H.L. Mencken

by Glenn N. Holliman

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public - H.L. Menchen


My college mate of long ago, Dave McIntyre of Tennessee, has been gently downsizing as we both creep (sometimes literally) deeper into our senior years. In my post office box this week arrived a mysterious package from him, a book by one of the most stimulating writers of  the first half of the 20th century, H. L. Mencken. Very famous and controversial in his time, Menchen's work for years enhanced the pages of the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

"Neat", I thought upon unwrapping the thick white packaging and glancing at the title and author's name.  Then to my delight I found the copy was signed by the author and included two letters to Menchen's friend and another provocative writer, 
Harry Elmer Barnes (1889-1968).  

Barnes is largely forgotten today but in the 1930s he was controversial for writing that France and Russia, not Germany, were primarily responsible for World War I. His school of thought was labeled revisionist.  

Barnes, pictured on the left, taught history at Columbia University, and later became a freelance writer and professor at smaller schools.  His 100 essays, 30 books and 600 articles and reviews made his one of the most prolific authors of his time.  He lost much of his reputation in the late 1950s when he help create the Holocaust denial movement.

Like Barnes, Menchen (1880-1956) was an iconoclast, one whom we might say thought outside of the conventional box. One who dared call a fool, well, a fool.  

This 'Sage of Baltimore' gained notoriety in the 1920s with his sarcastic reporting on the Dayton, Tennessee anti-Darwin 'Monkey Trial'.  He was skeptical of religion, populism and representative democracy.  His major work was a multi-volume  study of American English entitled The American Language.

Today his Baltimore home in the Union Square neighborhood is a museum and his papers scattered in various libraries.  The major collection resides in the Mencken Room at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library.

My plans are this volume and the letters scanned below will eventually find their way to that collection.

Where did Dave find this literary treasure?  Probably, he said at a yard sale or antique fair, really not sure. Thanks, old friend of my college days when the world was young, our cynicism was non-existent and all lay before us.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. - H. L. Menchen

Comments?

Dear Glenn

I paste an article below that may be of interest. It is written by Raheem Kassam with whom I have campaigned a little. It is food for thought. President Trump is gradually changing world politics more than any recent predecessor. I remain a keen supporter of this remarkable man. - David Lott of England, a founder of the United Kingdom Independent Party and retired RAF fighter pilot.

It may as well have been written before President Trump even uttered a single word in Warsaw earlier this week, the Economist‘s panicked, hysterical, and un-bylined reflection on his speech that placed matters of identity, culture, faith and sovereignty over democracy.

“In Warsaw, America’s president barely mentions democracy,” the article’s sub-headline shrieks. For a magazine so fervently opposed to the results of the Brexit referendum (direct democracy in action), you could easily hurl accusations of hypocrisy at the magazine’s editors.

Instead, we should be more wary of the ongoing fetishisation of the idea of one-man-one-vote as some kind of be all and end all of Western civilization.

Firstly, in the grand scheme of all things European — and derivative nations such as the United States, Canada, Australia, etc — democracy is a relatively new concept. The cynic may well drop in this overused Churchill quote. Or this one. Again, too easy.

It strikes me as more important that we look at what the Economist is trying to achieve by declaring:

When George W. Bush visited Poland for his first presidential visit, in 2001, he referred to democracy 13 times. When Barack Obama spoke in Warsaw in 2014, he mentioned democracy nine times. For Mr Trump, once sufficed.

The tone conveys hostility, not just towards those who do not believe the West is typified by more than the ballot box, but also to those who believe history matters, tradition matters, nation states matter, and identity matters.

A refusal to deify democracy runs deeply contrary to the objectives of globalism, which explains the Economist’s petulance.

For decades we have watched, almost stunned into inaction, as our children are forced to learn that patriotism is racist, and history is to be altered at the whim of the loudest, shrieking, protesters.

Mine isn’t an anti-democracy argument either. Merely I want to reflect upon how the President struck the right balance between democracy and philosophy/history in his Warsaw speech.

But The Economist wants to give a historical progressivism — a tool often leveraged, even if not adhered to, by globalists — an intellectual underpinning. But there is no intelligence in this mantra. Quite the opposite.

The notion of putting democracy on a higher pedestal than tradition is anti-intellectual.

Conservatives and reactionaries are, today, less likely to be motivated by fear and emotion and more interested in learning lessons from the past that the left would rather ignore or rewrite.

Many mistake the Economist for a pro-free market capitalist paper. Untrue.

It favours corporatism and cronyism. It isn’t left or right per se. But it does favour the modern political centre-left, more interested in “internationalism”, more in favour of the political establishment than the every man. Hence its risible backing of the pro-European Union Liberal Democrats at the British general election.

Curious, you might think then, that the magazine would side with the demos who elected President Donald J. Trump. Not so, either.

President Trump won because of the electoral college, a check on a more direct democracy, and one which the Economist has previously sought to undermine in its U.S.-election coverage. Heaven for fend we suggest a return to the Senate’s original role in not being a directly elected chamber either. That could really set their heads spinning.

It would be unfair however to state the paper misunderstands the idea of the tyranny of the majority. There have previously been printed warnings over referendums or ballot measures in the United States on their own pages. So what has changed since then, when in 2011, they published the following words:

…it is the “tyranny of the majority” that James Madison, a Founding Father, warned about. His reading of ancient history was that the direct democracy of Athens was erratic and short-lived, whereas republican Rome remained stable for much longer. He even worried about using the word “democracy” at all, lest citizens confuse its representative (ie, republican) form with its direct one. “Democracy never lasts long,” wrote John Adams, another Founding Father. Asked what government the federal constitution of 1787 had established, Benjamin Franklin responded: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

In a word: Trump.

In another word: populism.

Though JFK, Obama, and other centre-left politicians were swept into power on a populist wave, they represented the Wilsonian internationalism the Economist prefers. So they were okay. The same internationalism that loves democracy promotion abroad which led to the quagmire of the Iraq War: the reason we weren’t able to stablise Iraq post-invasion. Our newfound obsession with putting a tick in a box.

Again, no grasp or reflection of this from the Economist as it lambastes the President of the United States for focusing on political philosophy rather than fawning over a system of electing a government.

You couldn’t imagine editorialising such as: “The spectators, mainly conservative Catholics bused in from around the country and promised a free picnic at the defence ministry afterwards” under an Obama presidency. In fact, these are the same tactics the left uses at elections as well as for protests and marches all around the Western world.

Once more, hypocritically, the paper takes a dig at the recently democratically elected Polish government:

But the greatest reason for Poland’s government to be delighted with Mr Trump was what he did not mention: PiS’s undermining of democratic institutions to entrench its own power. The party has stuffed the civil service and the diplomatic corps with loyalists and has weakened the independence of the judiciary. It has transformed the national broadcaster into a mouthpiece of the state. Independent journalists face new restrictions. The European Commission has warned the government that its reforms pose “a systemic risk to the rule of law.”

Of course the (unelected, by the way) European Commission has said that. PiS has been steadfast in protecting Poland from the EU’s migration madness, as well as taking steps to reassert Polish sovereignty.

Never has the Economist mentioned how during the years the pro-establishment Civic Platform ruled, they too “stuffed the civil service and diplomatic corps with loyalists”. Their looting is one of the major reasons they lost to PiS in 2015.

The Economist wants to bash PiS and Trump; facts, philosophy, and even their own commitment to democracy be damned. If that means humiliating itself by performing anti-intellectual mid-air back flips in the process, it seems the editors are more than willing to do so.

Best wishes

Comments:

From a Pennsylvania art teacher - 

By the way, the David Lott piece on Poland, etc. was spot on.

The greatest threat facing the United States is its own president

By David Rothkopf July 4  Reprinted from the Washington Post

David Rothkopf is the author of “The Great Questions of Tomorrow.” He is a visiting professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Last week, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, I moderated a panel on U.S. national security in the Trump era. On the panel, former CIA director David H. Petraeus offered the most robust defense of President Trump’s foreign policy that I have heard. Central to his premise were two facts. First, he argued that Trump’s national security team was the strongest he had ever seen. Next, he argued that whereas President Barack Obama was indecisive to the point of paralysis, such as in the case of Syria, Trump is decisive.

Toward the end of the conversation, we turned to Trump’s erratic behavior and I noted that for the first time in three decades in the world of foreign policy, I was getting regular questions about the mental health of the president.

I asked Petraeus, a man I respect, if he thought 

the president was fit to serve. His response 

was, “It’s immaterial.”  

He argued that because the team around Trump 

was so good, they  could offset whatever deficits 

he might have. I was floored. It was a stunningly weak defense.

That is where we are now. The president’s tweeting hysterically at the 

media is just an element of this. So too is his malignant and ever-visible narcissism. The 

president has demonstrated himself to have zero impulse control and a tendency to damage 

vital international relationships with ill-considered outbursts, to trust very few of the people

in his own government, and to reportedly rant and shout at staff and the television sets 

he obsessively watches.

Whether he is actually clinically ill is a matter for psychiatric professionals to consider. But when you take the above behaviors and combine them with his resistance to doing the work needed to be president, to sitting down for briefings, to reading background materials, to familiarizing himself with details enough to manage his staff, there is clearly a problem. Compound it with his deliberate reluctance to fill key positions in government and his wild flip-flopping on critical issues from relations with China to trade, and you come to a conclusion that it may be that Trump’s fitness to serve as president is our nation’s core national security issue.

                                                                                                     

Not only does the president diminish the office with his pettiness; he also shows disregard for constitutional principles including free speech, freedom of religion and separation of powers, and he operates as though he were above ethics laws. Daily he shows he lacks the character, discipline, intellect, judgment or respect for the office to be president of the United States. In normal times, this would be worrying. But look at the news.

North Korea is moving closer to having the ability to deliver a nuclear weapon to the United States. A confrontation is coming that will be a test of character pitting North Korea’s unhinged leader, Kim Jong Un, against our leader.

 Later this week, he will sit down with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hamburg, Germany, during the Group of 20 meeting. Quite apart from the political optics of rewarding a man who attacked the United States with to help get Trump elected with such a meeting, the summit reveals why it is so dangerous to have an erratic president. 

Much of U.S. foreign policy comes down to personal diplomacy conducted by the president and his actions in the wake of such meetings. If a dedicated enemy of the United States and opportunist such as Putin determines to take advantage of Trump’s narcissism, ignorance, paranoia, business interests or brewing scandals, he will do just that. If he sees Trump’s behavior as a tacit endorsement of his own thuggishness, he will seize the opportunity. Could Trump enter the meeting with good advice from the team that Petraeus and others admire so much? Yes. 

But they can’t undo Trump’s record, nor can they, we have learned, always shape the behavior of a man who has shown repeated propensity for ignoring the advice of his best allies. That is one reason, according to reports, that European officials are deeply concerned about the outcomes of the meeting that will take place in Hamburg this week.

  

The United States has had a wide variety of presidents; we have as often been victimized by their errors of judgment as we have benefited from their leadership. But the stark reality is that objective analysis reveals that we have never before seen a president so unfit for office.

Even President Richard Nixon at his moments of darkest paranoia was a professional public servant who understood the office and the stakes associated with it. 

One might, on this Independence Day week, have to go back to King George III to find a head of state who so threatened America. But there is no precedent for one whose character is so obviously ill-suited to the presidency.

At the end of the Aspen session, a gentleman approached me and asked why I had made the conversation so ad hominem by questioning Trump’s fitness. I explained that when we have a system in which the chief executive is endowed with so much power, we regularly find that our fate in crises turns on the character of the president. For that reason, it is not the incivility of modern politics that drives us to question Trump’s fitness; it is a respect for the lessons of history and for the national interests his profound deficits put at risk.

Comments?

From a retired English teacher in Tennessee
What are we to do????  Wait for North Korea to bomb us? I fear we are frozen in place unless "happenings' are taking place behind closed doors.  Also frightening are the base of people who still believe this president to be the savior of the USA.

From a published law professor in Pennsylvania

Thanks.  Very good but depressing.

From a Librarian in Virginia

Well, that's a tremendously depressing article, especially in light of current events on the Korean Peninsula.

May thoughtful, cooler heads prevail.

From a scientist in England

We must hope that this kind of opinion spreads - quickly.

From a published author in Australia

Very interesting reading, and we agree 100% with David R. 

From the president of a prominent ladies club in Texas

I used to enjoy watching the news but it is too depressing now.

From David Lott, frequent contributor from England

Factless, base, rude and hysterical. Pot calling the kettle black .