I come to praise Mencken not to bury him. But oh, how we love to quote him on this site, myself included. We love the guy. In his company we look so erudite, so witty, so devilishy clever. Well let’s have a look at what he thought of us, why don’t we? Let’s see his thoughts on the pious, hardworking folk out here in the red sections of that election Map.
Fact is, the great sage spent fully seven-tenths of his writing time dumping on us — mercilessly. No way he’d have sat at the same table with us. Rural people in general, Southerners in particular and Christians especially, inflamed him to his vituperative best, I’m afraid. No getting around it. Let’s face facts. Hell, isn’t that what being a right-winger’s all about? Preferring the "objectively true over the subjectively agreeable" in the words of — oops! I did it again — yes in the words of old Henry Louis himself.
Well, here’s the facts: to Mencken we were the"yokelry" out there in the "cow and hog states" the "booboisie", "homo boobiens," "numskulls", "oafs." he had at us weekly for almost thirty years, and with glee and gusto, with fire-breathing lust.
He blamed us for hoisting our "dunghill ideas" on the civilized city folk. He actually blamed us for Prohibition!
"It was among country Methodists, practitioners of a theology degraded almost to the level of voodooism, that Prohibition was invented, and it was by country Methodists, nine-tenths of them actual followers of the plow, that it was fastened on the rest of us, to the damage of our bank accounts, our dignity and our ease…it is no more and no less than the yokel’s congenital and incurable hatred of the city man — his simian rage against everyone who, as he sees it, is having a better time than he is." (The Husbandman)
Yes, he walloped us in his every column, above and below the belt. The man was a certifiable sadist in this respect. He awoke every morning, a wicked smile on his face and his brain aflame with fresh vitriol to hurl at the denizens of the hinterlands. No getting around it.
I remember when his first diaries came out in 1990. The pinks and professional victimologists squawked and squealed to high heavens. Seems that in the privacy of his domestic chambers he’d written a couple of "insensitive" remarks about blacks and Jews.
Forget for a second that he wrote them in the 1920’s and 30’s when such sentiments were commonplace in his social circles — indeed, the norm. I roared with mirth at these pious finger-waggers so repelled by his" racism." The fun they’d been missing all these years! No way they’d read any of his other stuff!
If they had, they’d seen that those tid-bits plucked out of his copious diaries were about 1/100,000 as "insensitive" as anything he wrote — openly, for mainstream publication — about Anglo-Saxons, Southerners, pious Christians, and Americans in general. Let’s have a look.
Here he talks about the citizens of the land of the free and the home of the brave:
"The American people constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages, and they grow more timorous, more sniveling, more poltroonish, more ignominious every day." (The American Scene. p. 7)
He’s just getting started and continues:
"Here (in America) the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self respect, of honor, is so low that any man who does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head."
He’s getting some steam up.:
"Here (in America) the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly — the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries(and this in 1924!) of commercial brigandages and throat slittings, of theological buffoneeries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villanies, imbecilities, grotesqueries, and extravagances is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only a person born with a petrified diagram can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night and wake up with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-School superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows." (Ibid, p. 9)
Here he tackles the Anglo-Saxon specifically :
"I have come to believe in his (Anglo-Saxon) inferiority thoroughly….They are in the main extremely stupid men…that this inferiority is real must be obvious to any impartial observer. His braggadocio is no more than a protective mechanism erected to conceal an inescapable sense of inferiority." (The American Tradition.)
I ask you dear reader, change Anglo-Saxon to Negro, to Oriental — hell to anything! Can you imagine the uproar by the Pinks! Yet this wasn’t his diaries. This was Prejudices Fourth series. Right out there in the open. Not a peep from the Pinks about this. And the stuff in his diaries about blacks and Jews doesn’t come close!
But Ah! you think, he’s obviously talking about Yankees here, not us plucky and resourceful Southerners.
Think again. Here Mencken talks about the plucky Confederates:
"He (Anglo-Saxon) runs the whole south and in the whole south there are not as many first rate men as in many a single city of the mongrel north. Wherever he is still firmly in the saddle, there Ku Kluxery flourishes, and Fundamentalism, and lynching, and Prohibition, and all the other stupid anti-social crazes of inferior men."
Here he tackles the Confederacy specifically:
"The agonies of the south have been much exaggerated in popular romance. ..Large numbers of men escaped service, and the general hardship everywhere fell a great deal short of the hardships suffered by the Belgians, the French, The Germans the Serbians and Rumanians in the Great War. General Lee was of the opinion that his army was very badly supported by the civil population, and that its final disaster was largely due to that ineffective support." (The American Scene, a reader p. 27 )
Here he ruminates on farmers:
"He (the farmer) is a fraud and an ignoramus, a cheap rogue and a hypocrite..No more grasping, selfish and dishonest mammal, indeed is known to students of the Anthropoidea..yet we are asked to venerate this prehensile moron" (The Husbandman).
Again, the South in general:
"The picture gives one the creeps…..that stupendous region of worn out farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums….as sterile artistically, intellectually, culturally as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first rate men than all the states south of the Potomac…in all fields the south is an awe-inspiring blank, a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity, lethargy almost of dead silence… a complete sterility, a depressing lack of all civilized gesture and aspiration…as for this unanimous torpor and doltishness, this curious and almost pathological estrangement from everything that makes for a civilized culture, what is needed down there is a survey of the population by competent ethnologists and anthropologists..it is highly probable that some of the worst blood of Western Europe flows in the veins of the Southern whites…obviously it is impossible for intelligence to flourish in such and atmosphere. Georgia is perhaps the worst, crass, gross, vulgar and obnoxious…" (The American Scene).
Let’s face it folks, the man was an immensely entertaining writer from day one, but not much of a sage. A questionable Libertarian too. He voted for FDR the first time. It wasn’t until the mid-thirties, with the New Deal getting on its legs, that Mencken hit his purely Libertarian stride — if he ever did. Naturally that’s when his pink reviewers like Gore Vidal say "he lost his touch." Hell, if you ask me that’s when he found it.
Suffering withdrawal after reading everything he has in print — and five or six times — I ordered a tape of a 1948 interview with him from Laizzes Faire Books. Well, I heard him say that the government shouldn’t allow newspaper owners to own radio stations too. I swear.
Indeed, spend a weekend with him. This is the time of the year for it. Football’s over. Hunting seasons have closed. Weather’s too lousy for golf or fishing. So make a big fire, uncork some good brandy, and spend a week-end with the man. You’ll see.
Put that in your Menckenophile pipe and smoke it.
Humberto Fontova’s book entitled The Helldiver’s Rodeo — about cajun-style undersea lunacy — is due for release on March 1st. It’s already listed on Amazon.com and can be pre-ordered.
