Word: menckenism
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Royko's columns are so good that it's difficult to review them. The temptation is to quote from as many as possible. Suffice it to say that Royko can only be compared to H.L. Mencken...
...Mencken drew his strength from Baltimore, the way Royko draws his from Chicago, the way Antacus drew his strength from his mother. Earth Royko's Chicago, the city of Nelson Algren (eulogized by his friend in this collection) is more bustling, alive and bursting with strength than Baltimore. Perhaps that's why Royko's essays seem more alive and compelling than Mencken...
...Among the losers in this presidential election campaign you will have to include the nosy scribblers of the press," wrote the New York Times's James Reston last Sunday. "Not since the days of H.L. Mencken have so many reporters written so much or so well about the shortcomings of the President and influenced so few voters." Reston and those like Syndicated Columnist Joseph Kraft, who lamented in the past few weeks that "greed sits in the American saddle," are more accustomed to being the Pied Pipers of Middle America, marching jauntily out front with majorities forming obediently behind...
...American fractiousness subsided, and the extraordinary era of good feelings commenced, lasting for more than a decade. The 1920s coincided with a less constructive but perhaps giddier national mood that found expression in the election of two laissez-faire Presidents. On the eve of the 1920 election, H.L. Mencken came out in favor of Warren Harding, "an honest reactionary" who pledged a return to normalcy. Harding's successor, Calvin Coolidge, won in 1924 on a platform of tax and budget cutting. Coolidge's "chief feat
...also set and maintained the highest standards of design and craftsmanship in book production. His early lists emphasized Russian authors, but he also published Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot, André Gide, D.H. Lawrence and Franz Kafka, among other eminent Europeans, and such U.S. writers as Willa Gather, H.L. Mencken, John Hersey and Samuel Eliot Morison, and Latin Americans Jorge Amado and Gilberto Freyre...