Word: leveling
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...they scattered the convoy, hit six ships, set one afire, sank one patrol boat. The British denied any ship was hurt and described how one of the Heinkels, diving through clouds to escape a British pursuit squadron, came out below only to encounter other pursuits, craftily flying a lower level patrol. These shot the Heinkel down...
...businessmen it was plain that Steel, bellwether of U. S. industry, was not gaily charging around among the flock in approved spring fashion. Steel operations had had no "normal spring rise." While production stayed around 60% of capacity, the level of new buying was around 45%, below Big Steel's 55% break-even rate. A whacking slice of production, percentagewise, was still going into already bulky inventory. The story of the situation was written in the price of steel scrap, down to $16.50 a ton (the pre-war level). Worst of all: after a good fall, Steel...
...unbroken from one side of the valley to the other. On the south they end at the base of dry, rocky hills. On the north they end at the shining waters of Monterey Bay, where coves and inlets penetrate, unseen until a watcher is almost upon them, between the level cultivated fields. At the height of the season the 4,500 pickers who swarm over these fields, to take from them their average annual yield of 500,000,000 heads of lettuce, seem diminutive and remote in the immensity of dark earth and bright green leaves, the hills...
Dotty Thompson began it, Artic Krock took up the torch, and now Mark Sullivan has done his bit. They are all pumping hard for their common claim that unemployment has dropped to the two million level of pre-depression days. Each maintains that the bad old New Dealers know that joblessness is no longer a real problem, but won't admit it, because then "they must confess the success of the American system, and they won't do that." Their arguments are, as a Supreme Court Justice has put it, "interesting but only mildly persuasive...
Some of his observations are unexceptionable ("information is not culture"); others (sound directions for doing uninspired work successfully; for licking an employer's boots profitably) may be widely useful. Occasionally, as in the essay on old age, genuine feeling transcends the overlying complacency. But on the whole, the level of art M. Maurois recommends for living and the level he achieves in this book are of a piece: cautious, servile, opportunistic, rationalized, smug...