The Young Mencken
Chamberlain, John
Dr. George Washington Plunkitt, our prize-winning political analyst, is celebrating the publication of his new book, which is now available at avant-garde bookstores throughout New Jersey. Dr....
...I didn't know what they were and Julie had just brought over the new Ray Conniff album she and David got at the PX...
...Dear Dr...
...Burton Rascoe, Floyd Dell, Francis Hackett, Harry Hansen, all out of Chicago...
...you, sadly, were immoderate in both...
...I note, for example, that you began your remarkable career as the associate director of the National Commission on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws...
...Address all correspondence to The Bootblack Stand, c/o The Establishment, R.R...
...Plunkitt expects to earn ten million dollars from sales of his new book, he has agreed to continue to advise public figures through this column...
...Plunkitt's book is about the importance of altruism in politics and it is titled What's in It for Me...
...But when he writes an essay for the Atlantic Monthly in 1914 called '~I~ne Mailed Fist and Its Prophet," using Nietzche as an excuse to get into the subject of post-Bismarck Germany, the prose moves with a zing and a zest that shows Mencken has finally mastered his medium...
...Do you think he likes Ray Conniff...
...Plunkitt: Do you still have faith in the American political system...
...The poor man hasn't had a good night's sleep in weeks...
...33), the missing tapes...
...One should limit one's zeal in both reforming and milking the system...
...The Best of His Work collected by Carl Bode Dial $15.00 The ebullient steeplejack of the Seven Arts, James Gibbons Huneker...
...GWP "Yes," said the veteran Washington correspondent Arthur Kreck, speaking of The Alternative, "it has a Menckenian touch...
...Do you think Judge Sirica would like to hear the tapes...
...Mencken was the best of the newspaper~rained critics, and I think, in my condition af galloping gafferism, that it was he who ~aved my generation from the perils of ;urning politicians into gods...
...Cox: By all means send him the tapes...
...Although Dr...
...As my old friend Charlie Wilson has pointed out so well, the system has done immense good for General Motors...
...In a sense, I suppose, you're now getting a chance to do some solid field work in this important area...
...I_~t us say simply that any 26-year-old associate director in charge of a staff serving such luminaries as California's "Pat" Brown and the Illustrious Sam Ervin should have gotten the message a lot earlier than you did...
...In recent months I have begun to lose faith in the whole, dirty business...
...Mencken was always goodhumored, feisty, and beery, but his latterday trick of delivering the most outrageous statements as if they were the soberest truth had to be cultivated...
...It is fitting that a new Menckenian organ exists in the land to give hospitality to this book which exposes, in a leisurely unfolding, the growth of a great original...
...T. Cox Dear Ms...
...Appreciating Mencken for his manner more than for his libertarian matter, we went on into the thirties, actually voting for the planners who planned us into the forty-year inflation that shows no signs of abating...
...I have not done too badly myself...
...Have the newspaper critics been forgotten...
...GWP Dear Dr...
...My best to your lovely wife, whose presence at your side and in front of the cameras probably got 15 years knocked off your forthcoming field research...
...I just used one of the tape recorders the Secret Service had around for "Side r ' and another tape for "Side 2...
...Meaning, of course, that its reverences and irreverences are set forth in a saucy vocabulary (~tony dolts," '~patheticees," "moron ACLU lawyer") that would have delighted the Baltimore denigrator of the gelehrten whose early works have been exhumed by Carl Bode from newspaper and magazine files to make up a beautiful book called The Young Mencken...
...John W. Dean, HI Dear Mr...
...The academics of my youngest years sneered at people who, as the saving had it, got their education in public, but if it had not been for a whole generation of newspapermen who took to book reviewing, building up their backgrounds as they went, it is doubtful that we would ever have had the literature of the twenties and the thirties...
...Bode's collection of the young Mencken's news articles, Sunday features, Baltimore Sun "Free Lance" columns, epigrams, Smart Set reviews, Kiplingesque poems, Dreiserian fiction, and essays on American manners and morals makes us privy to the evolution of a style...
...Menckea's Smart Set sidekick, George Jean Nathan...
...Plunkitt: Oh, gee, I have a terrible problem...
...11, Box 360, Bloomington, Indiana 47401, Continental U.S.A...
...Talking about Nietzche in 1908, Mencken is just a competent neophyte...
...Before the coming of Mencken there was only academic criticism in the United States, and it was dull, dull, dull...
...Of course I still have faith in the American political system...
...Dean: So good of you to take time out of a busy : Lelevision schedule to drop me a line...
...When Mencken praised Coolidge for turn[ng the White House into a peaceful dormitory, we thought it a superb piece of satire...
...Also of an education...
...Mencken, a German by ancestry 24 The Alternative February 1974...
...I don't know how to tell my daddy that I'm the cause of his crisis (No...
...These and many others lacked formal credentials, but they brought gusto to criticism, created readers by the dozen, and gave that miraculous impetus to the Knopfs, the Heubsches, the Pat Covicis, the Albert Bonis, and the Horace Liverights of the new publishing companies that sprang up in the earliest twenties like flowers in Baja California ~fter a rain...
...The problem has arisen because of an attempt Lo reform the system...
...We read him in the anarchistic years just after Vermilles, when one laughed at Cal Coolidge...
...Little did we note that Mencken meant every word of it when he credited Silent Ca] with reviving the lost world of Thomas Jefferson...
...But something of Mencken's distrust of the politico stuck, and when Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and l a i r , Murray Rothbard came along with their reasoned variations on the theme of Our Enemy, the State, we were ready to recover our nerve and, along with it, our tradition...
Vol. 7 • February 1974 • No. 5
