Word: bleakness
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...bleak, jittery summer of 1932 a 19-year-old Negro communist organizer named Angelo Herndon led a hunger march of unemployed on Atlanta's courthouse. A few days later he was arrested, held for eleven days without charges. Then Atlanta prosecutors dusted off a Reconstruction law providing the death penalty for "any attempt ... to induce others to join in any combined resistance to the lawful authority of the State." In all its 66 years no one had ever been convicted under that statute. Chiefly on the evidence of communist pamphlets found in his possession, a Georgia jury found...
...Stakhanovism is a marvellous invention for brisking up idleness (in old days there was the knout). Stakhanovism would be useless in a country where the workers all work. But out there, as soon as they are left alone, they become slack." The bleak impersonality of some model houses depressed him: "Can this depersonalization, towards which everything in the U. S. S. R. seems to tend, be considered as progress? For my part, I cannot believe it." The nearly universal conformity of opinion depressed him more. "In the U. S. S. R. everybody knows beforehand, once and for all, that...
...bleak, rainy afternoon, years later, in an office in a northern navy yard, a group of men talked idly, as sailors will. What more natural than that their memories should revert to sunnier scenes, and several having served in Samoa, the talk soon turned on this very incident. As the event was illuminated from different points in time the following sequel developed...
...across the edge of the Grand Banks, the Coast Guard cutter Mendota slid to a stop, engines dead, church pennant at masthead, to pay the annual homage of the Ice Patrol to the 1,513 dead who caused its creation. Rolling in the trough of the sea with a bleak grey sky above and the broken hull of the Titanic below, the Mendota lay at rest with her 90 officers & men lining her quarter-deck in full dress while Commander Henry W. Coyle Jr. read the burial service. A rifle squad fired three volleys, and the Mendota steamed away through...
...bleak night last December eight men flying north from Charleston, S. C. were strapped in their seats in an Eastern Air Lines transport, undisturbed by the rough air because their pilot was famed Henry Tindall ("Dick") Merrill, whose exploits, besides flying U. S. mail in a bathing suit (see cut, p. 74), have included twice hopping the Atlantic (TIME, Sept. 14, 1936). Suddenly a thudding shiver ran through the plane as a wingtip sliced a treetop. Recalled Passenger W. T. Critchfield: "It sounded at first like a heavy truck running on gravel very fast. I looked at Saggio [a passenger...