Word: soapbox
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Soapbox v. Couch...
...them admitted that they sounded terrible. One announcer pleaded that he had had to read the same old commercials for 2½ years and that he was as bored as his audience. Most announcers, Meighan says, "fail to comprehend the informality of listening. They are up on a soapbox while the audience is flopped on,a couch...
...dockers, ignoring Attlee's speech and the vote, continued the strike. On Tower Hill, midday crowds gathered in the sun to hear soapbox speakers supporting labor solidarity and the strike. One of them popped out his National Health Service Acts false teeth, held them aloft triumphantly, cried gummily: "I'd never have had a tooth in me head if your fathers and my fathers hadn't stuck tergeth-er in the past for their rights. Solidarity, that's wot did it, and it'll do it again...
...clad Calcuttans left their steaming houses, clustered in the streets to drink lime squash, chew pan (made from the betel nut), and talk politics until tempers gave way and fists flew. Hoodlum gangs raced through the city, pasting posters, tearing down opposition signs, breaking up each other's soapbox meetings with shoes, brickbats, incendiary oil bombs, bursting bottles of nitric acid. A city ordinance banned loudspeakers, so electioneers shouted instead through megaphones, day & night...
Outside the West End Women's Club in Chicago, a mob choked the street. Inside, that night in 1946, a rabble-rousing, unfrocked Roman Catholic priest named Arthur Terminiello (since reinstated) was making a speech. On the platform with Terminiello was his soapbox bullyboy pal, Gerald L. K. Smith. Terminiello incited his audience with a fascist line of invective and bate. The mob outside hurled bricks, stink bombs, bottles and ice picks-through the windows and tried to break in the doors. Chicago police were just barely able to hold them in check and prevent a full-scale battle...