Word: tocsins
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...would capture Madrid because he had four columns outside the city and a fifth column of sympathizers within, the world pounced on the phrase with the eagerness of a man who has been groping for an important word. The world might better have been stunned as by a tocsin of calamity. For what Mola had done was to indicate the dimension of treason in our time...
Hedda was hardly out of bed Thursday morning when aristocratic Publisher McCormick called. Breathlessly, she sounded the tocsin around town. A few calls lined up Loretta Young and others for lunch at Romanoff's (front booth). Others alerted the 20th Century-Fox lot. Still others set RKO-Pathe and the homes of Merle Oberon (cocktails) and Sam Goldwyn (dinner) in motion. At dinner, Mrs. Goldwyn's innocent remark, "Why, you're just as comfortable as an old shoe," caused the Colonel to start. Due to a luggage mixup, he was wearing brown shoes with his tuxedo...
...colonos (sugar planters) like him, it was startling news. At the cockfight in town, and over a glass of country wine in the bodega afterward, he and fellow colonos talked angrily of raising less cane if they were not cut in on the price rise. Some even heeded the tocsin of the leftist Federation of Campesinos (Farmers), boarded trains and buses for Havana, demonstrated on the Capitolio's steps (see cut). By last week President Grau was reported ready to climb down. What Money Buys. Owning his own land (some 67 acres), a superior four-room wooden house...
...When the tocsin rang, motley mobs formed in village squares. Headed by local labor leaders and squeaky village bands, they marched on what they called "invasion." In some cases, priests and acolytes with holy water trudged behind...
Exactly what happened when they first got there is still a question. According to one account: the secretary of the municipal president said, "Those are the sons of bitches we are waiting for!" and ordered the church bells to sound a tocsin. Within a few minutes the federal officers were being stoned and beaten. Arenas played dead, escaped. Ocana was killed...