[WS:] I have mixed feeling about his shallowness. Some of his socio-economic analyses indeed look simplistic attributions to individual character, seemingly missing the influence of social context and interaction. But many more reuptable thinkers, including Karl Marx (not to mention scores of economists) made simplistic arguments, so this is hardly a valid refutation of Mencken's influence.
I think his main contribution is the clarity of his writing. He avoided the obscure mumbo jumbo of intellectual jargon that obscures more than it can explain, and provided a rather clearly written and intellectually stimulating portrait of what for the lack of better term can be caled "the American psyche." A good thought provoking journalistic account is worth more than volumes of obscure philosophical mumbo jumbo. As Mencken's hero Nietsche once said "The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men."
If we were to place Mencken on a political map, he would be definitely more on the Left than on the Right (especially the American Right.) I think he was disowned by the Left because he refused to jump on the Left's bandwagon of the 1930s - the (misguided) populism and the reverence for FDR. During WW2 he fell into further disrepute because of his unabashed Germanophilia. For these reasons, I think he was politically banished or exiled, rather than his views being intellectually refuted.
As far as comparison to Mark Twain is concerned, they share some common traits, notably criticicm of the petit bourgeois bigotry that dominated "the American psyche," but there is aone major difference, imho. Twain was fundamentally a defender of America and its values (cf. Innocents Abroad), he merely repudiated certain aspects of it (cf. parochial bigotry). Mencken, otoh, was an unabashed Europhile and a critic of Amerca and its core values - of which "boobois" bigotry was a central part.
In that respect I am more with Mencken than with Twain. Petit bouregois bigotry (manifested in multiple forms ranging from racism to elite and foreigner bashing), anti-intellectualism, parochialism, knee-jerk conformism and group-think (thinly disguised by individualistic rhetoric), faux religiosity (i.e. concern with church politics rather than theology and spirituality) and blown out of proprtion delusions of grandeur and self-righteousness seem to be the core elements of the American collective consciousness, rather thna accidental deviations from it. It is liberalism (i.e. progressive political views) that seems to be a deviation from that core. There are, of course, socio-historical reasons for that, but that is another story. Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------