REVIEWS

...Economically Mencken subsumed socialists in the same category as chiropractors, palmists and phrenologists, while classing gnostics with full-immersion Baptists...

...A larger staff is used as a pretext for demanding bigger budgets each year...

...H e believes, like his West Coast counterpart, Ronald Reagan, that the individual is responsible for his conduct...

...Certainly, he exhibited The N e w Republic's social elitism but never its ineffable condescension...

...Yet it interests others...

...If Weaver's book was strictly a history such errors would weigh heavily against it, but — as it is an interpretative study — the imprecisions are crucial only as they affect his sorites and they never do...

...it is blown for his native south "the last non-materialist civilization in the Western world," and more — for a fated Western civilization which suffers "everywhere crassness, moral obtuseness and degradation...

...This is where the real economy vsdll be realized in Whitcomb's order...

...Consider the m a n who dimorphously bloomed as the late Republic's greatest literary critic and political scientist, H. L. Mencken...

...Though today venerated as a rollicking gadfly he was a disciplined literary critic and skilled philologist...

...But Weaver's thought is still unfashionable...

...If their residence in the tabernacles of contemporary American culture would not draw Mencken's fire surely their rigid control of artistic expression would arouse the acid in his pen...

...This distinguishes him from today's five and dime gadflies and lends a perspicacity to his social criticism that will always elude dilettantes like Murray Kempton and Russell Baker...

...on the increase...

...On the other hand, the fewer government workers there are, the fewer people there are who can sit around and dream up ways to expand the government and spend the taxpayers' money...

...It is a tragic reminder that the road to liberalism is paved with good intentions...

...One cynical adviser to the Govemor said that the ten per cent reduction could be made simply by going through government offices and firing everyone foimd asleep on the job...

...On and on the freaks of the m o d e m world will spin, inspiring foolish vaticinations and warnings from commissions, reports and resident know-it-alls...

...Michael or Gabriel he would, in company with the rest of Aunt Jane's editorial department, be stalking poverty and worms in Beaufort County, South Carolina, trae...

...Each particular level knows best how to solve its problems because it is most familiar with them...

...Dripping with sentience all the church's yoimg luminaries will continue to preach relativism to young nihilists obsessed solely with commitment...

...So the churches will continue to probe relevance by getting dovrai on their hands and knees and oinking while the kids with whom they want to "rap" seek mysticism and irrelevance in drugs...

...R E V I E W S T H E S O U T H E R N TRADITION A T B A Y BY RiCHABD Weaver Arlington House, $7.00 Throughout Richard Weaver's brilliant v?riting sounds a solemn drum roll for the m o d e m world, and beyond the heath, off on a lonely hill resounds a forlorn trumpet — Weaver's haunting reminder of the precarious fate of civilization in our time...

...Implicit in Whitcomb's warning about "more and more government" is an awareness that in the United States the traditional role of government has been negative...

...Rehabilitation of criminals is not enough...

...It has, however, only victimized the people it was supposed to help — primarily the poor Negroes...

...Well a family tree bearing fruits like T.R.B...

...The point he was making is that empire building is an an engrained instinct of government bureaucrats who spend considerable time adding to the size of their staffs even though the total work load does not rise proportionately...

...Were he today not playing jacks with St...

...The Federal government, ironically, claims solicitous concern for Negroes who complained bitterly to the Kemer commission of the devastation wrought by urban renewal...

...Mencken delighted in goading the "sacred cows," and today the bovine of Dean Epstein's breed receives more lean-witted reverence than all the scravmy hoofers of India...

...As Irving Kristol has remarked (in an article soon to appear in The Alternative Weaver was interested in the quality of the life a m a n leads, and this curiously is not what interests philosophers today...

...Mencken devoted years to defending writers like Joseph Conrad and M a r k Twain and only a cartoonist like D e a n Epstein could depict Mencken uniting with those m o d e m liberals w h o busily interdict Conrad from libraries and expurgate Twain...

...He wrote as a philosopher and herein lies his tragedy and our misfortune, for he has not been considered significant even as a philosopher...

...The safety of our citizens must come first...

...A n extreme libertarian, Mencken viewed government controls with the same suspicion reserved for reform politicians...

...Intrusion from a higher level of government, no matter how well intentioned, usually only compounds problems at a lower level, because the intrusion involves uniform solutions to a diversity of problems...

...and Gilbert A. Harrison might have a branch for Mencken, but then the kids in Beaufort County might be dieting or The N e w Republic might be edited by Christopher Marlowe or the eminent Dean Epstein might have known who Mencken was before reviewing Smart Set Criticism...

...The Southern Tradition at Bay, Weaver explains why the trumpet sounds so forsaken...

...Weaver errs more grievously when, in discussing post-war Southern sentiment, he neglects mention of their bewildered notions that God had deserted them...

...h o w curious that Epstein missed them...

...When he breaks the law, he does so of his own free will and must be punished to deter him and others from future criminal action...

...As one of the N e w Deal's earliest critics he referred to the brain trusters as "a m o b of moimtebanks" and never forgave PDR's bureaucratic (Continued on Page 7) state government in Indiana has overexpanded on the assumption state government can best solve local problems...

...The vacuum is filled by the strong whose whim becomes law, which is what happened in Germany in the early 'thirties when the National Socialists battled the International Socialists (the Communists) to determine whose might would become law...

...The liberal approach to the problem is to disarm the lawabiding in hopes that the lawless will also obey the law, in this (Continued on Page 12) REVIEWS r#-»#^**#»#^'»-»#»##*#.»##'#.»##^#^.#^^v»^#^^^^^sy.»^s»^.»s» (Continued from Page 4) march into his living room...

...Exhibiting intimate knowledge of Mencken's work, Nolte has assembled a lively collection of book reviews, articles and distended horselaughs which will acquaint the readers with the most crucial facet of Mencken's work...

...Reversing the current liberal passion for the rights of the criminal, an emotion which has helped foster the current nationwide crime wave, Whitcomb states his philosophy thusly — "Compassion for criminals is not enough...

...Popular authors of that era wrote as inspidly and homogeneously as they do today (though motivated by runny hearts rather than drippy glands) and readers m a y test the validity of Mencken's criticism by contrasting the stature of Joseph Conrad with Marjorie Benton Cooke, the N o r m a n Mailer of her time...

...Dealing with the half century after Appomattox this book reveals little fresh factual information — albeit Weaver vsrote it for a Ph.D...

...There can be no freedom in a criminal anarchy...

...In other words, no, I doubt Mencken would have any truck with The N e w Republic today...

...members of the new left for instance, members of the yoimg right for another instance and all reflective persons...

...Federal urban renewal, for instance, was intended to rebuild cities...

...And how all the "rightthinkers" of the American saga either repose on its masthead or are romping with the archangels...

...To assure the safety of the lawabiding, Whitcomb suggests a number of deterrents including longer sentences for offenses iftvolving firearms...

...Dean Epstein is merely offering his readers the opiate they crave, for their uneasy rectitude demands weekly reinforcements of The N e w Republic's tendentious rhetoric...

...H. L. MENCKEN'S SMART SET CRITICISM by William Nolte Cornell University Press, $10.00 While reading your copy of The N e w Republic have you ever noticed how all "worthy causes," "needed programs," and "forward-looking projects" have somehow sprung from its pulpy loins...

...In this posthumous book...

...From 1908 to 1923 Mencken, as literary critic of the Smart Set, stood practically alone as advocate for beleaguered writers like Conrad, Twain, Dreiser and Shaw...

...To correct this trend Whitcomb, in his first official duty as governor, cut state employees by ten per cent...

...Yet I suspect future historians, desirous of insights into our time, will resort to works like Weaver's regardless of their vogue...

...The m o d e m world does possess a hideous remorselessness, lack of dignity, and synthetic values about which nice persons just do not talk...

...Weaver was not significant as a historian...

...These remarks express the realization that a government which does not maintain law and order fails to fulfill its first duty to the people...

...Axing employees also warns those remaining that they are expendable if they don't work...

...thesis over twenty years ago...

...Weaver's implication that by the 'twenties Southern defense of its singular culture and "peculiar institutions" had spread pandemically is but one of several unfocused asseverations...

...The Governor's remarks about solving local problems at the local level also holds true for state problems...

...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...Naturally these themes inhere throughout William Nolte's excellently edited collection of Mencken's early writing...

...Others who do talk might consult Weaver's work first for these were his concerns twenty years ago...

...Unfortunately it also contains historical imprecisions...

...Free government was conceived of as a preventive force to assure the safety of the people from foreign aggression and domestic disorder (crime...

...Surely the Sage of Baltimore, as Dean Joseph Epstein asserts in his N e w Republic review of Smart Set Criticism, resides at the tippy top of the N e w Republic's family tree, right...

...Order, of course, is the very foundation of individual freedom...

...Recognizing this, the Govemor has addressed himself to Indiana's growing crime problem...