Word: webster
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...proud that he never had to take a drink or buy one to get a story. As a solid senior citizen of Lebanon, Ill., he sings a raspy bass in the Methodist choir, is a trustee of small McKendree College, writes editorials for his son's Webster Groves News-Times. He always carries a beat-up briefcase that holds his evening paper, his notes, a set of brushes...
Whatever character the negotiations called for, the Great Actor had it: Mephistopheles in a baggy, black business suit; Daniel Webster, crouching behind his eyebrows; Billy Sunday, with the vox humana in his trombone voice; Bette Davis, crying like a curlew; John Barrymore, tearing an emotion to tatters...
...definitions looked simple enough, in Webster's dictionary. But translating a definition into action-even staged, cinematic action-was not so simple, as Encyclopedia Britannica Films discovered. When E.B.F. wanted to make educational movies on Democracy and Despotism, it took a panel of twelve scholarly advisers (headed by Yale's Harold Lasswell) 20 months and 100 conferences to agree. The scholars had to survey from Plato to Harry Truman before they came to terms...
...scholars finally agreed that democracy can be measured by two "signs" and two "conditions." The signs: shared power and shared respect. The conditions: economic balance (poverty leads to despotism) and enlightenment. One flaw in Webster's abstract definitions: areas of despotism can exist in a democracy, and he doesn't say so. The film shows such areas of despotism within U.S. democracy as the Ku Klux Klan, a resort accepting only a "selected" (Christian) clientele...
...demobilization-"a suit, a raincoat, two shirts, one pair of socks, two collars, a tie and a pair of shoes." In clothes-short Britain, such an outfit would take more than a year's ration points. When hundreds of other ex-soldiers angrily asked why General Riddell-Webster got two shirts, the British War Office called it "a packing error" and sent an officer to retrieve the second shirt...