Word: leftist
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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Retreat to Pleasure (by Irwin Shaw, produced by The Group Theatre) is an embarrassing attempt to mix farce, comedy and lofty social sentiments. A beautiful Ohio WPA administrator takes a vacation in Florida, where she is wooed by a valve manufacturer, a playboy and a fatuous young leftist-one of those self-righteous kibitzers who continually feels obliged to tell other people exactly what is wrong with them and with society. He wins the girl, only to spurn her in order to become a sort of wandering heart-of-the-world...
...went to work in Brooklyn College, was warmly welcomed by its tall, tweedy president, Harry D. Gideonse (pronounced Gideons), onetime critic and foe of President Robert Maynard Hutchins at University of Chicago (TIME, June 13, 1938). Mr. Gideonse took charge of Brooklyn College last year, has bickered with its leftist students and professors ever since. One of their complaints: Mr. Gideonse once entered a restaurant through a picket line...
Harrowing was his tale. When be became president, he found the college newspaper and student offices run by a leftist minority, the college's huge (14.000) student body without faculty guidance, assembly hall or space for extracurricular activities. He decided to hold student elections in classrooms, make everybody vote. Result: anti-Communists captured 17 of 20 places in the student council. Day of the election, leftists staged a peace demonstration. At an appointed hour, demonstrators suddenly blew whistles in college corridors, rushed into classrooms shouting: "Don't scab on peace." Promptly suspended were the demonstration's sponsors...
Composer Shostakovich has been on & off the careening bandwagon of the Soviet music party line. When he was off, his work was denounced as "un-Soviet, unwholesome, cheap, eccentric, tuneless and Leftist" by Pravda, which probably spoke for Musicritic Stalin. Shostakovich's fifth symphony, a thoughtful and tuneful glorification of the October Revolution, got him back on the bandwagon. Since then (1937) he has worked in the Leningrad Conservatory. The symphony which Philadelphia heard last week sounded as if Shostakovich's seat were secure-even though the symphony lacked a choral apotheosis of Lenin which the composer...
Speaking before a gathering of over 100 people in the Union last night, Granville Hicks, noted leftist author and lecturer, reversed the conventional radical view of isolation at all costs, to one of all possible aid to Britain short of war, and "conceivably even to a declaration of war on Germany" if that is necessary to defeat Hitler and to preserve our democratic institutions...