags were planting such deadpan messages by the thousands all over Los Angeles. When the victim called the number, he heard a sepulchral voice intone: "Venereal diseases are increasing in Los Angeles . . . Remember these facts. VD is spread mainly by sexual intercourse and kissing. Symptoms include sores, rashes and discharges. Treatment by a capable physician must begin immediately. These diseases can be cured...
Last week Psychologists Wendell I. Smith of Bucknell University and E. B. Hale of Pennsylvania State University told a Philadelphia meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association that pecking orders are not immutable. They can be changed by Smith and Hale...
Dividing twelve white Leghorn hens into three groups of four, Smith and Hale allowed the natural pecking orders to establish themselves. When each hen clearly understood its rank in society. Smith and Hale selected pairs of hens from each group. To the wings of the high-ranking hen of each pair, they attached wires from an electric-shock device. Then both were put in a pen with a single dish of grain...
Handlin has some good insights into life on New York's East Side. This part of his book is often fascinating, as he catches the flavor of Smith's early years quite well. Smith emerges as a cocky, jaunty politician, the man who reorganized New York's State government and gave it an honest and popular administration. He shows through as the Smith who in 1933 threatened to lick Tammany on "a Chinese laundry ticket," if it wouldn't back Herbert Lehman...
...more about this part of the book only if it were more important to Handlin. But regrettably he has subordinated this material, on which his studies have strongly qualified him to write, to his "Whig theory" of writing history in terms of the present. The view that Smith symbolized the high-water mark of Catholic political hopes may be correct; so may be the view that he was double-crossed by a vacuous F.D.R. But if these conclusions were valid they would stand more firmly on a better research and more detailed history, and one which did not announce...