H.L. Mencken: Iconoclast from Baltimore
Adler, Betty
be reversed and that they had to send mechanics, engineers, students and professionals to handle milk pails on the farm. All the same, even though they largely increased the amount of...
...It laid the ground for his lovehate relation to America...
...Constant exposure to the sprawling lustiness of street life made him appreciative of things American and disdainful of secondhand culture derived from abroad...
...Just as we think we have grasped the quintessential Mencken, another and contradictory phase of his thought emerges...
...Within six months a group of faculty Fagins had converted me into a raving radical, who shoutnd God is dead and the establishment doomed...
...Betty Adler Betty Adler is the editor o~ Menckeniana, a journal concerned with H L. Mencken which can be ordered by writing the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Maryland, and her work has appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun...
...Mencken made no pretense of being consistent...
...would have called him) holds that Mencken was neither an original nor a systematic thinker...
...Our conservative faculty activists could meet anytime in a telephone booth...
...But he lived in Baltimore, not New York and not even "tile inconvenience of commuting to New York for several decades could persuade him to move away...
...Stenerson holds that Social Darwinism permeates his views...
...analysis of Mencken's ideas and prejudices emphasizes the influence of his birthplace...
...Though acfually the majority (as proved by Ohio State University Poll results), they sit in the grandstands of life and let the liberals run with the boll...
...They constantly plot, meet, write, speak, campaign and elect -- exerting power far beyond their numbers...
...His prejudices were the themes of his art, not the building blocks of a coherent system...
...Stenerson next treats Mencken's experiments in short story writing, in a chapter which first appeared in Mencekniana...
...Thank you, Mr...
...Campus liberals do their homework well...
...Campus conservatives have no clout...
...his first book was Ventures Into Verse (1903...
...As a youngster, H.L.M...
...Prohibition, the rope for agitators no bawdy twanging of lyres...
...And what an amazingly wide range he encompassed: politics, literature, music, linguistics, the social and natural sciences and metaphysics...
...No anti-Communist revolutionary upheaval will arise from this state of affairs, though...
...Ohio State's late "Alternatives Committee," which had liberal solutions to everything, used to publish the names of its 150 members in the I.nntern...
...Yet at times, Mr...
...Not much has changed in academe since then, Most effective activists still lean to the left...
...Young liberals (or rndiclibs) control most studenl governments for the simpJe reason that they act to support their beliefs...
...Throughout his career Mencken maintained certain basic beliefs and attitudes...
...He may well be the only author who ever obtained royalties oy collecting and republishing the brickbats hurled at him (in his book entitled M enclceniana, a Schimpflexicon ). What are Mencken's most enduring contributions to American culture...
...Stenerson then reverts to the formative years of Mencken's boyhood and early newspaper days...
...Its southern traditions helped shape his political orientation...
...This is a challenging book, full of controversial views and deductions~ and it will really stir up the Menckenites...
...he craves certanties to protect him - - a simple and gross religion, safety for his precious money, no wild ideas to craze his wife...
...Listening to his father discuss the family cigar business made him conscious of belonging to the managerical class and colored his views of labor, business and economics...
...All the same, even though they largely increased the amount of irrigated land, the total agricultural product failed to go up, and all they could do was, dollar in hand, come shopping for grain in Canada...
...It is the business of the artist to blast his contentment with the sounds of joy...
...Their discontent thus will express itself more in sullenhess, careless work, poor cooperation and initiative and a brooding resentment of their masters, the Party and bureaucratic cadres...
...They do not plat, meet, write, speak or elect anyu, e. They seem to think democracy is a spectator sport...
...His social and political views ranged from conservatism to Jeffersonian liberalism to distrust of democracy...
...Professor Stenerson's...
...It's much-the same with student bodies...
...As an expert at controversy he enjoyed being attacked...
...Yet the Herr Professor (as H.t,.M...
...Now this traditional slanting of academe The Alternative May 1972 19...
...I admire campus liberals...
...the quarterly published by the Faaoch Pratt Free Library...
...While drama critic on the Baltimore Morning Herald, Mencken wrote the first book on George Bernard Shaw to appear in this country (1905...
...The German-American community of Union Square, where he was raised, ingrained in him family pride, common sense and an appreciation of hard work and thrift...
...The unimaginative and ignoble man," Mencken maintained, "likes the grayness, as a worm likes the dark...
...Stenerson points out, "his -theoretical determinism was at odds with his faith in individual initiative, his libertarianism, and his belief mat the small group of truthseekers can bring about a limited kind of progress...
...I do not admire c,~.npus conservatives, who expect to ride fhe freedom train forever without payina a fare...
...This was followed by the introduction to United States reaaers at the German philosopher Nietzsche, to whom he felt akin, although Mr...
...This book, which is not a conventional biography, begins with the mature Mencken at the height of his influence as editor of The American Mercury...
...Stenerson believes they are his affirmation of the right to dissent, and the gusto and artistry with which he expressed his prejudices...
...Wittfogel, for having put your finger on the leastknown of Communism's "inner contradictions !" [ ] Gerhart Niemeyer Gerhart Niemeyer is a professor of government at Notre Dame Darling of the gods Mencken, Iconoclast from Baltimore by DonaM C. Stenerson University of Chicago Press, $7.95 H L. MENCKEN, newspaper reporter, magazine editor, political and literary critic, was once called by Walter Lippmann the most influential private citizen of America...
...tanciea acing a poet...
...he wants to be made secure in his wallow...
...CORRESPONDENCE To the Editor: In 1930 i arrived at Kent State, wide-eyed and innocent, a true-believer in God and Man...
...Among the scattered peasants, such groupings are wholly inconceivable...
...From his editorial chair, as earlier with The Smart Set (1914-23), he led the rebellion against the puritanical sham and fake of the nineteenth century's genteel tradition...
...How rich a legacy Mencken bestowed by this identical bawdy twanging of his own lyre...
...Still, this is not unimportant when one bears in mind that armies usually are composed of farm boys, and that without overabundance of farm products there can be neither industrialization nor sustained warfare...
...Under totalitarian rule, even city people find it well-nigh impossible to group together with others of like mind...
Vol. 5 • May 1972 • No. 8
