Word: mencken
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Journalists who read the American Mercury for October went hot with pride, shame or anger. Editor Henry Louis Mencken had delivered himself of another diatribe on U. S. journalism. Once a newspaper man himself, Editor Mencken now looks down upon his former fellows and their calling with scorn and impatience. His tirades are bitter, egregrious, painfully penetrating. They are the firebrands of a studious but inactive idealist...
...violence has degenerated, if such a thing can degenerate, lower than the point at which it starts, to a stage where the most trivial incident can pierce the wall of soap-bubble thickness which divides law from anarchy in many States of the South. As H. L. Mencken declared in one of his essays, lynching takes the place of the merry-go-round, and offers a periodic relief from the tension of drab existence in Southern towns." This is pretty strong meat. I know nothing of conditions in the South. Mr. White should. Certainly he writes of them with power...
...taming of shrewish Mr. Mencken...
...Mercury's table of contents invariably includes three or four names wearing Ph.D.'s at their tails, letters boastfully included by Mr. Mencken among the virtues and credits of his performers. And again he has done a singular thing. He seems to have discovered some lost tribe of white professors, a warring tribe who truss up their gowns and take the field against the sacred bulls of American letters, arts, sciences...
Having stoned the reporters and the professors for twenty years, Mencken and Nathan now squawk for their help as they begin to endow America with a first-rate magazine...