Word: softener
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Montreal had been won over, but that cut no ice in Flatbush. Branch Rickey, who knows his fellow citizens, set out to soften them up. He organized a group of Brooklyn's leading Negro citizens, including one judge, into a formal "how-to-handle-Robinson committee." In every other city in the National League, Rickey set up similar committees. The Brooklyn committee drew up a list of do's and don'ts a yard long; Jackie's deportment in public & private was to be supervised as thoroughly as Princess Elizabeth...
LAKE SUCCESS, July 24--Hopes for a compromise solution of the Balkan problem faded today when Russia turned down French proposals intended to "soften" the American plan for a powerful semi-permanent commission in the Halkans...
Among the few composers spared Mossman's working-over were Bach, Beethoven and Schumann. Last week Schumann took the count. Mossman published three Tin Pan Alley adaptations of Schumann, timed to soften up the U.S. for a movie on Schumann's life, Song of Love, in which Pianist Artur Rubinstein plays Schumann's music straight (TIME, May 26). Schumann's Träumerei will be crooned and swung as Fantasy; the song Widinung will be known as Dedication. From the great A Minor Piano Concerto, Mossman has wrung a vapid tune called A Love Story...
...moonlight chilliness of his mood, his refusal to soften the deepening ambiguities of truth (as he saw it), the pitiless obsession of his God-seeking, and the scary symbolism in which he embodied his God-seeking, have kept Kafka from becoming a popular writer. Yet readers with the requisite staying power will find that in the scope of the problem to which he dedicated himself, in the depth and integrity of his discernments and in the variety of means by which he dramatized his vision in terms of everyday life (thereby giving to everyday life new implications and new dimensions...
...came back with the report that the French Directory only wanted peace, the chief effect of which was to soften American public opinion at the very moment when the Government was trying its best to appear strong. Congress was incensed. The well-meaning Logan got no more than a tongue-lashing, but Congress passed the Logan Act as a curb on all future self-appointed spokesmen...