[lbo-talk] Mencken

[John Thornton]

Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Gar Lipow <the.typo.boy at gmail.com>
> You guys do know both Mencken and Bierce were really awful racists.
> Mecken  wrote long racist rants in the American Mercury once the
> Roosevelt era began. He supported keeping Jim Crow, opposed anti-lynch
> laws, had long pseudo-scientific arguments for the biological reality
> of the races. You can probably guess which biological "race" he
>
> [WS:]  I think you got all backwards http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/06-2NRsummer/p74-0602-rodgers.html
>
> As I said in my exchange with Charles, HLM was petulant and that tainted his political judgment.  But his negative opinion of KKK and lynch mobs are well known and also consistent with his anti-populist stance.
>
> You also need to place a person's views in a historical context - what is considered racism today was a mainstream belief 70 years ago.  
>  Wojtek 
>   

Mencken wrote in praise of Strom Thurmond and in praise of Jim Crow.
He opposed lynch mobs because he hated mobs. Same for the KKK.
He also wrote that the US would have been better served if the South had 
won the Civil War and the US was ruled by an elite Southern aristocracy.
I don't paint Mencken as virulently racist but he was a little more 
racist than average in my opinion.
Better than 50% of American's opposed Jim Crow in 1950 but Mencken did not.

John Thornton