He also openly supported Scopes in Scopes Monkey Trial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial.
What I like about Mencken is that he did not mind going against the current and popular opinions - to which I can certainly relate. Yes he also had some brain farts, but who did not? One does not have buy the whole package deal, but rather pick and choose.
Wojtek
On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 11:15 AM, Max Sawicky <sawicky at verizon.net> wrote:
> Mencken was also pretty ferocious against the Klan, then a much greater
> organized force than it is today.
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 9:04 PM, <cgreen7223 at aol.com> wrote:
>
>> Yes, there is a side to Mencken's opinions that are revolting. In the book
>> I quoted from he also argued that Native Americans are racially inferior;
>> that if the dust bowl farmers and southern sharecroppers were all killed
>> then it would be of benefit to humanity; that people who have more children
>> than they can afford should be sterilized;that something should be done to
>> limit the offspring of the "unfit" i.e. the different classes of poor
>> people, etc. In the months before he suffered a massive stroke that sent
>> him into dementia in November 1948, he fervently supported the red scare
>> then underway and argued for a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union.
>> He was a fanatical anti-communist and anti-socialist. He seemed to have
>> bigoted things to say about most ethnic groups. He attacked unions as
>> tending to be full of workers who wanted to do less work for more money.
>>
>> But as Henwood has said before, there might be a few things in his
>> writings that leftists can learn from. He was very funny and some leftists
>> need more of a sense of humor. Ze'ev Chaffets, in his recent biography of
>> Limbaugh, compares Mencken to Limbaugh. That is, of course, idiotic. I
>> doubt limbaugh, if he were alive in the 1920's and 30's would have, as
>> Mencken did, refer to the US occupation of Haiti as murderous and conducted
>> for the benefit of US businessmen making an "unfair and excessive" income
>> from Haitian resources. I doubt Limbaugh would have contributed to the
>> Sacco and Vanzetti defense fund and lobbied for Emma Goldman's readmission
>> to the US or paid Goldman's hospital and funeral bills. I doubt Limbaugh
>> would have protested against the imprisonment of Eugene Debs and other
>> leftist radicals or testified before congress in support of federal
>> legislation against lynching.
>>
>> He was certainly a very independent minded and intelligent, within the
>> limitations of his conservative and social darwinist ideology. Most people
>> admire him for the way he wrote not the substance of what he said. They
>> enjoy reading him denounce people as morons but they don't really
>> comprehend his most important ideas, such as on the role of conformity in
>> society, his attacks on patriotism and moral rage, etc. They think of as a
>> comedian before anything else, which is probably what he was to a
>> significant extent. Alexander Berkman, in a letter to Emma Goldman in the
>> early 30's refered to Mencken as a "superficial clown." He probably was
>> that to an extent. Goldman replied that Mencken had some significant flaws
>> but that he had done a great deal for civil liberties and for pushing down
>> barriers to dissent in the US. Mencken wrote an article on Berkman and
>> Goldman in the mid-20's, portraying them in a friendly light, calling their
>> anarchist beliefs nonsense but praising their writing style and
>> intelligence and their criticisms of the Soviet Union. He paid Goldman's
>> hospital and funeral bills after she died and wrote government officials
>> arguing for her re-admission to the country.
>>
>> Chris Green
>>
>> http://www.facebook.com/#!/**profile.php?id=44901401<http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=44901401>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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