Word: angoff
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...steel strike could have been stopped long ago, union lawyer Samuel E. Angoff told the Young Democrats during their forum on labor last night. But there was no real need to stop it, he explained...
Blaming the controversy on a few new executives who "wanted to flex their muscles," he said that the employers rather than the workers started the issue. Angoff thought that the present strike would probably quiet their ambitions for a while though...
...Cello. Magazine circles were little better. The New Republic was run by "kept idealists," and the Nation was staffed "by men and women who were suffering the change of life." Mencken's high jinks masked low insight, according to Angoff, and Mencken never fully understood even the writers he championed, e.g., Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis. He thought Henry James "was an idiot, and a Boston idiot to boot, than which there is nothing lower in the world, eh?" F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was "poor stuff." Said Mencken of Hemingway...
Music could mellow the caustic Mencken strain. He once moved Angoff by saying, "Schubert knew God, he knew that God, too, was afraid, that God, too, trembled and was in doubt and got angry and regretted and yearned in vain, like you and me and all of us." Though he spouted misogynisms, Mencken was deeply in love with his wife, Sara Haardt, who lived only five years after their 1930 marriage. When she was dying he told a friend, "Women are always waiting . . . women are always waiting for-birth, for kisses, for love, for growing-up, for smiles, for death...
...laugh off the Depression as an invention of "charity racketeers," and he ignored Hitler as passing nonsense. Soon he and the Mercury were on the skids, and from 1933 until his 1948 stroke, he busied himself mainly with reminiscence (Newspaper Days) and scholarship (supplements to The American Language). Author Angoff skirts his lasting impact. Mencken, who detested democracy, ironically democratized U.S. life and art. He made Babbitt-land so culture-conscious that Babbitt disappeared. He lampooned frauds in high places so lustily that no public figure has been sacrosanct since. Partly because of his blasts at the prissy genteel tradition...