Word: menckenism
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...fine May evening in 1912, two testy young U.S. critics strolled along the Champs Elysees in Paris. "Isn't it magnificent?" asked George Jean Nathan. Replied H. L. Mencken: "You can have it. I want a good American drugstore, where I can get a first-class toothbrush...
...last time that Mencken spoke well of his native land. Years later he admitted that "I wouldn't swap an American bathroom for the Acropolis." But these were passing sentimentalities from the man whose avowed program was "to combat, chiefly by ridicule, American piety, stupidity, tin-pot morality, cheap chauvinism in all their forms...
Tory & Bohemian. William Manchester's Disturber of the Peace is as good a record as any of how Mencken went about goading his victims. But the surprising fact is that no really first-rate book has yet been written about the juiciest subject imaginable for a U.S. literary biography. The raw materials for the job are massive and easily available. Among them: Mencken's 88 scrapbooks of clippings; the Princeton University Library's microfilm record of more than 10,000 letters written by Mencken; the Congressional Library's long-playing recordings on which Mencken, under questioning...
From that close-up point of vantage, Biographer Manchester tries manfully to understand the contradictions that few understood when the beer-guzzling bad boy from Baltimore was an editor of the Smart Set and the American Mercury. Mencken wrote like a reckless revolutionary, but he was Tory to the core. His home life was as innocent as the average minister's, but he flayed the ministers, and the Bohemians claimed him as their own. In the 1920s, a word of praise from Mencken became a priceless treasure. When, as a joke, he suggested various politicians for the presidency, minor...
Presumably intended to fall into the Mencken tradition was Editor Huie's own lead article, "Untold Facts in the Forrestal Case." Based on word-of-mouth reports about the contents of Forrestal's private papers, it belabored the backbiters and columnists responsible, as Writer Huie put it, for the "destruction" of the late Defense Secretary. Huie, whose book, The Case Against the Admirals, was an air-power fanatic's assault against Forrestal's program for a balanced defense force, now lauded Forrestal as the only Administration leader who had fully realized the threat of Russia...