H.L. Mencken

[Inkstainedwretch]

Favorite Mencken quote, concerning the 3.2 beer sellable during Prohibition, often called "near-beer."
Mencken: "Whoever called it 'near-beer' was a poor judge of distance."
The quote has a Classical pithiness worthy of Samuel Johnson or Gibbon.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Another interesting angle on Mencken is his relationship with the African-American journalist George S. Schuyler, who was to the Pittsburgh Courier what Mencken was to the Baltimore Sun. Schuyler often wrote in what was very much a high Mencken style, and he and the man himself seem to have corresponded fairly regularly at the mutual height of their influences. Schuyler's novel "Black No More," an extraordinary science-fiction social satire published in 1931, carries a very clear Mencken influence in its writing style and overall outrageous tone.

Schuyler shared Mencken's contempt for organized religion, for "reformers," and for "do-gooders," and ended up following a political trajectory similar to Mencken's -- although he ended up outdoing his colleague by eventually drifting into the orbit of the John Birch Society. It would have been interesting to see what Mencken would have made of that.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Mencken's coverage of the Scopes trial was revealing in his opinion of the "salt of the earth." He routinely referred to the fundamentalist types who frequented the trial as, "the hicks," "the rubes," and, my favorite, "the hookworm-carriers."

 

[HadleyH1]

H. L. Mencken has been one of my great heroes for many years. We could certainly use a few more writers like him today.

I second that Warbaby!

Mencken was not perfect (who is perfect really)

but my oh my !.....what a mind he had!

 

[vitanola]

Favorite Mencken quote, concerning the 3.2 beer sellable during Prohibition, often called "near-beer."
Mencken: "Whoever called it 'near-beer' was a poor judge of distance."
The quote has a Classical pithiness worthy of Samuel Johnson or Gibbon.

Oh, heavens no!

Prohibition era "near beer" contained "less than one half of one percent" of alcohol.

When 3/4 once of some illicit medical absolute alcohol was added to a schooner of near beer the junior senator from New York pronounced the result delicious.

 

[LizzieMaine]

3 point 2 was what was legalized by the Roosevelt Administration in the spring of 1933, several months before Repeal, thus kicking off a mad craze for quaint Gay 90's saloon memorabilia and imagery. Doubtless even the Sage of Baltimore hoisted a mug of National Bohemian to FDR in the midst of all that.

 

[tonyb]

Isn't three point two beer still the limit in some U.S. locales for what can be sold in food stores (supermarkets, convenience stores, etc.)? And the poor beer imbibers have to venture to a liquor store to procure the stronger stuff?

 

[Bamaboots]

Isn't three point two beer still the limit in some U.S. locales for what can be sold in food stores (supermarkets, convenience stores, etc.)? And the poor beer imbibers have to venture to a liquor store to procure the stronger stuff?

I don't know about that, tony but I remember my first trip to CO during the 70's, in my teens, where they had 3.2 bars for those of us at least 19 but under 21.

 

[belfastboy]

I previously loved reading Mencken's quotes and he struck me as my kind of curmudgeon. But I have been reading material on the Dust Bowl tragedy of the 30's and came across Mencken's eugenic writings on sterilizing the population of the Great Plains. I guess there is always a risk in lionizing a man, especially an iconoclast such as HL. But his standing in my eyes has dropped precipitously since reading the contempt he held for rural folks. Just another member of that snobbish class of the coastal elite???

 

[plain old dave]

Read Hills Of Zion. You don't see contempt for the plain people so much as you do pity. He loathed Bryan, but simply pitied his followers.

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[HadleyH1]

I previously loved reading Mencken's quotes and he struck me as my kind of curmudgeon. But I have been reading material on the Dust Bowl tragedy of the 30's and came across Mencken's eugenic writings on sterilizing the population of the Great Plains. I guess there is always a risk in lionizing a man, especially an iconoclast such as HL. But his standing in my eyes has dropped precipitously since reading the contempt he held for rural folks. Just another member of that snobbish class of the coastal elite???

You say snobbish class?? ^^

Well, he was not a socialist, he certainly was not a Communist.

He was a bit extravagant, you know, he was simply Mencken.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I previously loved reading Mencken's quotes and he struck me as my kind of curmudgeon. But I have been reading material on the Dust Bowl tragedy of the 30's and came across Mencken's eugenic writings on sterilizing the population of the Great Plains. I guess there is always a risk in lionizing a man, especially an iconoclast such as HL. But his standing in my eyes has dropped precipitously since reading the contempt he held for rural folks. Just another member of that snobbish class of the coastal elite???

I think there are two kinds of curmudgeons -- the kind who throw a gimlet eye on some aspect of society because it betrays its potential to be more than it is, and the kind who sneer at some aspect of society because they feel it's beneath them. You can be an idealistic curmudgeon or an elitist curmudgeon but you can't be both. Mark Twain was the former, and I fear that, while he might not have started out that way, Mencken became the latter.

But that said, he was also tapping into a strain that went extremely deep in post-World War I 1920s America. There was a great deal of cultural contempt among the Better Classes for the rubes and the hicks of East Outhouse, USA, largely because there was a sense that these were the people who put over Prohibition. This is not true -- Prohibition had a strong base of support among Progressive-era reformers in the cities -- but the image of uneducated pencil-necked yokels marching in Epworth League parades, or fat hypocritical Babbitts carrying on at the Rotary Club luncheon carried a lot of weight in the "smart" circles of the time. In that sense Mencken wasn't doing or saying anything that wasn't also being done or said in the pages of Judge or Life or the New Yorker or most of all in the pages of the novels of Sinclair Lewis. He was just far more flamboyant about it than they were. He figured out his niche, and he milked it for all it was worth.

One of the reasons his influence crashed in the 1930s is that that "smart set" of the twenties that made up the bulk of his American Mercury audience got put in its place real fast by the Depression. Once young Dickie Cheltenham III and Ysobel Vassargirl were digging ditches, slinging hash, and picking bedbugs out of their hair because the family fortune had suddenly gone pffrt, suddenly all the dumb-rube stuff didn't seem quite so clever.

 

[HadleyH1]

Mencken in the middle....celebrating the repeal of Prohibition

 

[HadleyH1]

I like Mencken.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I used to Menck, but you know, you get old, and Mencken ain't what it used to be.

Seriously, though, long after his hyperbole and invective are as forgotten as that of Westbrook Pegler -- who was the Mencken for the people Mencken hated -- the world will remember Mencken for "The American Language." It is, and will always be, the definitive work on English as it was spoken and written in the US in the 20th Century. I have the original edition and both supplements, and find them fascinating to just open at random and start reading.

 

[HadleyH1]

For me Menck and all of them, writers and journalists and so on from back then... they get even better as time goes by.

I weep for those times....I weep when I compare them with today.

I do.

 

[plain old dave]

I used The American Language in college to try to satisfy the language requirement by studying American.

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[belfastboy]

You say snobbish class?? ^^

Well, he was not a socialist, he certainly was not a Communist.

He was a bit extravagant, you know, he was simply Mencken.

Yes, I think eugenics as a faddish idea crossed ideological lines. Tommy Douglas the socialist hero of Canada, the father of our socialized medicine system and champion of the people was a eugenics proponent back in the day.....and yes he now ranks as one of the most admired Canadians of all time....some people are able to transcend their despicable aspects.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

I used to Menck, but you know, you get old, and Mencken ain't what it used to be.

Seriously, though, long after his hyperbole and invective are as forgotten as that of Westbrook Pegler -- who was the Mencken for the people Mencken hated -- the world will remember Mencken for "The American Language." It is, and will always be, the definitive work on English as it was spoken and written in the US in the 20th Century. I have the original edition and both supplements, and find them fascinating to just open at random and start reading.

This is an excellent topic for a new thread: What books can you just pick up, open at random, start reading and be instantly immersed? My favorites in this category are Pepys' Diary and Will Durant's " The Life of Greece." Gibbon's " Decline and Fall" is not far behind.

 

[plain old dave]

Yes, I think eugenics as a faddish idea crossed ideological lines. Tommy Douglas the socialist hero of Canada, the father of our socialized medicine system and champion of the people was a eugenics proponent back in the day.....and yes he now ranks as one of the most admired Canadians of all time....some people are able to transcend their despicable aspects.

About the only area in this regard HLM could be criticized for is not recognizing Nazism for what it was for a VERY long time.

If any customer takes it for a defense of Hitler, then I can only say that I must give up trying to write plain English. It is actually an attempt to disentangle the facts from the blah of both sides, and present them as objectively as possible.

Probably colored by his German-American upbringing, enthusiastic support for Germany in WW1 (including a reporting venture through Germany in 1916-17) and concurrent incandescent hatred for Wilson and the British, he still as late as 1945 considered FDR worse than Hitler, whom he considered little more than a rabble-rouser in the same category as William Jennings Bryan, whom he loathed.

It has to be considered, too, that many people old enough to remember WW1 in that era thought the reports from Germany in the 30s-40s were similar to the "Rape of Belgium;" little more than Allied propaganda.