Word: solon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...responsibility and Congressional authority, the La Follette-Monroney Committee makes some proposals which will probably be greeted with the same enthusiasm as the recent suggestion of whipping-boy Wallace. Besides recommending adoption of an honest-to-God budget, increases in Congressional salaries, appointment of an administrative assistant for each solon, and the lifting of petty but time-consuming burdens such as the supervision of the District of Columbia, the report advocates a revamping of the overlapping, over powerful committee system. Congressional committee have long been the stronghold of the "rugged individualist" and the chief means by which a small group...
Religion v. Materialism. Solon Barnes is a Quaker, brought up in unworldliness. He marries (for love) into a richer family of Friends and becomes a Philadelphia banker. For many years he floats along on uneasy rationalizations about the sacred stewardship of wealth (which he honestly tries to live up to). When his associates mire themselves and their bank deeper & deeper in crooked, within-the-law self-interest, he can stay silent no longer. In part the novel is a study of the losing struggle between the moribund U.S. religious sense and proliferating U.S. materialism...
...Dreiser was far less a theorist than a humanist; essentially his novel is not a social thesis but the timeless story of family life. Of Solon's five children, one is set apart by her homeliness; one is a born Pharisee; one is a self-conscious beauty; one is an artist; one is a natural cavalier. Dreiser is interested mainly in the two latter, the arch-rebels. Against them Solon Barnes finds sternness and tolerance equally ineffective. His son and daughter, in the struggle to come to life as autonomous human beings, become thieves, and worse. The soberly beautiful...
...story has been told many times, and more dramatically, but seldom with more balanced compassion or gentler insight. The Bulwark's closing chapters, in which Solon Barnes realizes what his good intentions have wrought, and is battered into a simpler, humbler kind of religious understanding, are of a searching, level, melancholy beauty which cannot be expected of any living American writer...
...native Albertan, 44 years old, Solon Low neither drinks nor smokes. He first became interested in Social Credit's principle (artificial creation of purchasing power) when he was an economics student in crackpot-breeding Southern California. In 1935, he won a seat in Alberta's legislature as a Social Crediter. He became Provincial Treasurer in 1937. One of the least radical of Social Crediters, he has labored mightily, and in vain, to refund Alberta's $140,000,000 debt...