Word: menckens
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AMERICAN political conventions are perhaps democracy's most spectacular sacrament. H.L. Mencken found them "as fascinating as a revival or hanging," and they are often a little of both. As sheer theater, they are a special American form, a television marathon, a grandiose town meeting staged by DeMille. Yet for all their exuberant buncombe, their stretches of interminable tedium and their gusts of rhetoric, the conventions have the seriousness and the fascination of great political power in transfer...
Founded in 1833, the Telegraph's roster of writers over the years included H.L. Mencken, Ring Lardner, Louella Parsons, Ben Hecht, George Jean Nathan and Heywood Broun, who was fired. When it carried Walter Winchell's "Beau Broadway" column in the 1920s, the Telegraph was studied as closely as Variety at Broadway restaurants such as Sardi's and Lindy's. Even in recent years the paper kept five staffers on the show-biz beat. One of the most popular writers in the 1950s was Columnist Tom O'Reilly, who used to write a Monday piece...
...everybody had something to say about the country's most controversial neWWs-boy. To Ed Sullivan he was a "cringing coward"; to the California American Legion he was "America's No. 1 Patriot." Ben Hecht said he wrote "like a man honking in a traffic jam." H.L. Mencken lauded him as "an assiduous inventor and popularizer of new words and phrases." Lord Mountbatten and J. Edgar Hoover wrote him fan letters. Ethel Barrymore wondered, "Why is he allowed to live...
...clear in Wanda June is that Vonnegut is an easy kind of satirist. His writing is full of engineered whimsy, empty of rage. He is so eager to ingratiate himself with his audience that he seldom takes on anything more substantial than tentative heroes, canting psychiatrists, fumbling representatives of Mencken's American booboisie. A couple of heavyweight opponents are indeed invoked throughout Wanda June (the war in Viet Nam, the Christian religion). But Vonnegut dances around them like a kid from the Golden Gloves unwilling to risk even...
...great confrontations of U.S. legal history, pitting Clarence Darrow, the noted civil libertarian, against Prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, famed as a fundamentalist orator and three-time Democratic presidential candidate. For eight days the two argued; in the end, a jury "unanimously hot for Genesis," as H.L. Mencken reported, found Scopes guilty, and the judge fined him $100. Tennessee did not repeal the law until...