Word: weevils
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...plot curdles. Home from the bounding main with a wreath of gigantic pearls for his sweetheart, a sailor man stops on his joyful way for a shave. Woe is his, for Sweeney Todd, barber, gnawed by the weevil of avarice, has long had the vile habit of dropping his rich customers through the floor, chair and all, to a subterranean death chamber; there slitting their throats, robbing them, erasing all traces of crime by transforming the corpses into "veal" pies, succulent, rich in gravy, spiced with hairs and buttons. Such is the mariner's fate−until the last...
Nevertheless, the present high prices are a huge incentive in the attempt to overcome these difficulties of producing cotton abroad. Unless the American planter can overcome the ravages of the boll weevil, increase production and thus lower prices to something nearer a normal level, he will in a few years begin to encounter stiffer foreign competition than ever before in cotton production...
...somewhat similar fate may not be in store for our cotton planters. Owing to three successive short crops, the world price for cotton is extraordinarily high, and there is every encouragement for foreigners to undertake cotton growing. The scarcity of American cotton has been due to the boll weevil and the shortage of labor in the cotton belt...
...Egypt and India. Argentina recently brought in an experimental crop of 120,000 bales?a trivial amount now compared with the huge American crop. Nevertheless the Argentines, flushed with their successful competition with our wheat growers, are becoming enthusiastic over the possibilities in Argentine cotton. Thus far the boll weevil has not appeared there, but the customary labor shortage is considered to preclude any very great cotton production in the Argentine, at least in the near future...
...cooperation with the Army Air Service, the U. S. Department of Agriculture has had most successful results in fighting the boll weevil. Aeroplanes specially fitted for this work are now to be built. The poison is to be sprayed from under the wings, The aeroplanes must fly slower than any commercial planes ever built, 25 miles an hour, so that spraying may be thorough and unhurried...