Talk:H. L. Mencken

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Contents

[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.

In the 1920s Americans were freer to make fun of each other. Mencken joked like everyone else in his day, but reserved his poison darts for the Ku Klux Klan and its ilk. See, for example, his translation of the Declaration of Independence into the vernacular or practically any issue of American Mercury. Because many people have been given the impression that Hitler was influenced by Nietzsche (as opposed to Goethe and Kant), persons of altruistic predilections seek to impugn Mencken by making similar associations. Ayn Rand would certainly have noticed if her favorite columnist, to whom she wrote fan mail, were a Jew-baiter. George Orwell wrote stuff much more callously disrespectful of Jews during WWII, yet is never paraded about as an anti-Semite. translator (talk) 22:12, 9 December 2007 (UTC)


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 it's 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)
    • 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)
      • 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)

[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. —Preceding unsigned comment 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. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.150.170.94 (talk • contribs)
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)

So someone who prefers the Anglo-Saxon race would be a racist, too ? Stupid Yanks...


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.

--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)

I'd imagine since a goodly portion of the article is occupied with PC boilerplate analysis that will be laughed at in 50 years as an incomprehensible and largely irrelevent. Virtually every paragraph has this ridiculous feinting and jiving relating to Mencken's feeble views on PC hot-topics. Maybe you haven't noticed but the death of your philosophy is coming soon, to the detriment of the admirable aspects of your philosophy, solely because you chose to pursue your ideological interests in a manner totally unproductive and irritating. Your medievelist fantasy loses first-rate minds and attracts elderly-librarian consciousness, hardly the recipe for revolution.

[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. —Preceding unsigned comment 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)
That's OK by me, except I think the one about horse laughs should stay here also, since it is quoted so often. Is that OK? Bubba73 (talk), 16:56, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Neutrality Tag

While the content in this article is not perfect, we should not think that most other top-class Wikipedia articles are. As I explained in the comments I appended to my edits, simply re-arranging the page actually renders many of the neutrality concerns harmless for a reader's perception - and this in turn renders the neutrality tag superfluous.

Unless anyone can provide a very valid reason, I'm going to go ahead and remove the tag. It cheapens the page more than the prejudicial content does (that is, by extension, more than the prejudicial content warrants).

Kind regards to all, Scotsman

[edit] "American Nietzsche"?

I had to remove this from the article, as I'm not able to find any really substantiated source referring to Mencken as "the American Nietzsche" (with good reason).

He translated Antichrist, and was amused by Friedrich, or possibly by the reactions of the churchly. That he was not blinded by the man's ideas is plain enough in Treatise on Right and Wrong, which I cannot quote here without giving pretext for deletion but on pp. 76, 284 and especially 318 you will see he sizes up Friedrich the same as any other man. I suspect the idea is to try to rally a lynch mob of fanatics against Mencken, and it matters little whether they be religious, ethnic or racial in orientation. The same is applied to his individualist student, Ayn Rand. She admits in writing he was her idol, favorite columnist and exemplary individualist philosopher but mention the fact in the Ayn Rand entry and the text is deleted immediately. I guess the idea is to depict her as foreign and influenced by foreign thinkers even if it means deleting the facts. translator 05:51, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

I have again listed Ayn Rand as influenced by Mencken--as claimed by her in a letter published in Letters of Ayn Rand. She also listed him as her favorite columnist in a recent book on Rand by Jeff Britting (fac-simile image included). Recent smears seek to depict Mencken as an anti-Jewish racist. A book by Teachout does this on practiclaly every page, but lists on a single page all the things Mencken did FOR Jewish individuals when National Socialism ruled Germany. Anyone missing that page is left with the smear impression. Ayn Rand was herself Jewish, and the effort may be an attempt to isolate her ideologically from Mencken. Both are painted as worshippers of Friedrich Nietzsche. Mencken did translate Antichrist, but makes it clear in "A Treatise on Right and Wrong" (pp 5-6, 76, 227, 284, 318) that he found fault with much of what the writer had to say. translator (talk) 21:57, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV

As a Non-Jewish, Non-Trotskyite, I would like to add to the clamour regarding the bias of this article. It is simply written in an opinionated way; it's more of a personal essay than an encyclopedic entry. Everything Mencken did is purported to be "legendary" or "nearly unheard of at the time." This article needs to be flagged, because it's not up to wik standards.72.78.165.37 07:28, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

The "Style" section reads pretty strongly hagiographically, to me. It passes (positive) value judgements in a way that really doesn't seem neutral or encyclopedic. I eventually got really sick of reading it. It read like a self-serving blurb on a dust jacket of some pretentious author from today, something which Mencken almost certainly would have ridiculed. Ghamming 19:38, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Organization

It seems like the Life section is very poorly organized. It mentions his influences, etc. which should probably be under the "style" section. Also, it doesn't mention his educational background or lack thereof. Any thoughts? Wikipediarules2221 20:04, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

The Wikipedia is too easily invaded by vandals for me to invest much in articles. Anything nice said about an individualist is deleted with shrieks of "hagiography" by someone enamored of the word. Simultaneously, the articles are loaded down with verbiage so slanted as to depict claimants of individual rights as a) racist and b) either atheists or mystical extremists. Since I admire Mencken, I cannot contribute without the certain knowledge that saboteurs will obfuscate, deface, distort or elide whatever nonnegative things I have to say. I therefore choose to contribute at my own websites, off-limits to grafitti censorship. If this sounds like exaggeration, please visit the discussion behind the Ayn Rand entry and see for yourself. translator 06:11, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The section 'Style'

is particularly bad with respect to POV and original research. It reads as if it was written by a Mencken wanna-be who doesn't understand the difference between encyclopedic writing and opinion journalism. Someone please help in fixing it. Even removing it wholesale might be an improvement.radek (talk) 07:24, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

I've removed it entirely -- it appears to be a complete rip-off of this website. I have my suspicions about some of the rest of the article as well, and will look into it when I have some time. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) (talk/cont) 07:40, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
OK. The same IP address User:18.214.1.149 that put in practically the entire "Style" section on April 29, 2005 [2] also some weeks earlier put the bulk of the "Race" section in as well, so that section must be suspect. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) (talk/cont) 07:56, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
Someone please check me out on this, but it appears to me that for the most part, the material that was inserted wholesale on April 9, 2005 [3] to become the "Race issues" section has been to a large extent edited to become an almost entirely different piece, so I'm not going to remove it -- but I am going there now to try to clean it up and strip out anything that smacks of duplicated material. Feel free to add back in anything that I take out that I shouldn't have. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) (talk/cont) 08:03, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Alright, I've changed my mind. As I worked on it and compared it to the material originally entered by the IP address above, about 2/3rds of it (at least) turned out to be only thinly re-worked, so I removed it as well.

I don't think that article necessarily needs a section about Mencken's style -- a paragraph or so should be sufficient -- but certainly the question of Mencken's attitudes about race issues ought to be covered. Unfortunately, I'm not up to that task, since copyediting is more my forte, and it's been a long time since I last read up on Mencken in any depth. I'll post both the race section and the style section below, as a reference for anyone who wishes to work on new versions. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) (talk/cont) 08:12, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Incidentally, if I'm wrong in my judgments about this material, I apologize in advance -- but I've removed the material in good faith that it's been appropriated from elsewhere. Feel free to overturn my actions if warranted. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) (talk/cont) 08:26, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The removed "race" section

I removed the following section for suspicion that it was copied wholesale from another source, and then subjected to 2 1/2 years of Wiki-editing. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) (talk/cont) 08:15, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Race While Mencken's essays are sprinkled liberally with racial epithets ("blackamoor," "niggero," "coon," "prehensile kikes") Mencken considered the African-American intellectual George Schuyler to be a life-long friend — rare in any case, considering Mencken's infamous capacity for personal criticism. On the other hand, while Mencken was fair to individuals, he was deeply negative in regard to social groups and other groupings of people, and ethnic groups were no exception. Mencken's The Negro as Author began as a straightforward critique of a fictional work of a black author writing with racial themes as a focus:

"The Shadow, by Mary White Ovington, is a bad novel, but it is interesting as a first attempt by a colored writer to plunge into fiction in the grand manner."

In fact Mary White Ovington was not "colored," as Mencken conveniently pretends not to know. He instead uses this omission as a means to single out her work as an example of sympathetic, liberal-esque anti-racist activism (among educated whites) which in the end only turned out bad writing that undercut the public image of genuine emerging black authors. Within this humorous context, Mencken then commented positively on the future of black writing:

"The thing we need is a realistic picture of this inner life of the negro by one who sees the race from within--a self portrait as vivid and accurate as Dostoyevsky's portrait of the Russian or Thackeray's of the Englishman. The action should be kept within the normal range of negro experience. it should extend over a long enough range of years to show some development in character and circumstance. It should be presented against a background made vivid by innumerable small details."

In his legendary salvo against Southern American culture, "The Sahara of the Bozart" ("Bozart" being a mock misspelling of "Beaux-Arts"), Mencken argued that the whole Confederate region fell into cultureless savagery and backwardness after the Civil War — with the exception of the African-American community. In what was an audacious (and seriously intended) argument, Mencken claimed Southern blacks were actually the heirs and descendants of the talented aristocrats — by way of African-American mistresses of Caucasian men. Further Mencken opined that this community was the only site of cultural vitality or activity whatsoever, in spite of being hindered by the barbaric oppression of a culture that condoned and enforced Jim Crow laws and still tacitly sanctioned lynching.

Scruggs's The Sage in Harlem is the most authoritative work on Mencken's influence on and support of African-American intellectuals is. As the editor and main creative force behind The American Mercury, Mencken published more black authors than any other mainstream American outlet of that day. Articles by African-Americans ranged from a Pullman porter's account of life in that occupation to sophisticated articles by important black thinkers.

[edit] The removed "style" section

This material was copied pretty much lock stock and barrel from another source: http://biographylist.com/henry-mencken/unsurpassed-style. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) (talk/cont) 08:23, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

==Style== Mencken's greatest contribution to American letters is arguably his humor and satire. Much influenced by Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift, Mencken believed the lampoon was more powerful than the lament; his hilariously overwrought indictments of nearly every subject (including more than a few that were unmentionable in polite company at the time) are certainly worth reading for their superb prose style. His style proved quite influential. For example, in his autobiographical Black Boy, the Afro-American author Richard Wright described the power of Mencken's technique, and how his discovery of Mencken would inspire him to become a writer himself. Wright recalled his reaction to A Book of Prefaces and to one of the volumes of the Prejudices series as follows:

"I was jarred and shocked by the clear, clean, sweeping sentences ... Why did he write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen ... denouncing everything American ... laughing ... mocking God, authority ... This man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club ... I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it." (Quoted in Scruggs, p. 1)
In his classic essay "On Being an American" (published in his Prejudices: Third Series), Mencken fires a salvo at American myths. The following choice quote displays his amusing take on why the United States is the "Land of Opportunity", and segues into a laundry-list of national pathologies as he sees them:
"Here the business of getting a living ... is enormously easier than it is in any other Christian land—so easy, in fact, that an educated and forehanded man who fails at it must actually make deliberate efforts to that end. Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy. And here, more than anywhere else I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows."
Whether the reader agrees with Mencken or finds him infuriatingly coarse and incorrect, all can observe his technique with profit; it is rare in contemporary discourse. The criticisms he poses are nearly the same as those of famous literary expatriates including Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; the injustices (or at least incongruities) are the same ones fought by the muckraker journalists of his day, such as Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. However, instead of decrying the "daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly" and calling for reform or improvement, Mencken says he is "entertained" by them. On its face, this approach displays a crass indifference and total lack of compassion; Mencken admitted as much, as it was part of his personal philosophy: a kind of fierce libertarianism inspired by a Nietzschean contempt for the "improvers of mankind", a social Darwinist outlook derived from Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, and a "Tory" elitism. The power of satire comes from the transformation of enemies and villains into a source of entertainment; they are reduced from powerful people to be contended with into farcical creatures deserving of mockery. Black journalist and Mencken contemporary James Weldon Johnson celebrated this technique as a way of fighting racism without stooping to the level of Jim Crow enforcers and the Ku Klux Klan:
"Mr. Mencken's favorite method of showing people the truth is to attack falsehood with ridicule. He shatters the walls of foolish pride and prejudice and hypocrisy merely by laughing at them; and he is more effective against them than most writers who hurl heavily loaded shells of protest and imprecation.
"What could be more disconcerting and overwhelming to a man posing as everybody's superior than to find that everybody was laughing at his pretensions? Protest would only swell up his self-importance." (quoted in Scruggs, p. 57)
In his "On Being an American," Mencken called the United States "... incomparably the best show on Earth..."; he clearly took joy in covering religious controversies, political conventions, and unearthing new "quackeries" (among his favorite targets are the Baptist and Methodist churches, Christian Science, Chiropractics, and most of all, Puritanism, which he defined as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy"). Although he attacked every President of the United States who served during the years of his career as a writer and critic, from Taft to Truman, Mencken reserved a special ire for his attacks on Woodrow Wilson, whose administration he saw as epitomizing the moralistic, puritanical impulses of American life. Mencken's snipes at Wilson resulted in Mencken being singled out by the Bureau of Investigation (the predecessor of the FBI) and other law enforcement agencies as a potential subversive during Wilson's administration. One of the disadvantages of slashing satire is that it does only that: slash. Alfred Kazin called Mencken's criticisms impotent since "Every Babbitt read him gleefully and pronounced his neighbor a Babbitt" -- they permitted a circular firing squad of self-righteous viciousness. ("Babbitt" is a now-rare epithet derived from the Sinclair Lewis book of the same name; it can be loosely defined as an uncultured, "square", typically middle-aged and middle-class businessman characterized by timidity and ignorance of their philistinism. It is a very similar concept to the more commonly used German terms Spiesser and Spiessbürger.) Critics must walk a thin line between declaring "The Emperor has no clothes" (a fine service to all), and going too far by furiously tearing the clothes off of undeserving bystanders. Mencken tended to go too far as matter-of-course; consequently he was the first to say what needed to be said in his criticisms of lynching, World War I-era civil liberties abuses, and especially the dismally moral and philistine American arts. On the other hand, this extremism left him with a body of work filled with unsubtle reviews of the subtle and scores of openly vicious statements about all ethnicities. This viciousness was summed up in the play Inherit the Wind, a fictionalized version of the Scopes Monkey Trial. As the story ends, the protagonist tells Hornbeck (the character representing Mencken):
"You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something."

[edit] Newspaper Days

I am astonished at the lack of attention given to the autobiography, esp. Newspaper Days, surely one of the finest expositions of the newspaper game of that or any other time (Mencken would snort if I called it Journalism). This must be corrected, and I plan to do so. You have Franklin, H. Addams and Mencken in autobiography- another area that must be corrected, as no one with a sense of humor could read the three volumes and dislike the man or fail to be fascinated by the times. Any assistance in these areas greatly appreciated. Magilla3 (talk) 22:48, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Picture caption is incorrect

It should be "right" and "right" or "left" and "left". The caption makes it seem like there should be a third person in the picture. Also, the phrase "seen here in the film played by Gene Kelly," is a misplaced modifier. Gene Kelly didn't play "the film", he played Mencken. --210.170.97.50 (talk) 14:33, 14 May 2008 (UTC)Kevin

[edit] Contradiction

...between Haardt's death and the 1948 stroke which left him aware and fully conscious but unable to read or write, Mencken's main intellectual activity, other than writing occasional pieces for the Baltimore papers, was his research on the American language and writing his memoirs. These took the form of humorous, anecdotal, and nostalgic essays, first published in the New Yorker, then collected in the books Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days.

As a reader pointed out to me via email, this appears to be a blatant contradiction. Does anyone know which part is incorrect? The history of the article did not lead to an obvious conclusion (eg. recent vandalism). Thanks, Daniel (talk) 09:04, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Could you clarify what is contradictory? As I understand, between 1935-1948 he wrote his memoirs, which took the form of anecdotal nostalgic essays. He certainly didn't write anything after the stroke. Merzul (talk) 22:37, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
Did you perhaps misread "between Haardt's death and the 1948 stroke" as "between his death and the 1948 stroke"? Otherwise I can't see where you think the contradiction is. Olaf Davis | Talk 12:20, 30 May 2008 (UTC)