Word: tatterdemalion
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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With troops, tanks and tear gas President Hoover succeeded in driving the Bonus Expeditionary Force out of Washington fortnight ago. But that did not break up the tatterdemalion army and scatter it home. With diplomacy replacing armed force, the rest of the job was accomplished last week by the combined efforts of Daniel Willard, president of Baltimore & Ohio R. R., David Barry, brother-in-law of Steelman Charles Michael Schwab, and "Eddie" McCloskey. scrappy little Mayor of Johnstown...
Last week, Philadelphia's Mayor Harry Arista Mackey revealed that for some time past he too has been disguising himself to go among his citizenry. Made up as a tatterdemalion in false whiskers, with a red bandana knotted about his neck, he would wander nocturnally among the poor and jobless of the city, sleeping and eating with them as public wards. Thus, when a committee of unemployed called at his office to complain about conditions in the city's almshouse and demand free food, clothing, rent, streetcar rides, and a dole of $15 a week, Mayor Mackey...
...that Mr. Laurence's version employs such U. S. colloquialisms as ''bunk . . . all wet . . . caught with his pants down," it preserves the strange compound of squalor and beauty with which the original depicts a sorry crowd of derelicts living in an unspeakable Moscow basement and, like tatterdemalion philosophers, pondering their own destiny and that of the race. In an almost formless succession, each of these is scrutinized by the playwright who strips away the surface tissue and exposes the quivering core of passion, perplexity or faith...