Realist
Active Member
- Apr 13, 2018
- 118
- 29
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Mencken was complicated.
You, OTOH, are a simpleton
Mencken's vicious attacks on Republican Presidents Calvin Coolidge (“Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored”),[20] Warren Harding (“he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered”)[21] and Herbert Hoover (“a dud”)[22] made him a favorite of the literati, lionized throughout the publishing world. But when Mencken similarly lampooned the DemocratFranklin Roosevelt (“a fraud from snout to tail”),[23] whom he had supported in 1932,[24] he suddenly found himself a pariah, shunned by the establishment.[25] “[T]he New Deal might appear to offer just the sort of target [Mencken] loved,” wrote Alistair Cooke, but “the New Deal was Mencken's Waterloo, and Roosevelt his Wellington.” According to Cooke, “Mencken had a clear eye for the realities that conceived the Roosevelt period,” yet “it was the Roosevelt era that brought him to the mat." Cooke added that "The decline of his prestige was very swift,” so that by “the middle 1930's he all but abandoned the preoccupation of his palmy days, his self-chosen trade as 'a critic of ideas.'”[26]
Since the publication of Mencken's diaries in 1991, he has been lambasted as anti-Semitic, racist and "pro-Nazi."[27] He wrote:
“ The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered, they lack many of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display.[28] ”
In his diary, Mencken referred to “the Jews and whores who hang about the theatres and nightclubs”;[29] his publisher Alfred Knopf, wrote Mencken, “showed a certain amount of the obnoxious tactlessness of his race”;[30] George Jean Nathan, his former co-editor at The American Mercury, he wrote, had “a typically Jewish inferiority complex.”[31] Nathan commented, "I guess it would be right to say that [Mencken] never wholly liked Jews. He respected them, he was amused by them, he was even afraid of them, but he didn't like them. Maybe he even disliked them. I suppose that's anti-Semitism."[32]
The fact remains that you are proudly quoting Mencken who hated Republicans!