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By 1902 membership in the clubs constituting the General Federation of Women's Clubs had reached two hundred thou-sand. This remarkable growth occurred despite relentless ridicule and hostility from the press. Men were clearly aware of the threatening implications of women organizing, even in this most genteel way. Of even greater significance than the numerical growth of the club movement was its change in direction. No longer a mere resting place for the middle-class matron, the women's clubs were paying more and more attention to current events and to civic improvements in their com-munities. That this change was a self-conscious one was amply demonstrated at the biennial convention in 1904. Not only did a discussion of suffrage take place for the first time, but a woman voter, Sarah Platt Decker of Colorado, was elected president.
As a matter of fact, it was not a healthy environment, in a way. There was a great deal of homosexual relations going on there, and we had a terrible tragedy in our class that nobody had coped with. There was a girl who was a very masculine type of girl, head of the basketball program, and another who was a very beautiful, sweet, delicate, typically feminine girl. The two of them lived together. The one girl loved boyfriends and dancing, and she went up to Dartmouth a great deal. A boy in Dartmouth fell in love with her, but her roommate was determined to break that up. That summer during our junior year the roommate persuaded her to cancel the engagement; she had found out that the mother of this perfectly brilliant, gifted young boy had been in a mental institution.
MURDER AND SUICIDE
Senior at Smith College Shot for Breaking Her Engagement
Northampton, Mass., April 29.—Enraged because she had broken her engagement with him and refused to renew It, Porter Smith, of Chicago, who was graduated from Dartmouth College, last year, today shot and fatally wounded Miss Helen Ayer Marden, a senior at Smith College, and then committed suicide. Miss Marden Is a daughter of Frank Marden. of Somerville. She died shortly before noon today.
that a I didn't know what to think! As soon as the women had the vote, they just quit. It's one of the tragedies of the whole era slump took place. Women stopped seeking higher degrees in college, they stopped trying to be better educated. Many young women left school for marriage and many went to work to help husbands secure degrees. Over the years this custom has become commonplace-a strange reaction to the fire and the drama of the fight for woman's suffrage.
Maybe we needed new issues. Alice Paul was right. She began immediately to plan to introduce to the Congress the equal rights amendment. Although she had helped to secure woman's suffrage, she still believed that woman's suffrage alone was not going to give women everything they wanted and needed. They had only secured the right to vote. Even now the U.S. Supreme Court has stated that the only status women have in our government is as voters. Any state today can still pass any law they'd like against women, and they have no recourse except perhaps to vote against them. There are now a thousand very bad laws on the records of state legislatures against women. This is added proof that Alice Paul is a woman with a profound mind. Getting woman's suffrage was not enough, it was just the first...
After 1922, when Maynard had his first heart attack, he was not well enough to do very much. It was enough to be going around doing all the lecturing and all the writing. And then, from 1924 until 1932 we were absorbed in the anti-evolution fight. That took up all the energy either of us had.
Maynard founded the Evolution or Science League because one state after another began having these anti-evolution bills.
He had written to every scientific and scholarly organ you can think of and they all answered that "yes, somebody should do it, but it wasn't their line." Finally, in despair, when he was doing a long lecture series, at the end of one of them he out-lined the situation and we started right there. That night we collected eleven dollars and nineteen members, and that was the beginning. This was before the Scopes trial. In fact, most of the witnesses for Scopes were our members. We were very, very select. We had practically every well-known scientist in the country, but we didn't have an awful lot of them.
We had a secretary who was supposed to do the office work, but his salary got so far in arrears that he had to get a job some-where and I did most of it from that time on. We organized branches in Los Angeles and San Diego and Sacramento and we'd take organizing tours. Sometimes I went along, sometimes I didn't.
At one time we had something like a thousand members, not all scientists, of course. Anybody who wanted to could join. I remember there was an old man in Nevada who hadn't any money and he used to send rabbits he'd kill. Once a rabbit arrived on Saturday, when we weren't there, and when we opened the door Monday morning, it was horrible. It was like a grave. There was another old man, in Georgia, an old Spanish War veteran who would sometimes be paid five dollars for someone to sleep in his bed while he slept on the floor. He'd send us the
five dollars, which was very touching. The League lasted until 1932, when Maynard's health got so bad that he couldn't go on with it. We just had to let it go, and by that time it was long after the Scopes trial. About this
1. Iconic film actress, "---ty Davis"
2. "The King" of Rock and Roll, "---is Presley"*
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4. "Revolu---n", a sudden, radical change
21. Tommy of Cheech and Chong
2. Hasbro toy for aspiring chefs ---- -ake Oven"
The Reagan bill, called the Economic Recovery Tax Act, promised to cut personal income-tax rates by 25 percent over three years and sharply cut business taxes to encourage new investment in plants, equipment, and real estate. After presenting the plan less than a month into his administration, Reagan, as well as his supporters, expressed confidence that the proposal would effectively kill the burgeoning tax shelter industry. On its face, the argument seemed to make sense. After all, shelters were largely a response to high tax rates, and the Reagan plan was expected to cut personal income-tax rates by an average of 25 percent over three years. But there was a critical flaw in their argument. Rather than kill the shelter business, the Reagan bill would spur their growth by making them more attractive investments.
The heart of his business tax-cut plan was a program known by the acronym ACRS, which stood for Accelerated Cost Recovery System. Under that proposal, assets such as real estate and equipment could be depreciated far faster than they had been in the past. Essentially, where the tax code once declared that a building would run itself down in twenty-five years, giving investors depreciation deductions throughout the entire period, under ACRS the time was reduced to fifteen years. That made investments in real estate and other depreciable assets far more attractive. It sharply boosted the amount of deduction bang an individual could get for each investment buck. Never had there been any legislation so significant to the growth of the tax shelter industry.
...
Within a matter of days, before Wall Street barely got out of the gate, the tax shelter business got another boost. A second radical change was announced on August 18 in the staid and solemn pages of the Federal Register. A publication of the United States government, the Register carries all proposed regulation and regulatory changes, and it is hot reading among lawyers and lobbyists. On that August day, it carried a proposal from the Securities and Exchange Commission that was read widely across the financial world: The government securities regulator wanted to change the rules for selling unregistered securities like private partner-ships.
The proposal, known as Regulation D, reduced some of the restrictions on such sales. It eliminated the ceiling that restricted the sales of unregistered securities to just a hundred people, loosened the definitions of what kind of investors could participate in such offerings, and raised the dollar amount of securities that could be sold to such investors. The intent of the change was to make it easier for small businesses to sell stock to the public, opening up new ways to raise capital. But it also had a mammoth effect on private offerings in the tax shelter world-now, such offerings could be bigger, broader, and sold to more people than ever before.
By itself, Regulation D would have rapidly expanded the tax shelter business on Wall Street. Combined with the Reagan tax changes, it served as a turbocharger. Almost any firm that wasn't already in the business launched its own tax shelter division. Those that already had them, from Hutton to Merrill to Bache, expanded their operations even faster.
...an insider-trading scandal emanating from Nassau, the Bahamas, out of the modest offices of Bank Leu International Ltd., a subsidiary of Switzerland's oldest private bank. That morning, lawyers for the commission rushed into the courtroom of Federal District Judge Richard Owen in New York. They were seeking an injunction to prevent the transfer of $10 million out of a Bank Leu account controlled by Dennis B. Levine, an investment banker with Drexel.
Shortly after 7:30 that night, prosecutors with the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan arrested Levine for insider trading. In hopes of cutting a deal, Levine offered the government information about his insider-trading accomplices. The names included one of Wall Street's biggest fish, Ivan Boesky, the wealthy arbitrageur. For the next five years, prosecutors and the SEC, starting with Levine's information, aggressively pursued a trail of evidence that led them to some of Wall Street's most powerful financiers. By the time they were done, a number of prominent executives, including Michael Milken, Drexel's junk-bond wizard, would go to jail. It would be one of the greatest successes in the history of securities law enforcement.
The huge investigations of Wall Street insider trading and market manipulations consumed the working days of almost every top official in the SEC enforcement division. With so much manpower delegated to pursuing the high-profile lawbreakers, few aggressive inquiries were made into whether Prudential-Bache was following the terms of the 1986 settlement. It would be seven years later, after the Boesky and Drexel investigations were finished, before the government finally learned that Prudential-Bache had ignored the strict compliance requirements of its settlement and engaged in a series of even more serious violations.
... Harrison launched a drive to win a presidential pardon. A number of his high-profile investors wrote recommendations to the Justice Department. In later years, Harrison would brag to friends that Bob Strauss himself helped lobby for the pardon. With such high-profile support, Harrison pulled it off. President Gerald R. Ford signed Harrison's pardon on October 9, 1974, one month after the pardon of Richard Nixon. Everything was finally in place for Clifton Harrison to start his life over.
Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children's Literature by Alison Lurie My rating: 4 of 5 star...