H.L. Mencken
From Conservapedia
Henry Louis (H.L.) Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956), was a rabidly anti-Christian newspaper critic and journalist who savaged evangelicals, William Jennings Bryan and, more privately, blacks and Jews. In the 1920s the New York Times called him "the most powerful private citizen in the United States," and Walter Lippmann said he was "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people."[1]
Mencken was obsessed with social status. He broke off a relationship to his lover, Marion Bloom, because she had not been wealthy or sophisticated enough, as well as his disdain towards her conversion to Christianity Science.
Twenty-five years after Mencken's death, the publication of his diary revealed him to be a complete bigot towards almost anyone other than his own German ethnicity, including his remark that "There is no other Jew in Baltimore who seems suitable" to belong to a private club in Baltimore, after its only Jewish member passed away. Of blacks Mencken said in 1943, "it is impossible to talk anything resembling discretion or judgment to a colored woman."[2] But during his life, Mencken was lionized by his fellow liberal journalists as the "Sage of Baltimore," and to this day evolutionists are grateful to him for how he ridiculed (and misrepresented) the facts that transpired at the Scopes Trial.
Mencken had contempt for religion and faith, such as:[3]
- Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
- Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
H.L. Mencken had this to say about moral victories: "In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished."[4]
H.L.Mencken's extraordinarily bigotted obituary of Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential nominee and Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson, concluded with the following:[5]
- Bryan, at his best, was simply a magnificent job-seeker. The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him. He was ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to take up new ones at a moment's notice. For years he evaded Prohibition as dangerous; then he embraced it as profitable. At the Democratic National Convention last year he was on both sides, and distrusted by both. In his last great battle there was only a baleful and ridiculous malignancy. If he was pathetic, he was also disgusting.
- Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.
- The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille. If it fails, they will devour it.
References
- ↑ NYT and Lippman quotations from H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken (1880-1956) in Contemporary Authors Online.
- ↑ The Diary of H. L. Mencken, published by Alfred A. Knopf.
- ↑ http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/H._L._Mencken
- ↑ http://www.lewrockwell.com/jarvis/jarvis34.html
- ↑ http://www.peeniewallie.com/2005/06/h_l_menckens_ob.html
