Word: squalor
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Nearly 500 enumerators in the metropolitan New York area threw away their pencils and quit after the first few days. "They couldn't take it," explained their boss. One enumerator reported that she had become too depressed by the squalor she saw on Manhattan's lower East Side; another explained that her feet were killing her. The majority found the pay too small ( 7¢ a name), the work too dull or the insults too biting. Another Manhattan census taker was fired for filching a $202 check from a mailbox-but the Government had other plans...
...charges against the U.S. had cited cases of peonage and labor under forced contracts in Maine, Connecticut, Texas, Arkansas, Georgia and California. They had revealed that thousands of "wetbacks" (i.e., Mexican laborers who wade the Rio Grande in search of work in the U.S.) lived in squalor and poverty, sometimes were paid as little as $8 a week...
Some of the splinters mirror images from other poems, from legend, or from history. These references invite the reader to measure the squalor of his day against past splendors-Elizabeth and Leicester in a red & gold barge on the Thames contrasted with an anonymous London girl of today, in a canoe on the same Thames, being seduced without pleasure, without protest ("My people humble people who expect / Nothing...
...jammed Manhattan street. She wore clothes designed in 1900. When the Seymour was modernized ten years ago she refused to let decorators enter her rooms; they went untouched. Finally, in the summer of 1948, Mary grew ill. Hotel employees and a doctor invaded her suite, found her lying amid squalor...
...just that Playwright Kanin sets theater above drama, but that he displays an almost equal lack of respect for his sordid material and his own talent. The one concern with squalor is to make it picturesque at all costs; with vulgarity, to exploit it for laughs. In the end The Rat Race gets nowhere; worse, it gets dull, repeating a lot of facile tricks and typifying a theater where, more & more, clever playwrights write everything but plays...