Word: menckenism
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Poets & Philosophers. Today, probably not even Mencken would describe the Southern Baptists that way. With the Depression and the U.S.'s increasing concern over international problems, Southern Baptists began to come out of their provincial hard shell. Fundamentalism declined and social issues moved to the forefront-although the Baptists never took to the "Social Gospel." Today, hellfire and brimstone revivalists are increasingly scarce, and though emotion-packed evangelism is still part of every Baptist sermon, more and more Baptist preachers are university-trained. They read the classics, study foreign languages, keep informed on science. Richmond's Theodore Adams...
...local autonomy, no one could say whether or not they spoke for Southern Baptism. There was, for instance, J. Frank Norris, a Fort Worth Baptist preacher ("the Texas tornado"), who killed a political foe by shooting him four times in the belly, was acquitted on "self-defense." H. L. Mencken's picture, done with his usual exaggerated gusto, was taken as real by many readers: "It became dangerous in the South to be intelligent . . . 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...
Colorfully and tendentiously described by such angry hotshot reporters as Baltimore's H.L. Mencken-who called Bryan "a tin-pot pope" and lamented that Darrow might as well be "bawling [his eloquence] up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan"-the monkey trial made screamlines all over the U.S. and Europe. Bryan and Darrow put on a spectacular sideshow, bellowing like snake-oil salesmen, crassly subverting judge, jury and the rules of evidence as they addressed their elocution to the larger court of public opinion. "We have the purpose," Darrow thundered, "of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling...
Died. Philip Benjamin Perlman, 70, Maryland lawyer, newspaperman (onetime Baltimore Evening Sun city editor and prank-playing crony of H. L. Mencken) and Democratic politician, who from 1947 to 1952 as workhorse Solicitor General of the U.S. personally won an unprecedented 49 cases before the Supreme Court but lost his most famous one, defense of President Truman's 1952 seizure of the steel industry; of heart disease; in Washington. An energetic fighter for civil rights. Perlman was co-chairman of the Platform Committee at last month's Democratic Convention...
Remarkably enough, there have been few really satisfactory dictionaries of American slang. H. L. Mencken made his prodigious contribution (The American Language), and Lester Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark produced their useful but not fundamental compendium (The American Thesaurus of Slang). Standing up well against the competition, Dr. Harold Wentworth, editor of the American Dialect Dictionary, and Stuart Berg Flexner, Cornell and University of Louisville philologist, have produced a handy, invaluable reference work that may well emerge as the standard in the field. In short, the authors have done a remarkably fly and dicty...