H.L. Mencken

Stella_Omega said:

yeah, yeah.
You need to take your activity to another rumpus room, that's all.

You have a lot of nerve insinuating witchburning, Mister Counts-His-Money Man. I AM someone who would have beenburned, while YOU are just another of the millions of bourgeois limpdicks with a wallet where his brain should be.


Your moral code is in plenty effect all over the fucking world. This forum was once a respite from beancounters and middlemen. If you don't want to talk to the regulars, what are you doing here? Seriously, think about it.

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Stella_Omega said:

Be honest; you aren't quoting his writing in this thread, only his political quips. And only the ones that anyone could get via google.

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Baltimore, April 13, 1945

The Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man." There are heavy black dashes above and below it. The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when "he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined." In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. It is astonishing how far the Sun has gone in this nonsense. When the English fetched Patterson and John Owens they certainly did an all-out job. I know of no paper in the United States, not even the New York Herald Tribune, that croons for them more assiduously.

Roosevelt's unparallelled luck held out to the end. He died an easy death, and he did so just in time to escape burying his own dead horse. This business now falls to Truman, a third-rate Middle Western politician on the order of Harding. He is fundamentally against the New Deal wizards, and he will probably make an earnest effort to turn them out of power, but I have some doubt that he will succeed. They have dug in deeply and they may be expected to fight to the bitter end, for once they are out they will be nothing and they know it. The case of La Eleanor is not without its humors. Only yesterday she was the most influential female ever recorded in American history, but tomorrow she will begin to fade, and by this time next year she may be wholly out of the picture. I wonder how many newspapers will go on printing her "My Day." Probably not many.

It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history -- maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics. If the war drags on it is possible, of course, that there may be a reaction against him, and there may be another and worse after war is over at last, but the chances, I think, run the other way. He had every quality that morons esteem in their heroes. Thus a demigod seems to be in the making, and in a little while we may see a grandiose memorial under way in Washington, comparable to those to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In it, I suppose, Eleanor will have a niche, but probably not a conspicuous one. The majority of Americans, I believe, distrust and dislike her, and all her glories have been only reflections from Franklin.

The Baltimore Hearst paper, the News-Post, handled the great news with typical cynicism. Hearst is one of the most violent enemies of Roosevelt, and all his papers have been reviling the New Deal, and even propagating doubts about the war. But the whole first page of the News-Post is given over this afternoon to a large portrait of Roosevelt flanked by two flags in color and headed "Nation Mourns." The editorial page is filled with an editorial saying, among other things, "The work and name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt will live on, not only today or tomorrow, but in all the annals of recorded time." This, as I have noted, is probably a fact, but it is certainly not a fact that tickles Hearst. He is, however, an expert in mob psychology, and does not expect much. The Sun is in far less rational position. It certifies to Roosevelt's greatness in all seriousness.

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NOTE​

This collection is not exhaustive, but an effort has been made to keep it representative. The original materials would fill many volumes: they include hundreds of savage articles and newspaper editorials, and a number of whole pamphlets. During the single year 1926 more than 500 separate editorials upon the sayings and doings of Mr. Mencken were printed in the United States, and at least four-fifths of them were unfavorable. Himself given to somewhat acidulous utterance, he has probably been denounced more vigorously and at greater length than any other American of his time, not even excepting Henry Ford, Robert M. LaFollette, Clarence Darrow, and Sacco and Vanzetti. Here there is room only to offer some salient specimens of this anti-Mencken invective— mainly single sentences or phrases, torn from their incandescent context. Some were chosen for their wit— for there are palpable hits among them!—, some for their blistering ferocity, and some for their charming idiocy. The rest of the material awaits the literary resurrection men of another and perhaps less indignant day.
-THE PUBLISHER

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• Zoölogical
  "This maggot, this ghoul of new-made graves, this buzzard!"
  -Eugene L. Pearce, in the Tampa Times.
  
• Genealogical
  "Mr. Mencken did not degenerate from an ape, but from an ass. And in the process of 'revolution' the tail was eliminated, the ears became shorter and the hind parts smaller; but the ability to bray was increased, intensified, amplified and otherwise assified about one million times."
  - J. B. Tedder, in the Chattanooga News.
  
• Pathological
  "H. L. Mencken says the Liberty Bell episode was a myth. That man just naturally can't stand for anything that is more cracked than he is himself."
  - The Los Angeles Record
  
• Freudian Diagnosis
  "Mr. Mencken, that American Loud-Speaker, is suffering from a serious superiority complex."
  - The Queen ( London ).
  
• Penalogical
  "Mencken, with his filthy verbal hemorrhages, is so low down in the moral scale, so damnably dirty, so vile and degenerate, that when his time comes to die it will take a special dispensation from Heaven to get him into the bottomost pit of Hell."
  - The Jackson ( Miss. ) News.
  
• As A Critic
  "Mr. Mencken is a typical Hun in his criticism."
  - The Los Angeles Times.
  
• As An Artist
  "Mr. Mencken is no writer at all, but a brick factory."
  - The New Republic.
  
• As An Evangelist
  "Mencken is frankly a diabolist."
  - The Manchester ( N.H. ) Union.
  
• As An American
  "A British toady."
  - The Lowell ( Mass. ) Sun.
  
• As An Intellectual
  "In his glorious upward progress he acquired instead of the gray matter placed in the skulls of Tennesseans by the Almighty, a composite of slime, mould, bunk, miasma, decay, skunk cabbage, devil's snuff, flapdoodle and Hamburger cheese, blended in minor proportions with razor extract, stump water and valerian. So biggon, sooey, scat, shoo!"
  - Nannie H. Chesnutt, in the Nashville Tennessean.
  
• As A Journalist
  "H. L. Mencken thinks journalism is in a low estate. It sure is wherever Mencken touches it."
  - The Council Bluffs ( Iowa ) Nonpareil.
  
• As A Truth-Seeker
  
• As An Editor
  
• As A Statesman
  "A radical crack-brain."
  - The Huntington ( W. Va. ) Herald-Dispatch.
  
• As A Voluptuary
  "The Menckens are accustomed to trafficking in morasses of racy French literature. They have attained that peak of rarefied highbrowism where the palate quickens only upon highly-seasoned eroticism."
  - The Louisville Courier-Journal.
  
• As A Scoundrel
  
• Kosher Or Terefah?
  "Mencken is connected with the New York World, the attitude of which toward Romanism and Rum the reader should know full well. From his name, he seems to be a Jew, or at least a German, and recently in an Alabama daily he was sneering at Genesis.
  - The Alabama Christian Advocate.
  
• Ex-Cathedra
  "One H. L. Mencken, whose name sounds like that of a German, Polish or Russian Jew, said to be foreign-born and a product of the schools of Germany, has sneeringly called the South the Bible Belt."
  - THE REV. JAMES M. GLENN, D.D., in the Birmingham ( Ala. ) Christian Advocate.
  
• Counter-Offensive
  "I do not believe that all the iconoclastic mouthings of H. L. Mencken can weigh as feathers against the gold of a single, little, undernourished, underprivileged or crippled child, made happier by the work of the Lions."
  - PROFESSOR ENEST C. MARRINER, of Colby College, Waterville, Maine.
  
• Winces Of The Called
  
• The Voice Of The Motherland
  
• Miscellaneous Elegancies
  "H. L. Mencken, instead of taking a page ad like the piles cure manufacturers or the fly paper venders or the corn plaster makers, simply says something sufficiently shocking or silly to be quoted."
  - The Nashville Tennessean
  
• Verdicts In Brief
  "A SMART Aleck who has become a member of Phi Beta Kappa."
  - Hearst's Chicago Herald-Examiner.
  
  "A Baltimore Babbitt."
  - O. O. McINTYRE
  

...For all our professed delight in and capacity for jocosity, we have produced so far but one genuine wit—Ambrose Bierce—and, save to a small circle, he remains unknown today. Our great humourists, including even Mark Twain, have had to take protective colouration, whether willingly or unwillingly, from the prevailing ethical foliage, and so one finds them levelling their darts, not at the stupidities of the Puritan majority, but at the evidences of lessening stupidity in the anti-Puritan minority. In other words, they have done battle, not against, but for Philistinism—and Philistinism is no more than another name for Puritanism. Both wage a ceaseless warfare upon beauty in its every form, from painting to religious ritual, and from the drama to the dance—the first because it holds beauty to be a mean and stupid thing, and the second because it holds beauty to be distracting and corrupting.

Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist; there was in him something of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof engrossment in the human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one associates with the great artists of the Renaissance. But his nationality hung around his neck like a millstone; he could never throw off his native Philistinism. One ploughs through "The Innocents Abroad" and through parts of "A Tramp Abroad" with incredulous amazement. Is such coarse and ignorant clowning to be accepted as humour, as great humour, as the best humour that the most humorous of peoples has produced? Is it really the mark of a smart fellow to lift a peasant's cackle over "Lohengrin"? Is Titian's chromo of Moses in the bullrushes seriously to be regarded as the noblest picture in Europe? Is there nothing in Latin Christianity, after all, save petty grafting, monastic scandals and the worship of the knuckles and shin-bones of dubious saints? May not a civilized man, disbelieving in it, still find himself profoundly moved by its dazzling history, the lingering remnants of its old magnificence, the charm of its gorgeous and melancholy loveliness? In the presence of all beauty of man's creation—in brief, of what we roughly call art, whatever its form—the voice of Mark Twain was the voice of the Philistine. A literary artist of very high rank himself, with instinctive gifts that lifted him, in "Huckleberry Finn" to kinship with Cervantes and Aristophanes, he was yet so far the victim of his nationality that he seems to have had no capacity for distinguishing between the good and the bad in the work of other men of his own craft. The literary criticism that one occasionally finds in his writings is chiefly trivial and ignorant; his private inclination appears to have been toward such romantic sentimentality as entrances school-boys; the thing that interested him in Shakespeare was not the man's colossal genius, but the absurd theory that Bacon wrote his plays. Had he been born in France (the country of his chief abomination!) instead of in a Puritan village of the American hinterland, I venture that he would have conquered the world. But try as he would, being what he was, he could not get rid of the Puritan smugness and cocksureness, the Puritan distrust of new ideas, the Puritan incapacity for seeing beauty as a thing in itself, and the full peer of the true and the good...

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The average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty—and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies. It is, indeed, only the exceptional man who can even stand it. The average man doesn't want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.

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For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.

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What amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.

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Mencken’s descriptions of these wondrous clowns [i.e., politicians] are still a delight because, though the originals are long since erased from the collective ‘memory’ of the United States of Amnesia, the types persist.

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Byron In Exile said:

Baltimore, April 13, 1945

The Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man." There are heavy black dashes above and below it. The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when "he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined." In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. It is astonishing how far the Sun has gone in this nonsense. When the English fetched Patterson and John Owens they certainly did an all-out job. I know of no paper in the United States, not even the New York Herald Tribune, that croons for them more assiduously.

Roosevelt's unparallelled luck held out to the end. He died an easy death, and he did so just in time to escape burying his own dead horse. This business now falls to Truman, a third-rate Middle Western politician on the order of Harding. He is fundamentally against the New Deal wizards, and he will probably make an earnest effort to turn them out of power, but I have some doubt that he will succeed. They have dug in deeply and they may be expected to fight to the bitter end, for once they are out they will be nothing and they know it. The case of La Eleanor is not without its humors. Only yesterday she was the most influential female ever recorded in American history, but tomorrow she will begin to fade, and by this time next year she may be wholly out of the picture. I wonder how many newspapers will go on printing her "My Day." Probably not many.

It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history -- maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics. If the war drags on it is possible, of course, that there may be a reaction against him, and there may be another and worse after war is over at last, but the chances, I think, run the other way. He had every quality that morons esteem in their heroes. Thus a demigod seems to be in the making, and in a little while we may see a grandiose memorial under way in Washington, comparable to those to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In it, I suppose, Eleanor will have a niche, but probably not a conspicuous one. The majority of Americans, I believe, distrust and dislike her, and all her glories have been only reflections from Franklin.

The Baltimore Hearst paper, the News-Post, handled the great news with typical cynicism. Hearst is one of the most violent enemies of Roosevelt, and all his papers have been reviling the New Deal, and even propagating doubts about the war. But the whole first page of the News-Post is given over this afternoon to a large portrait of Roosevelt flanked by two flags in color and headed "Nation Mourns." The editorial page is filled with an editorial saying, among other things, "The work and name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt will live on, not only today or tomorrow, but in all the annals of recorded time." This, as I have noted, is probably a fact, but it is certainly not a fact that tickles Hearst. He is, however, an expert in mob psychology, and does not expect much. The Sun is in far less rational position. It certifies to Roosevelt's greatness in all seriousness.

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sr71plt said:

Hasn't even noticed he's been quoting to himself for two years.

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Byron In Exile said:

Baltimore, April 13, 1945

The Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man." There are heavy black dashes above and below it. The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when "he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined." In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. It is astonishing how far the Sun has gone in this nonsense. When the English fetched Patterson and John Owens they certainly did an all-out job. I know of no paper in the United States, not even the New York Herald Tribune, that croons for them more assiduously.

Roosevelt's unparallelled luck held out to the end. He died an easy death, and he did so just in time to escape burying his own dead horse. This business now falls to Truman, a third-rate Middle Western politician on the order of Harding. He is fundamentally against the New Deal wizards, and he will probably make an earnest effort to turn them out of power, but I have some doubt that he will succeed. They have dug in deeply and they may be expected to fight to the bitter end, for once they are out they will be nothing and they know it. The case of La Eleanor is not without its humors. Only yesterday she was the most influential female ever recorded in American history, but tomorrow she will begin to fade, and by this time next year she may be wholly out of the picture. I wonder how many newspapers will go on printing her "My Day." Probably not many.

It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history -- maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics. If the war drags on it is possible, of course, that there may be a reaction against him, and there may be another and worse after war is over at last, but the chances, I think, run the other way. He had every quality that morons esteem in their heroes. Thus a demigod seems to be in the making, and in a little while we may see a grandiose memorial under way in Washington, comparable to those to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In it, I suppose, Eleanor will have a niche, but probably not a conspicuous one. The majority of Americans, I believe, distrust and dislike her, and all her glories have been only reflections from Franklin.

The Baltimore Hearst paper, the News-Post, handled the great news with typical cynicism. Hearst is one of the most violent enemies of Roosevelt, and all his papers have been reviling the New Deal, and even propagating doubts about the war. But the whole first page of the News-Post is given over this afternoon to a large portrait of Roosevelt flanked by two flags in color and headed "Nation Mourns." The editorial page is filled with an editorial saying, among other things, "The work and name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt will live on, not only today or tomorrow, but in all the annals of recorded time." This, as I have noted, is probably a fact, but it is certainly not a fact that tickles Hearst. He is, however, an expert in mob psychology, and does not expect much. The Sun is in far less rational position. It certifies to Roosevelt's greatness in all seriousness.

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