Mencken Chrestomathy

Finding libraries that hold this item You may have already requested this item. Please select Ok if you would like to proceed with this request anyway. WorldCat is the world's largest library catalog, helping you find library materials online. Don't have an account? Your Web browser is not enabled for JavaScript.

Some features of WorldCat will not be available.

Create lists, bibliographies and reviews: Search WorldCat Find items in libraries near you. Advanced Search Find a Library. Your list has reached the maximum number of items. Please create a new list with a new name; move some items to a new or existing list; or delete some items. Your request to send this item has been completed. Citations are based on reference standards. However, formatting rules can vary widely between applications and fields of interest or study.

The specific requirements or preferences of your reviewing publisher, classroom teacher, institution or organization should be applied. The E-mail Address es field is required. There was every expectation Mencken would continue his previous pattern of anti-fundamentalist articles, this time with a searing critique of McPherson. Unexpectedly, he came to her defense, identifying various local religious and civic groups which were using the case as an opportunity to pursue their respective ideological agendas against the embattled Pentecostal minister. After all charges had been dropped against McPherson, Mencken revisited the case in with a sarcastically biting and observant article.

He wrote that since many of that town's residents acquired their ideas "of the true, the good and the beautiful" from the movies and newspapers, "Los Angeles will remember the testimony against her long after it forgets the testimony that cleared her. In the Arkansas legislature passed a motion to pray for Mencken's soul after he had called the state the "apex of moronia. Mencken, says Charles A. Fecher, was, "deeply conservative, resentful of change, looking back upon the 'happy days' of a bygone time, wanted no part of the world that the New Deal promised to bring in.

In addition to his identification of races with castes, Mencken had views about the superior individual within communities. He believed that every community produced a few people of clear superiority. He considered groupings on a par with hierarchies, which led to a kind of natural elitism and natural aristocracy. In , per his instructions, Alfred A. Knopf published Mencken's "secret diary" as The Diary of H.

According to an Associated Press story, Mencken's views shocked even the "sympathetic scholar who edited it," Charles A. Mencken said, "There is no other Jew in Baltimore who seems suitable," according to the article. The diary also quoted him as saying of blacks, in September , that "it is impossible to talk anything resembling discretion or judgment to a colored woman.

They are all essentially child-like, and even hard experience does not teach them anything. For example, he had this to say about a Maryland incident:. Not a single bigwig came forward in the emergency, though the whole town knew what was afoot. Any one of a score of such bigwigs might have halted the crime, if only by threatening to denounce its perpetrators, but none spoke.

So Williams was duly hanged, burned and mutilated. I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American Negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the Negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it.

The educated Negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a Negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him. Mencken countered the arguments for Anglo-Saxon superiority prevalent in his time in a essay entitled "The Anglo-Saxon", which argued that if there was such a thing as a pure "Anglo-Saxon" race, it was defined by its inferiority and cowardice.

• Lost at Starvation Lake (Starvation Lake series Book 2).
• Frequently bought together.
• Sewende somer (Helene de Kock-omnibus) (Afrikaans Edition)?

In the edition of Treatise on the Gods , Mencken 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: 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. That passage was removed from subsequent editions at his express direction. Author Gore Vidal later deflected claims of anti-Semitism against Mencken:.

Far from being an anti-Semite, Mencken was one of the first journalists to denounce the persecution of the Jews in Germany at a time when The New York Times , say, was notoriously reticent. On November 27, , Mencken writes Baltimore Sun , "It is to be hoped that the poor Jews now being robbed and mauled in Germany will not take too seriously the plans of various politicians to rescue them.

A Second Mencken Chrestomathy

As Germany gradually conquered Europe, Mencken attacked President Roosevelt for refusing to admit Jewish refugees into the United States and called for their wholesale admission:. There is only one way to help the fugitives, and that is to find places for them in a country in which they can really live. Why shouldn't the United States take in a couple hundred thousand of them, or even all of them? Rather than dismissing democratic governance as a popular fallacy or treating it with open contempt, Mencken's response to it was a publicized sense of amusement.

His feelings on this subject like his casual feelings on many other such subjects are sprinkled throughout his writings over the years, very occasionally taking center-stage with the full force of Mencken's prose:. Democracy gives [the beatification of mediocrity] a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world—that he is genuinely running things.

Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters—which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.

This sentiment is fairly consistent with Mencken's distaste for common notions and the philosophical outlook he unabashedly set down throughout his life as a writer drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer , among others. Mencken wrote as follows about the difficulties of good men reaching national office when such campaigns must necessarily be conducted remotely:. The larger the mob, the harder the test.

H. L. Mencken - Wikipedia

In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.

We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. Mencken defended the evolutionary views of Charles Darwin but spoke unfavorably of many prominent physicists and had little regard for pure mathematics. Regarding Charles Angoff, Mencken said:.

In response, Angoff said: Addition, subtraction, multiplication, fractions, division, that's what real mathematics is. The rest is baloney.

Bestselling Series

All of our sciences still suffer from their former attachment to religion, and that is why there is so much metaphysics and astrology, the two are the same, in science. Elsewhere, he spoke of the nonsense of higher mathematics and "probability" theory, after he read Angoff's article for Charles S. Peirce in the American Mercury. I can make no sense of it, and I don't believe you can either, and I don't think your god Peirce knew what he was talking about. Mencken also repeated these opinions multiple times in articles for the American Mercury.

He said mathematics is simply a fiction, compared with individual facts that make up science. The human mind, at its present stage of development, cannot function without the aid of fictions, but neither can it function without the aid of facts—save, perhaps, when it is housed in the skull of a university professor of philosophy. Of the two, the facts are enormously the more important.

Navigation menu

In certain metaphysical fields, e. Very few fictions remain in use in anatomy, or in plumbing and gas-fitting; they have even begun to disappear from economics. Mencken repeatedly identified mathematics with metaphysics and theology. According to Mencken, mathematics is necessarily infected with metaphysics because of the tendency of many mathematical people to engage in metaphysical speculation.

In a review for A. Whitehead's The Aims of Education , Mencken remarked that despite his agreement with Whitehead's thesis and approval of his writing style, "now and then he falls into mathematical jargon and pollutes his discourse with equations", and "[t]here are moments when he seems to be following some of his mathematical colleagues into the gaudy metaphysics which now entertains them".

Mencken also uses the term "theology" more generally, to refer to the use of logic in science or any other field of knowledge. The Greatest Works of Jane Addams. A Voice From the South.

The Book of Life: Works of Ralph Adams Cram. The Letters of William James, Vol. Sunday After the War. What's What in America. Studies of Lowell from Literary Friends and Acquaintance. The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America. The Art Of Public Speaking. Berg Esenwein and Dale Carnagey. Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. My Life as Author and Editor. How to write a great review. The review must be at least 50 characters long. The title should be at least 4 characters long. Your display name should be at least 2 characters long.

At Kobo, we try to ensure that published reviews do not contain rude or profane language, spoilers, or any of our reviewer's personal information.

• No Shadow of Turning: A Sojourners Tale?
• Mencken Chrestomathy : H. L. Mencken : ;
• Love and Accept Yourself Now: A Memoir!
• A Mencken Chrestomathy by H.L. Mencken | www.newyorkethnicfood.com: Books.
• Adult romance with sex: Passion From The Past...An adult short story book (Erotic Quickies 3).

You submitted the following rating and review. We'll publish them on our site once we've reviewed them. Item s unavailable for purchase. Please review your cart.