Word: menckenism
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Culturally, the South no longer is "the intellectual Gobi or Lapland" dismissed by Baltimorean H.L. Mencken in the '20s. The region boasts symphony orchestras, theaters and a number of enterprising museums. And even Mencken noted: "[In the South] some attention was also given to the art of living-that life got beyond and above the state of a mere infliction and became an exhilarating experience. A certain noble spaciousness was in the Southern scheme of things." That ideal has been translated into magnificent urban structures in Atlanta, Houston, Charlotte and smaller cities. Yet Southern urbanites are not captives...
...South was the "Sahara of the Bozart"-mediocre, stupid, lethargic. So insisted Supercynic H.L. Mencken. Even Virginia, the "most civilized" state in the South, was an "intellectual Gobi or Lapland," where education "had sunk to the Baptist-seminary level; not a single contribution to human knowledge has come out of her colleges in 25 years...
...crass and boss-ridden as they once were, but they are just as synthetic in an up-to-date show-biz way. Newsmen used to armor themselves against the hokum by reporting it in the cynically fond style of amused outrage made popular by H.L. Mencken. That tone is harder to sustain these days, and a good many reporters and editors are now asking whether they are covering conventions in the right...
...areas of what one would call, in a pinch, charm." But Parker becomes impatient with endless faculty meetings, such as five sessions to discuss whether or not to install a toilet in the watchman's booth. At Harvard, they typed her as basically hostile, "a female Mencken." Her Cambridge curt speaking manner bugs the Bennington artsies; her demeanor comes across as aloof, cynical and supercilious. She says she wants to be "queen of the hop on a larger scale...
...prairies. Out of the hellfire tradition of revival-tent meetings grew an uglier tradition of prejudice and violence. The burning crosses of the Ku Klux Klan were a grotesque perversion of Christian principles, but an image was formed. "It became dangerous in the South to be intelligent," as H.L. Mencken scolded during the heyday of Klan power in the 1920s. "Every Baptist pastor became a neighborhood Pope ... Every pastor was a chartered libertine, free to bawl nonsense without challenge ... What the poor whites heard from the outside world they heard from the lips of these pious ignoramuses...