Word: watson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Some years ago psychologists strenuously quarreled over John B. Watson's theories of behaviorism, now largely forgotten. Another uproar sprang from the importation from Germany of "dynamic patterns of behavior" (Gestalt psychology). An endless dispute goes on over the value and significance of I. Q. tests. At present a major trouble focus is the research carried on at Duke University by Joseph Banks Rhine, by which Dr. Rhine claims to have proved the existence of "ESP'' (extrasensory perception). Dr. Rhine-some of whose admirers have compared him to Abraham Lincoln, and others to Sigmund Freud and Charles...
...haired, unreconstructed, uncompromising old Confederate who refused to take the oath of allegiance and who used to stalk around the lobby of Atlanta's Kimball House, deep in his cups, delivering his matchless tirades against the North. The other was the tvpe represented by the nervous, embattled Tom Watson of Thomson, only nine years old when the war ended, who began as a champion of the poor farmers, became a Populist candidate for President, and wound up as a rabble-rouser, an anti-Semite, anti-Catholic, defender of lynching, with a reputation as the "basest, most depraved, most poisonous...
Last week Professor C. Vann Woodward analyzed these two protesting movements in a long (518 pages), meaty biography. Toombs's story was simpler and more heroic; Watson's was incredibly confused. For 30 years he was a hero to hard pressed Georgia dirt farmers; The Thomas E. Watson Song is still sung in the Georgia back country. Debs admired Watson, Bryan feared...
Fifty-one years ago this month the crusading Farmers' Alliance began organizing in Georgia, had 100,000 members in three years. At that time Watson was a 31-year-old lawyer who played the fiddle, spouted Byron by the hour, and was considered a born orator in a State famed for them. Becoming the Alliance leader, Watson worked as hard for Negro farmers as for white, fought the convict lease system, was denounced as a communist while his followers were shot at and chased from the State...
Persecution made Watson stronger, but success beat him. In Congress he was despondent and ineffectual. He became wealthy, built a big house where he lived like an oldtime planter, but grew morose and vindictive, gradually stopped crusading for farmers and took up more sensational causes. Increasingly unhappy, he would interrupt his incoherent tirades against the Jews and Catholics with strange stories about assassins who were after him, about mysterious footprints found outside his mansion windows. At times he thought he was going insane. Beaten in one campaign after another, he was finally jeered off the stage in Atlanta, where...