Mencken's Last Campaign
Nolte, William H.
Upcoming Articles in Psychoeconometrica Fehler, A., "Fine-tuning the Economy: the Brazilian Experience." In 1500, Pedro Cabral left Portugal for the west coast of Africa but got lost and...
...aid and unfair foreign competition...
...The simple fact is that Truman was the better politician, which is to say he was willing to promise anything to anybody for a vote...
...Nelson A. Rockefeller, the d~gag~ Vice President of the United States of America...
...Still, he wrote that those who heard Thomas speak in Baltimore ("this great medieval city") enjoyed "a rare and exhilarating pleasure, to wit, that of listening to a political speech by a really intelligent and civilized man...
...If this collection falls a good deal short of his Carnival of Buncombe (1956), which covers the years from 1920 to 1936, it should still reward his customers, and it will certainly surprise those readers who have only a passing acquaintance with his work...
...Miss Patty Hearst was sentenced to seven years in the calaboose for her flamboyant tests of the Bill of Rights, and two Illinois men were arrested for attempting to sell a stolen flamingo to a northern Illinois zoo...
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...Richard Michael Laury, a convicted criminal, when faced with the news that he had been born out of wedlock some forty-six years earlier became "frustrated, angry and confused," and shot his seventy-six-year-old mother dead...
...An inordinate snob, Dewey, unlike Truman, the compteat democrat, disdained getting down on all-fours with the canaille: "While Dewey was intoning essays sounding like the worst bombast of university professors, Truman was down on the ground, clowning with the circumambient morons...
...And the only ones who will benefit from t h a t melancholy fact are the politicians...
...Suggests massive redevelopment loans and a redistribution of climate...
...continued on page" 3 7) William H. No/te, chairman of the English departme'nt of the University of South Carolina, is the author of H. U Mencken: Literary Critic...
...82 Finally felicitations to Mr...
...RET MENCKEN'S LAST CAMPAIGN (continued from page 35) Mencken aficionados, and p a r t i c u l a r l y members o f the Fourth E s t a t e who are not i l l i t e r a t e , a r e s e r v a t i o n t h a t still leaves a sizeable minority, are fond of asking when and if we shall ever s e e his like again...
...BARON VON KANNON _9 P.O...
...Although the bubonic plague may not have been started by private enterprise, the profit motive was certainly no cure for the ills of that troubled society...
...Belenko's wife suffers from what Kremlinologists term the "Mrs...
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...To look at him is to laugh...
...An application of Keynesian fiscal policy to home economics...
...Soon he will be spoken of in the same hushed tones generally reserved by the enlightened for such patriots as Messrs...
...Prof...
...Reading this collection of Mencken's articles, resurrected from the files of the Baltimore Sun, I was struck all over again by his amazing ability to condense enormous amounts of information into succinct phrases that bite and sting, and, above all, by his use of metaphor and hyperbole as a kind of shorthand...
...He made votes every time he gave a show, but Dewey lost them...
...Concerning his running mate, a banjo-playing Senator from Idaho named Glen Taylor, Mencken wrote, "Soak a radio clown for ten days and ten nights in the rectified juices of all the cow-state Messiahs ever heard of, and you have him to the life...
...Viktor I. Belenko's wife shed considerable light on the young pilot's motives for landing his top secret Foxbat MIG-25 in Japan and seeking asylum in the United States...
...He then added that it was "a little inaccurate" to say that he hated everything...
...Rockefeller's reply almost as much as we await his next joyous political appearance...
...Chock full of delightful anecdotes, many of them published only a few times before...
...If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country he would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayers' expense...
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...Try to imagine what g r e a t fun he would have, and hence we would have, with all those who have been lusting this y e a r for the imperial crown: the twice-born Jimmy C a r t e r (the very name makes one giggle), going to and fro and up and down in the Republic, preaching the gospel of Love and Human Kindness, reminding those of us who have forgot t h a t we are all God's children...
...Daniel Ellsberg and Alger Hiss...
...At Binghamton, New York late in September he articulated the longsimmering aspirations of millions of Americans when he responded in kind to a pack of protesting brats who saluted him with vertical middle fingers...
...82 Mr...
...By his own admission he delighted in the vulgar and the obscene...
...Yet Mr...
...Thurmond was sadly handicapped "by the fact that all the worst morons in the South are for him...
...Please make checks payable to The Baron...
...Fortunately for us, possession of those high qualities did not, except in time of war when free speech is severely limited, prevent Mencken from performing biopsies on most of the political animals roaming the land between 1900 and 1948...
...But it hasn't been realized in seven or eight hundred years...
...Mencken's l a s t campaign was not only his l a s t look a t a P r e s i d e n t i a l race but the l a s t such view any of us will again have...
...Indeed, he took to politicoes much as a tom takes to catnip...
...Ivan Syndrome," but when she appeared before the cameras there could no longer be any doubt that her condition was far gone...
...Two months later, with the campaign in full swing, he commented again on Taylor: "He is cheap, vulgar and stupid...
...In Sweden a coalition of moderate parties ended the Socialists' forty-four-year domination of that country's politics and Prime Minister Olof Palme's seven-year tirade against the United States...
...I t ' s idle to speculate, of course, a b o u t what Mencken would say about this most recent crop of Ciceros and Bismarcks, for even i f he were to be placed in our m i d s t again, t h e r e is little chance t h a t any newsp a p e r would publish him...
...It has been all uphill for the dowdy, middle-aged sourpuss whose saturnine visage has always given viewers of his TV news reports the impression that his bowels were locked in a tumultuous struggle with an enormous and intrepid fecal impaction...
...Hence his abiding interest in the mephitic art of the rabblerouser...
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...In head and body she is reminiscent of the late Nikita Khrushchev...
...Schorr was principled enough to lay hands on some top-secret government documents and to peddle them to newspapers...
...The New Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Aldo Ceccato...
...The failure of the tourist industry in the "rock garden spot of South America" is attributed to insufficient U.S...
...How the principles of economics may contribute to the dramatic elements of an operatic theme...
...But he also had the backing, Mencken admitted, "of some of the best men and women below the Potomac," though to be sure there were few such people, certainly not enough to make any impression on the rest of the country...
...The British pound sank to $1.64 on September 28, and all indications are that it will continue to follow the Empire into oblivion...
...Ronald Reagan, whose B-movies were vastly s u p e r i o r to his performance as governor of California...
...Violetta, in the final act, dies of Y-(c(Y-T) + I + G + X(M + mY...
...The Alteri,.arive: An American Spectator November 1976 THE CONTINUING CRISIS (continued from page 2) ý82 By the end of the month the lugubrious press conference of First Lieut...
...Beverly Sills as Violetta...
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...Belenko would have a better time of it married to an American grizzly bear...
...He detected a flavor of religi~,us awe in the Philadelphia Convention Hall where the Progressives gathered to anoint the gullible Swami: "If, when he is nominated today, he suddenly sprouts wings and begins flapping about the hall, no one will be surprised...
...o , Christmas Turkeys: $4.95 , o o o o Now for the gimmick...
...Even her tearful entreaties revealed a note of fierceness, convincing old hands in the Central Intelligence Agency that Mr...
...And what would he say about the " f i n a n c i a l l y p u r e " F r i t z Mondale, whose i l l e g a l " g i f t s " from the Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company will probably be found out and exposed by the New York Times shortly before all the leaves have turned r e d this fall...
...For example, some readers may be perplexed by his admiration for the Socialist Norman Thomas, since Mencken, who believed that capitalism was less a human contrivance than it was a reflection of natural laws, always said that his last act on the gallows would be to lift a hoot at socialism and all its moon-struck apostles...
...The Black Death is discussed as evidence for the necessity of socialism...
...Cage, A., "Have Your Cake and Eat It Too...
...Slanderous reports of cannibalism are refuted by proof that the deaths of tourists had actually been caused by starvation...
...Mencken's most severe censure was reserved for Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party...
...Commoner, B., "Rats, Lice, and Capitalism...
...I am," he insisted, "strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency...
...This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic...
...BOOK REVIEW Mencken's Last Campaign: H. L. Mencken on the 1948 Election Edited by Joseph C. Go,,Iden / The New Republic Book Company / $8.95 William H. Nolte When asked by a reporter from Life Magazine in 1946 if he would rather be called "The Sage of Baltimore" or "The Man Who Hates Everything," H. L. Mencken replied that he didn't care a damn what the reporter or anyone else called him "just so long as you don't call me an old dodo sneaked out of the dissecting room...
...Reminiscences of the author's great-grand-uncle, Karl...
...The Official Alternative Turkey Tee Shirt (Paris Green on White) comes in three sizes: medium, large, and extra large...
...Marx, M., "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Utopia...
...Verdi, G., "The Consumption Function in La Traviata...
...Although in his 68th year and nearing the end of his long career as premier gadfly of the Republic, Mencken had lost none of the vibrancy of his earlier years...
...to hear him is to bust into tears...
...It may also surprise readers to find Mencken saying kind things about Strum Thurmond, the Dixiecrat candidate...
...A man accused of armed robbery and aggravated assault would not generally be suspected of also being a ruddy duddy, but St...
...Daniel Schorr, the selfless civil libertarian, has won his struggle to overcome the vengeful House Ethics Committee and is well on his way to becoming a 1970s eminence of the first water...
...Petersburg's Mr...
...As for Thurmond's hope that "his holy crusade for States' Rights" might throw the election into the House of Representatives, Mencken concluded: "In national campaigns the candidates of third parties always cherish that hope...
...Following Truman's startling victory on the first Tuesday in November Mencken wrote that Dewey's defeat probably resulted from defects in his personality and his incompetence as a rabblerouser...
...Rockefeller--"We consider you the preeminent authority on the subject and the only pol in America who really has been reborn " The literary world awaits Mr...
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...Again, I quote that most quotable of all our critics: "If [Truman] did not come out for spiritualism, chiropractic, psychotherapy and extra sensory preception it was only because no one demanded that he do so...
...Fehler contends that critics of discretionary monetary and fiscal policy, like Cabral, miss the whole point...
...Since his September 6 landing, rumors have been circulating within the intelligence community that poor Mr...
...Rockefeller's gesticulation that this distinguished intellectual review asked him to review the recent muckraking book about him, I Never IVanted To Be Vice President of Anything, for--as assistant managing editor Joseph P. Duggan said in his letter to Mr...
...In personality she seems to be at one with Stalin...
...and J e r r y Ford, perhaps the g r e a t e s t ( a l b e i t unconscious) deadpan comic since the d e a t h o f vaudeville...
...You can't eatthis turkey, but you can wear it...
...Bishop, J., "The Day Keynes Died...
...In 1500, Pedro Cabral left Portugal for the west coast of Africa but got lost and discovered Brazil instead...
...Allende, S., and L. Brezhnev, "Tierra del Fuego: Socialist Dream and Imperialist Stab in the Back...
...An analysis of the theory of time preference from a macroeconomic perspective, with particular attention to long-run effects...
Vol. 10 • November 1976 • No. 2
