Word: spineless
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...every four dollars to the entire New Deal experimentation fund, yet receives two one-hundredths of one per cent in return, while Mississippe, a typical southern state, realizes a tidy return of 466 per cent on its investment. This discrepancy is directly due to Governor Lehman's spineless acceptance of whatever scraps are thrown to him by the New Deal revelers. Here is a prime reason for every farmer and every other New York tax payer to line up behind the Republican aspirants, who show, by their nomination of a Supreme Court Justice, real sincerity in the interest of fairness...
Appearing complicated to the point of bewilderment at first glance, this narrative method emerges in The Big Money as ingeniously simple. Basis of the book is the life stories of a few men and women whose careers converge or parallel each other. Some, like the promising but spineless Harvard intellectual, Dick Savage, have figured prominently in the previous volumes. Red-faced, hard-drinking Charley Anderson barely appeared in The 42nd Parallel; Margo Dowling, dissolute and disillusioned cinema queen, makes her debut in The Big Money. Dos Passos' method is to follow one of his characters through some meaningful experience...
...only does this make the workers weak, spineless, and servile, so that in the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, another perpetrator of these policies, there have been no strikes or labor troubles of any kind since the beginning of the depression, and, even easier, far before under the present leadership, but also this treatment of labor is now absolutely illegal. Heroes Wagner and Roosevelt (my blessing upon them for many services rendered) have made such activitiy absolutey illegal...
Best in the book, and well worthy of inclusion in a U. S. anthology, is the title story, Kneel to the Rising Sun: A spineless sharecropper, whose landlord persistently half-starves him and browbeats him, as he does all his tenants, one night finds his old father missing from the cabin. To help him search he rouses a Negro neighbor; together they find the old man's body, half-devoured by their landlord's hogs. When they wake the landlord there is a quarrel between him and the Negro, which is the excuse the landlord has been waiting...
Aren't the 15 Senators a bunch of spineless pollywogs to congratulate Coughlin for usurping their jobs...