Mr Mencken, 1932 and 2009
From H. L. Mencken, “What Is Going On In the World”, The American Mercury, March, 1932:
“The psychic effect of the depression, it seems to me, is generally a good one. It has made multitudes distrust such charlatans as Hoover and [Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W.] Mellon who were quite willing, three years ago, to credit them with the magic of saints and archangels. It has busted a long line of popular wizards, running from Henry Ford to [head of Bethlehem Steel] Charlie Schwab, and from [economist] Irving Fisher to [newspaper editor] Arthur Brisbane, all of them as hollow as jugs. It has taught people the difference between speculative values and real values. It has hastened the death of sick industries, and proved the vigor of sound ones. It has blown up the old delusion that the amount of money in the world is unlimited, and that every American is entitled to a police captain’s share of it.
“Best of all, it has taught millions that there is really no earthly reason why there should be two cars in every garage, and a chicken in the pot every day. A few years back we were all leaping along after the pacemakers, and making shining fools of ourselves. Life in America had become an almost unanimous effort to keep up with the Joneses, and what the Joneses had to offer by way of example was chiefly no more than a puerile ostentation. So many luxuries became necessities that the line separating the one from the other almost vanished. People forgot altogether how to live well, and devoted themselves frantically to living gaudily.
“It seems to me that the depression will be well worth its cost if it brings Americans back to their senses. Once they rediscover the massive fact that hard thrift and not gambler’s luck is the only true basis of national wealth, they will discover simultaneously that a perfectly civilized and contented life is possible without the old fuss and display.”
Further reading: Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, 5th Edition.
Mencken House Open for Union Square’s Christmas Cookie Tour
The Mencken House will be open Sunday, 2008-12-14 from 12:00-17:00 as part of the Union Square Christmas Cookie Tour 23. Admission to the Mencken House free. You must purchase a ticket if you wish to visit the other houses which are part of the tour.
Der Tag (Mencken Day), September 13, 2008
Download a vicinity map (pdf format).
Saturday, 2008-09-13
10:00AM Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St, opens.
10:05AM – 12:15PM Meeting of the Mencken Society.
12:15PM – 1:00PM Informal preview of the George H. Thompson Mencken Collection at the George Peabody Library, 17 E Mount Vernon Place.
2:30PM Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Mencken Memorial Lecture by Susan Jacoby.
Reception in Poe Room.
6:00PM – 9:00PM Saturday Night Club (reservations required).
Mr Mencken, YouTube and MySpace
On a lark, I typed “Mencken” in YouTube’s search box, not expecting anything to show up. To my surprise, there were 114 results. Most do not deal with Mr Mencken directly but quote him, or refer to other Menckens, such as the composer Alan “Mencken”, whose name is correctly spelled ‘Menken’, composer of the score for Disney’s Alladin or refer to author James Bovard who won the Free Press Association’s Mencken Award in 1994, and so forth.
Some items which deal substantively with Mencken and which I’ve listed with the better items grouped first are:
H. L. Mencken – In Defense of Women – Intro Part 1/2: vocal recording from librivox.org which provides free audiobooks of works in the public domain.
H. L. Mencken – In Defense of Women – Intro Part 2/2: vocal recording from librivox.org which provides free audiobooks of works in the public domain.
Inheriting Mencken: clip from Inherit the Wind (1960), with Gene Kelly as the Menckenish E. K. Hornbeck.
Good Night Valentino: clip from the 15-minute short Good Night Valentino (2003) which dramatizes Mencken’s meeting with Rudolph Valentino.
H.L. Mencken: Mencken quotes with a musical background.
Scopes Monkey Trial: high school students re-enact the Scopes Monkey Trial.
The Sahara of the Bozart: one man’s comments on Mencken, with distracting camerawork (evidently the speaker was holding the camera at arm’s length and rotating himself giving the effect of him being stationary while the background whizzes by).
Lastly, Mr Mencken has both a MySpace profile and a blog
New Edition of Notes On Democracy
Dissident Books of New York have released Notes on Democracy: A New Edition with an introduction and notes by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers and an afterword by Anthony Lewis.
Lawrence M. Ludlow reviews the book at the website Strike the Root.
Remembering Sara
The end of May marks the seventy-third anniversary of the passing of Sara Powell Mencken, neé Haardt.
John Strom, Thrice Doctor
By James Drayham [H. L. Mencken]
[Smart Set 71(1):122 (1923-05)]
John Strom, thrice doctor, wrote 10,000 pages or so, to prove the value of an intellectual life. Not content with writing, he also lectured. One day he grew more enthusiastic than usual. He almost shouted: “The body begins to rot at thirty. The intellect is a perennial flower!”
A piece of plaster fell with a thunderclap upon the bald pate of John Strom, thrice doctor.
John Strom was thirty-nine years old that day. He continued to live for thirty-two years more. Of the ten languages he knew fluently the only word he remembered was “Boo!” which he liked to repeat, as he used to repeat his lectures. Of the ten thousand pages or so that he had written he made cornucopias, which he balanced on his head, exclaiming: Boo! Boo! Boo!”
The truth about “Ventures Into Verse”
It is common knowledge that Mr Mencken considered his first published work, a collection of his poetry, to be so bad that he bought all the copies he could and destroyed them.
Common knowledge is wrong. … More