Word: menckenism
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That really is the question which confronts the University Debating Union. Either the Union exists or it does not exist. And when such questions as the might of Mencken are its sole breath of life, it cannot be called particularly vital...
...some journal of the haute monde of cleverness and thin satire on which to base his belief that the movies are right, that sin sits in high places. There will be times when other papers, with even less to damn them than "Hatrack" and less to sell them than Mencken, rest in naughty niches safe from the gaze of the Bostonian and the blessed...
...Debating Union has finally decided for time and eternity that Mr. Mencken is worth reading, that he is a force, that he has a message. So one dare not read his editorial on education in the March "Mercury" with the usual grain of salt. Nor need one. For Mr. Mencken wandering through mazes of contradictions and losing himself in occasional thickets of wisecrackery does arrive at a definite and exact description of existing phenomena. He believes that there is not sufficient training in thought per se afforded by the usual American college education. And he is no doubt right...
...Mencken goes little further. Like all capable iconoclasts he has no better icon in his pocket to replace the smashed idol. Bertrand Russell has. And though his particular idols are those of the philosophical mind and, therefore a triple shadowed by the clouds of unattainable idealism, they are worthy gods and not small ones...
...final speaker of the meeting was K. F. White '27, who supported the negative on the basis that Mencken being primarily a humorist, should not be taken seriously enough to be thought to have any effect at all on American culture. He further stated that Mencken represented no real school of thought, and since there was no American culture Mencken could not be said to be inimical to it even if we are inclined to take his writings seriously...