H L Mencken once said that if a congressman discovered there were cannibals in his district, he’d promise them missionaries.
From this Fallows blog post The quote is apparently somewhat garbled– it was originally part of a shot at Franklin Roosevelt that Mencken published in The American Mercury. It’s in the middle of this long string of Mencken quotes, which includes my two favorites: ”Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy” and “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
also described the south as a “sahara” of the fine arts. hope maggots are eating his remains.
Terminator, you’re not suggesting he was wrong about fine arts or our environs, are you? I believe his maggots moved on and expired long ago — as did their great-grandchildren. My favorite Menken quote: “It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would be lying if you were in his place.”
Mencken got a lot right. He got a lot wrong– heck, how many books he published were called “Prejudices”?
The essay Terminator mentions, “The Bozart of the Sahara,” I first heard of from one of my high school English teachers– possibly at the same time as Terminator? It was published in 1917, at a time when Southern literature…
… probably deserved the darts Mencken threw As an epigraph, he quotes a Southern poet; Alas, for the South! Her books have grown fewer- She never was much given to literature.” Republishing the essay in 1949, Mencken wrote:
“This produced a ferocious reaction in the South, and I was belabored for months, and even years afterward in a very ex- travagant manner. The essay in its final form, as it is here re- produced, dates sadly, but I have let it stand as a sort of historical document. On the heels of the violent denunciations of the elder Southerners there soon came a favorable response from the more civilized youngsters, and there is reason to believe that my attack had something to do with that revival of Southern letters which followed in the middle 1920 ‘s .”
I wouldn’t give him credit for the arrival of Southern letters in the mid to late 20s, but, at the same time, I’d have to ask: Was he really wrong about Southern writing before 1920?
I missed it in high school, discovered it as an undergrad at UM after I changed my major to Englsh.
Here’s the essay. This passage reminded me that Mencken translated Nietzsche:
The New England shopkeepers and theologians
never really developed a civilization; all they ever developed was a government. They were, at their best, tawdry and tacky fellows, oafish in manner and devoid of imagination; one searches the books in vain for mention of a salient Yankee gentleman; as well look for a Welsh gentleman. But in the South there were men of delicate fancy, urbane instinct and aristocratic manner-in brief, superior men-in brief, gentry. * * * It is as if the Civil War stamped out every last bearer of the torch, and left only a mob of peasants on the field.
And that’s before you get to the out-and-out racism.
I recall that in the 60′s in my small town we had a tiny 1 room library with very few books. The High School library was worse. Who knows how many great writers in Ms we could have had if they had something to read when young.
That’s a classic: Englsh. Probably why I wound up a friggin lawyer [retired]…