Word: menckenisms
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...will remember the story related a few years ago in Americana, a bald quotation from a small Southern newspaper, to the effect that the constabulary had barely prevented the lynching of a negro who ventured to object when a white man held him up and took his billfold. Mr. Mencken, even as Beaumarchais before him, found this ludicrous, but, like Beaumarchais, he did not neglect to point the implicit moral, i.e., that justice was a rare bird for the declassed minority...
...must constantly be applied in the form of grants and subsidies, for so many farmers are thumbing their noses at economy by keeping milch cows and using stubbly lands that the others could not supply our needs. The only intelligent capitalist solution has been advanced by Mr. H. L. Mencken; since the farmers are obviously not up to the serious business of feeding us cheaply, they should be made hired labourers, and the agricultural system owned and managed by competing corporations, much as in mining or the manufacture of cloth. In a time of depression, even such corporations as these...
With the twentieth century and the war came a closer approach to comprehension. Sinclair Lewis, Dreiser, Mencken, furnished blocks for the building; but none was sufficient architect to complete the edifice. Others were sidetracked, as Irving Babbitt to Humanism, Thornton Wilder to Catholicism, Krutch, Jeffers, and Faulkner to Pessimism. Hemingway tried to dodge the problem of values in bullfights and drink without success...
...would think from this that we are out for a gripe or that Mencken has come at last to Hanover to flay dying cats. The impression is not the right one, for the articles are built carefully out of facts presented coolly. "Steeplejack" thinks that an undergraduate's best training for future worth is in taking something be knows, namely the score on college as it is, and examining it with candid vitality and solid control. Constant humorous recriminations in "The Dartmouth," campus daily, suggest that this policy gets under the skin. Or maybe it is not so much...
...imagination. The national attention which humanism captured probably grasped little more of it than the fact that it was something earnestly preached by Irving Babbitt which had a great deal to say against Rousseau, and that it was furnishing a great deal of amusement to those who found Mr. Mencken's critical style amusing. Humanism, as Professor Mercier demonstrates but does not say, is a philosophy and an attitude which by its nature must be as indifferent as truth itself to how much of and how successfully the popular attention has been captured...