Talk:H. L. Mencken
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[edit] POV issue
It seems to me that this entry is manifestly not NPOV. I started to "neutralize" the entry, but I'm not a Mencken expert, and I don't want to gut the page. I'd rather have it corrected.
Can anyone help?
Rholton 23:07, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I guess he did a little composing too. 142.177.168.74 14:51, 16 May 2004 (UTC)
[edit] H.L. Mencken's Score on the PC Purity test
This article is just plain nuts. Out of all the things that could be said about one of the most influential men of letters in the United States, the article starts with a discussion of Mencken's racism or lack of racism? If this wikipedia were written by the Christians of the Ffith Century, all it would talk about was Mencken's relationship to the Donatist Schism. Since Donatism was all that was on their minds then, no doubt people locked into that time and place would have been fascinated. Likewise, here, those of us not obsessed to the point of madness with race issues occassionally want to find out information, neutral information, on the great writers and thinkers of history. It is like reading a report card that only reports on one topic: how does he rate on his political correctness? John C. Wright 9:48 1 February 2007
[edit] Accuracy of quote
I'm looking for a source for the "No one ever went broke..." quote. This remark is usually quoted as "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."
If this article substitutes "middle classes" for "public" incorrectly, then that strikes me as a pretty serious breach of NPOV. I don't want to mess with the quote unless I can find a reliable source. Help? Cyrusc 12:35, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
Then there's this quote about "the educated Negro", also uncited. Some webpages cite it from Men versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist. Does anyone know the context in which this statement was made? Cyrusc 13:07, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] The last part would be a good place to start...
Any chance we could remove the "Also a latent prophet of sorts" dig in the last paragraph? It seems like a non-NPOV sentiment to me..
--Ultra Megatron 08:31, Nov 11, 2004 (UTC)
- Well, the passage quoted reads like a prophecy. And the article makes no claim that the prophecy has yet been fulfilled. Daniel,levine 00:25, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Any point to the anti-semitism speculation?
Even if it were true - so what ? Is it illegal to have antisemitic thoughts ? Remember Mencken was a philosopher. Plato hated the Barbarians = non-greek peoples - - so what ? Janine.
It seems to me that since Mencken's work has nothing material to do with Jews the question of whether or not he was anti-semitic is completely out of place in the article. You might as well speculate whether or not he enjoyed pizza, or if he and Plato had been contemporaries, who would win in a sissy slap-fight.
- The point is that its something that a lot of his critics bring up, and if you read his work, its definitly coloured by the anti-semitism. I actually did some research from my university's library for this article, and all 5 or 6 books, in their introductions, mention Mencken being accused of anti-semitism and misogyny. Anyway, Mencken was a social critic, so much of his job was to talk about his personal views (bigoted though we may find them), so I think they certainly merit a section in the article. Jackson 07:47, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
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- IMHO, citing introductions perfectly verifies that Mencken has been referred to as Anti-Semetic, but the veracity of the charge -- which in the article currently reads "superficially" -- cries out for some citations. His comparison of Hitler to KKK'ers speaks for the common mindset and tactics he saw, not for any Anti-Semitism Ð’ntalk 08:26, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
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- I think a major reason Mencken remains of interest is speculation about the relationship between his personal politics and his work. He did write explicitly about these subjects e.g. "The Jews" in Damn! A Book of Calumny or Designations for Colored Folk. This article has a responsibility to address the apparent conflict between disparaging remarks Mencken made about Jews and African-Americans on one hand, and his service to these groups--e.g. as publisher of African-American writers or assistant to Jews leaving Nazi Germany--on the other. Cyrusc 13:47, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
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[edit] Where can I get some info?
I recently bought A Mencken Chrestomathy at a used-book store. It is a first edition and the first page has someone's signature (with '49 under it). How can I find out if it's Mencken's signature?--The Individual 13:59, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
He was not able to sign his name, or write at all, after 1948--Saxophobia 20:29, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
According to Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (see references) after his stroke he signed a "wobbly H.L.M." and "one spring morning (1949)" he wrote "the first legible memorandum . . . since his stroke." see pages 534 & 535.--Gamahler 18:10, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Contradiction
The interpretation "Most commentators regard his views as libertarian, but some of Mencken's writing displays elitism, and at times a pronounced racist element in excess of early-twentieth century Social Darwinist thought" conflicts with the entirety of the "Race Issues" section. Someone make up Mencken's mind. --CannedLizard 05:40, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
Where's the contradiction?There's none that I can tell of; the text seeming totally coherent.--193.137.78.252 22:44, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Mencken could be quite tasteless
Mencken tended to speak his mind rather freely at times. In an article on Chiropractors (PREJUDICES, series 1) he refers to people with birth defects as "Botched by God", He states that it is his opinion that God, in his wisdom, "Intends the Botched to die" and Chiropractors, by doing nothing useful, help them on to their destined end. --Saxophobia 20:40, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] H.L.Mencken House ownership
National Park Service states "After he passed away on January 26, 1956, he bequeathed his home to the University of Maryland." [1] What is source for changing article to reflect ownership passed to brother? Davidbober 19:47, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
What can I say? The Feds have been wrong in the past, they are wrong now, and will be again in the future.
- “Only one item remained unassigned: the house itself.
- In the family no one cared more for 1524 Hollins Street or had a greater attachment to it than Mencken. Its disposition caused a major squabble within the family. But in the end, all agreed with Mencken’s decision that August should remain sole owner and later dispose of it in some proper way.” Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Mencken, The American Iconoclast, p. 539
- “August Mencken continued to live at 1524 Hollins street. . . . August died in 1967.” Ibid., p. 551. --Gamahler 03:28, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Whooping for the Kaiser
The article currently omits Mencken's stance on World War One: he wanted Germany to defeat the Democracies. This article by Fred Siegel quotes Mencken as writing:
- I, too, like the leaders of Germany, had grave doubts about democracy. ... It suddenly dawned on me, somewhat to my surprise, that the whole body of doctrine that I had been preaching was fundamentally anti-Anglo Saxon, and that if I had any spiritual home at all it must be in the land of my ancestors. When World War I actually started I began forthwith to whoop for the Kaiser, and I kept up that whooping so long as there was any free speech left.
(This is apparently from My Life as Author and Editor.) Siegel then writes
- This wasn't a brief episode, but the very core of Mencken's political being. He proudly proclaimed in his columns for the Baltimore Sun papers that, in the battle between autocracy and democracy, he wanted to see democracy go down. Mencken was enamored not only of the Kaiser's autocratic rule, but with "the whole war machine." He mocked Allied outrage over German killings of Belgian civilians, as well as the sinking of the S.S. Lusitania, which brought the death of 124 Americans. Hobson tells us that he advised Theodore Dreiser, a fellow German-American, that "there can never be any compromise in future men of German blood and the common run of 'good,' 'right thinking' Americans. We must stand against them forever, and do what damage we can do to them, and to their tin-pot democracy."
I suggest that the article should mention this pro-German stance, which probably also played a part in the decline of Mencken's popularity in the years preceding WW2. Cheers, CWC(talk) 12:39, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] POV Conformist Liberalist Apologia
This article reeks of modern liberal egalitarian antiracist propaganda. No legitimate secondary sources are given, the whole article consists of arbitrary liberal propaganda and ORIGINAL RESEARCH. It nervously and defensively seeks to dishonestly whitewash Mencken's intellectual nonconformism (i.e. his anti-democratism, racialism and anti-Semitism) by projecting modern artificial PC values. This is just another case of Wikipedia showing off its PC-Trotskyite biases. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 172.164.179.204 (talk • contribs).
- Mencken was most certainly not a "racialist" and not an anti-Semite, you silly Ku Kluxer. The only group of people that Mencken showered with contempt and disdain throughout his entire life were white southerners ("the apex of moronia", "simian", comparing the Baptist and Methodist churches to voodooism, etc.) Mencken was a libertarian and an elitist, he was married to a Jewish woman (not that it improved his views on marriage and women), he did have an amusing fetish for aristocracy and he showed enough admiration for the American "aristocracy" (Washington, Jefferson, Robert E. Lee) throughout his career to make his one off-hand remark about his views being essentially "anti-Anglo-Saxon" (as in the posting above) a fairly irrelevant example of Mencken's usual rashness and love of making an (intellectual) scene. What Mencken respected was "first-rate men" of all races and ethnicities. This should be clear to anyone who takes time to read any decent selection of his writings. As to the article itself, it is clearly apologist and thus needs to be thoroughly re-written. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 69.150.170.94 (talk • contribs).
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- Actually, he was racist, but in a rather 19th-century way. For instance, he preferred the "German race" to the "Anglo-Saxon race", as explained above. Please note that it is very hard for people today to understand the way people thought about race in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Cheers, CWC(talk) 15:56, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
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- Actually, what modern Ku Kluxers mean by the term "racialism" is "racial consciousness", that is to say, a dominating herd instinct coupled with the usual anti-black racism. And Mencken, it is clear, posessed absolutely no "racial consciousness": a Baptist redneck from Alabama was to him a creature clearly inferior to his black cook. That is the impression one gets from his writings. And I'll repeat, I see no clear evidence in his body of writing that he seriously had a theory of the superiority of the "German" race. He mocked his readers, and loved a controversy.. but his ideas remained thoroughly intellectual and logical throughout his life, even if some of his off-hand remarks are anything but.
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--You guys are all typical modern people in fashionable PC reality-denial, something Mencken would have scorned. The fallacious, reflexive, hysterical accusations of "Kluxer!" when somebody points out reality is also revealing. I dare the prevailingly jewish-trotskyite crowd of wikipedians to study the following actual words of Mencken and incorporate them in the article:
I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. Men versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist [1910]
…the negro, no matter how much he is educated, must remain, as a race, in a condition of subservience; that he must remain the inferior of the stronger and more intelligent white man so long as he retains racial differentiation. Therefore, the effort to educate him has awakened in his mind ambitions and aspirations which, in the very nature of things, must go unrealized, and so, while gaining nothing whatever materially, he has lost all his old contentment, peace of mind and happiness. In Defense of Women
Gore Vidal, Foreward to M.E. Rodger's The Impossible H.L. Mencken:
Recently, when his letters were published, it was discovered that He Did Not Like the Jews, and that he had said unpleasant things about them not only as individuals but In General, plainly the sign of a Hitler-Holocaust enthusiast. So shocked was everyone that even the New York Review of Books‘ unofficial de-anti-Semitiser, Garry Wills (he salvaged Dickens, barely), has yet to come to his aid with An Explanation.
- Mencken may have written nasty things about African Americans, but there was no group in the U.S. that Mencken hated more than Deep Southern whites. One could search through Mencken's works and find nothing positive that he wrote about the whites of the South. His view was that the Southern aristocracy had effectively self destructed in the Civil War, and ever since then the Southern whites were degenerate rabble who were lower in his mind than the blacks that they persecuted. To Mencken, the "high-caste white stock" excluded the white populations of the South (the only exception being that part of the Virginia aristocracy that survived the Civil War). One would also search in vain to find ANY racial, ethnic, or national group that Mencken did not attack at some point, including the group that he himself pertained to, German Americans.
In my considered opinion, we can safely dismiss POV complaints when they come from people who rant about Wikipedia's "PC-Trotskyite biases" and the "jewish-trotskyite crowd of wikipedians." Expressions like these are used only by people who are entirely divorced from reality. Why are we even discussing this? Cliodule 02:47, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] over the top.
...Is the only phrase to describe the hagiographic prose extolling Mencken's exploits.
I'm starting to think it's the same guy going through some of these bios, dropping the word salvo here and there and thinking that, clearly, the subject of the bio is beyond all reproach, even in areas where he might be. Some of the language calls for a look, in other words. --r. 07:54, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Sundry remarks
This entry disappoints, because it leaves so much out that I think is important. I own copies of 6-8 of Mencken's books, but no biography and no volume of his letters. Mencken:
- Was the product of an astounding self-education. His factory owning father ordered Henry to attend what was then called a "manual" or "trade" high school, whose graduates were assumed never to attend college. I suspect that the quality of the English classes was quite high, especially by present-day standards. Very early in his journalistic career, he took a night class in expository prose that he later praised. But otherwise, he was entirely the product of an enormous reading. He had little time for nearly all professors of humanities and social science.
- Was an elitist. But in so being, he often merely wrote down what many of his fellow Americans thought and spoke. Also keep in mind the evident elitism of George Santayana and Henry Adams.
- Was a fatalist. But this is a time-honored stance about the human condition, although one heavily out of favor in the USA. It should be remembered that in his day, most Americans struggled to live on unproductive farms, or held humble jobs and lived in urban tenements. The mass of Americans began to enjoy a decent middle class life only after WWII. In his day, most Americans had only a primary education, took their thinking from some pulpit, and read only religious tracts.
- As a young man, had been deeply impressed by Nietzsche, and that is supposed to embarrass us. But he also admired Joseph Conrad, whom we all admire. Keep in mind that Nietzsche is no longer seen as the forefather of the Third Reich.
- Enjoyed many advantages. He never suffered from writer's block or had trouble earning a living. He lived all his life in the provincial city he loved. His books generally sold well. He enjoyed food, drink, and classical music. But one thing proved elusive: the consolations of the opposite sex. He did not marry until he was 50, whereupon his bride grew sick and he was a widower at 55. I think he wrote very shrewd and funny things about the sexes and the inevitable conflict between them. On balance, I think he preferred the common sense of adult women to the pomposity of so many middle class men. But I suspect that nearly all women felt very edgy about a man with such a clear and unembarrassed view of feminine nature. 18th and 19th century French women would have loved Mencken, but I suspect that early 20th century American ones could not; he was too wise to their game.
- Re Jews and blacks, was partly a product of his place and time, and partly loved to yank the chains of the usual tongue-cluckers. He was quick to see that the pious liberals often love groups in the abstract, and do not care much for members of those groups. He relished standing that situation on its head: he skewered groups, but went out of his way to befriend and help members of those groups who happened to be struggling writers.
- Was undismayed by both the Soviet Union and the Third Reich. He supported Germany in WWI because he saw Germany as a superior culture on the march, and saw dismay at the Third Reich as just more anti-German sentiment. I do not know if he ever commented in writing on the Holocaust (which did not become general knowledge until Allied troups invaded concentration camps in 1945.) The Holocaust was fully consistent with his low opinion of the general run of humanity. But it did contradict his belief in the relative superiority of Germany.
- Went into decline because be hated FDR and the New Deal, and because he could not stomach the fascination socialism held for 1930s intellectuals. He saw the Great Depression as just desserts, given what he saw as the American propensity for self-delusion.
- Will be remembered as an American humorist and prose stylist, and as a shrewd student of human nature. Recall that humor tends to the conservative and to the politically incorrect. Mencken is not all that striking if one recalls Swift, Sydney Smith, Mark Twain, Flann O'Brien, and P J O'Rourke.202.36.179.65 19:23, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
If you take his views into the contemporary, much of the 'esteemed' value is severely diminished. While remaining unbiased, it is however important that the Wikipedia also includes this.
~~November 19th, 2006~~
As a Mencken collector and someone who keeps the volumes of The American Language as a reference, I think I can agree on almost all of your points. I think that if Walter Lippmann's comment about his influence on a whole generation of Americans is not included in this article, it should be. As my grandparents lived down the street from Mencken and were the Jews on Mencken's block, I have heard stories about him from the time I was young. College journalism students would, I think, not appreciate his humor and it is my feeling that young people would simply view him as a racist. It takes a lot of reading of Mencken to understand enough to appreciate his wit. His book In Defense of Women is one of his best short works. I don't think that his volumes on theology or morals are regarded or remembered by those who write about such complex issues today. It's a shame that The American Mercury descended to the depths of Jew-baiting and Ku Kluxery many years after he left it.
--Dec. 28 2006-- Mike meabrams@earthlink.net
[edit] Quotes?
What's with the giant section of quotes at the bottom of the page, which are added stripped of context; isn't that what Wikiquote is for? Besides, they looked bloated, ugly, unprofessional, and takes up a ridiculous amount of space, and are of little use. I'm voting for deletion of that section. I'd like to hear what other people think. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jackson (talk • contribs).
- They are bloated because they use {{quotation|quote|person}}, which draws the box around them, thus using a lot of space. I think Mencken's quotes are very good, but I favor putting them in a bulleted list or something. It seems to me that the purpose of the quotation thing is when you are putting in one quote, and it doesn't work well for multiple quotes. I added one earlier today, and I followed the format of the existing ones. Bubba73 (talk), 03:30, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
- These should definitely be moved to Wikiquote; they are not really encyclopedic. -- Beland 06:53, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
