Actually as far as Mencken's racism and anti-Semitism are concerned, he was a mass of contradictions. A number of African-American writers got their start, writing for the American Mercury. Mencken was not overly fond of Jews but he did speak out against the persecution of Jews in Germany, and called for a relaxation of immigration quotas so they could come to this country.
Jim F.
On Sun, 1 Sep 2002 19:52:29 -0400
=?iso-8859-1?Q?Christopher_Rhoades_D=FFkema?= <crdbronx at erols.com>
writes:
> Doug wrote --
>
> 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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