Of course he wasn't a thinker - he was a journalist! And I'm well aware of his numerous hateful shortcomings. But like I said, he was a great polemicist and funny as hell. Why oh why must the left (which of course doesn't exist in the Coxian orthodoxy) ceaselessly invoke all the familiar pieties?
I agree with this sentiment. I guess in Mencken’s case, I was responding to a couple of things – * The fact that Mencken had a certain importance, as a cultural critic, on the development of the liberal intellectual strata in the twenties which were a component of the New Deal liberalism that came along in response to the depression. My parents, for example, who were very standard New Deal Democrats, were also Mencken fans. This is a bit of an irony. Actually Mencken’s popularity faded after 1929. * This fact is worth keeping in mind in assessing the general social rôle of intellectuals in the US. Not to make moral judgments about it, but still, this is an important question for the left. It also surprised me to discover his laissez-fairism (more than the racism and anti-Semitism, which were more common then) and the zaniness of the thinking that went into them. Certainly, you are right that “he was a great polemicist and funny as hell”, and that he was a great English stylist. Actually, I keep some copies of his articles on the Scopes trial and on the death of William Jennings Bryan to give to the social work students I supervise as examples of how to write brief expository pieces, such as we have to write.
This does bring up one of Mencken’s real, though implicit and unintended, progressive qualities – that he helped form a body of opinion opposed to the South and to evangelicalism/fundamentalism, and that he never gave way to populist sentimentalism about the alleged wisdom of “the people.”
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
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