Word: venal
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...would have welcomed a diplomatic post; but he was never offered one. Hoping to become a political power through the Press, he wrote for the North American Review and as Washington correspondent for The Nation; but when President Grant's itchy-palmed administration came in, the thickly venal atmosphere was too much for Henry. As he grew older, his early will-to-power rarefied itself into an ironic, scholarly contemplation of U. S. history, the U. S. scene. After teaching history at Harvard and editing the North American Review, he settled down to write. His anonymous novel Democracy...
...lives in sin with her bank clerk. The son, jailed for stealing a little coal, joins a street-corner meeting in which a policeman is killed. He is convicted of the murder and hanged, largely because of his radical opinions. Other scenes tabloid black-hearted iron tycoons, grimy politicians, venal judges, rich diplomats. Written strongly and at the top of its lungs, broadly directed by Author Rice, excellently cast, We, the People is an evening of violent excitement, crude theatre...
...their relations with a revolver. What all this leads to any cinemaddict ought to know, but Raft and Cummings look their parts and the picture was well directed by Archie Mayo. It manages to convey a sense of a locale, to dramatize successfully the popular conception of speakeasies as venal institutions which are sleek, disorderly and exciting...
Izzy got his job in the first place because he did not look like a detective. He kept it because he was neither venal nor lazy. When his fellow agents were reporting for work. Izzy would appear with a dozen prisoners. His industry, affability and ingenious disguises made and kept him headline news. Some of his makeups: Negro, Italian fruit-vendor, iceman, longshoreman, gasfitter, judge. Cornell undergraduate, streetcar conductor, carpenter, trombone-player (when demonstrating his ability he played ''How Dry I Am"). Once he was admitted to a speakeasy on the strength of being a Prohibition agent...
...criticism, sober and ribald, to which the venal trade of publicizing has been subjected seems to have been blunted on the dullness of its target. Or possibly the public has become so habituated to the nonsensical claims by manufacturers who keep safety-pins and piston rods fresh in cellophane, that claptrap and falsehood in advertising neither arouses suspicion as to the purity and worth of the product, nor awakens resentment in the minds of the duped. If this is so no hopes can be held for any immediate change. But if the flood of periodicals mocking the accepted lies...