Mr. Mencken gives the
impression of an able mind so harried and irritated by the philistinism of
American life that it has not been able to attain its full power. These more
carefully worked-over critical essays are, on the whole, less interesting and
provocative than the irresponsible comment he gives us in his magazine. How is
it that so robust a hater of uplift and puritanism becomes so fanatical a
crusader himself? One is forced to call Mr. Mencken a moralist, for with him
appraisement has constantly to stop while he tilts against philistine critics
and outrageous puritans. In order to show how good a writer is, he must first
show how deplorably fatuous, malicious or ignorant are all those who dislike
him. Such a proof is undo... (From: fair-use.org.) It would not perhaps be thought, ordinarily, that the man whom physical disabilities have made so helpless that he is unable to move around among his fellows can bear his lot more happily, even though he suffer pain, and face life with a more cheerful and contented spirit, than can the man whose deformities are merely enough to mark him out from the rest of his fellows without preventing him from entering with them into most of their common affairs and experiences. But the fact is that the former's very helplessness makes him content to rest and not to strive. I know a young man so helplessly deformed that he has to be carried about, who is happy in reading a little, playing chess, taking a course or two in college, and all with the sunnies... (From: RaggedEdgemagazine.com.) No incident of recent years has served to bring out so much crude thinking among supposedly educated men as the now happily ended McNamara case. A wave of hysterical passion for law and order seems suddenly to have swept over the land, a passion which one would like to believe is entirely sincere and ready to carry itself through to logical conclusions. It looks a little too much like a sudden scare, a purely physical timidity on the part of the comfortable classes, to be quite convincing. The gallant and well-worn phrase, law and order, has been worked overtime to conceal a very real fear on the part of the dominant classes for their lives and property.
The law and order which they reverence is one in which society minds its own busines... (From: fair-use.org.) Mr. Seymour Deming follows his eloquent Message to the Middle Class with an assault upon the colleges. His book he calls a profane baccalaureate, and it rips along as from one who is overturning the altars of Baal. No one has a style quite like this, with its mixture of Greek classicism and Broadway slang, with its cheap sardonic kicks and its sudden flashes of insight. Mr. Deming moves you, but he leaves you in the end more entertained than persuaded. His prophetic fire is so much fire and so little light. The first part of the book is devoted to picturesque denunciation of the colleges for not training a man to make a living. The second glorified the radical as the man who scorns success, and has turned from everything which the world thi... (From: Anarchy Archives.) I.
To most Americans of the classes which consider themselves significant the war brought a sense of the sanctity of the State which, if they had had time to think about it, would have seemed a sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought. In times of peace, we usually ignore the State in favor of partisan political controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the pursuit of party policies. It is the Government rather than the State with which the politically minded are concerned. The State is reduced to a shadowy emblem which comes to consciousness only on occasions of patriotic holiday.
Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contemp... (From: fair-use.org.) No reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public opinion more solicitude than the failure of the 'melting- pot.' The discovery of diverse nationalistic feelings among our great alien population has come to most people as an intense shock. It has brought out the unpleasant inconsistencies of our traditional beliefs We have had to watch hard- hearted old Brahmins virtuously indignant at the spectacle of the immigrant refusing to be melted, while they jeer at patriots like Mary Antin who write about 'our forefathers.' We have had to listen to publicists who express themselves as stunned by the evidence of vigorous nationalistic and cultural movements in this country among Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians, and Poles, while i... (From: TheAtlantic.com.) To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war, it
has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with which the American
intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of war-technique in the
crisis in which America found herself. Socialists, college professors,
publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of literature, have vied with
each other in confirming with their intellectual faith the collapse of
neutrality and the riveting of the war-mind on a hundred million more of
the world's people. And the intellectuals are not content with confirming
our belligerent gesture. They are now complacently asserting that it was they
who effectively willed it, against the hesitation and dim perceptions of
the A... (From: BigEye.com.) I.
Time brings a better adjustment to the war. There had been so many
times when, to those who had energetically resisted its coming, it seemed the
last intolerable outrage. In one’s wilder moments one expected revolt against
the impressment of unwilling men and the suppression of unorthodox opinion. One
conceived the war as breaking down through a kind of intellectual sabotage
diffused through the country. But as one talks to people outside the cities and
away from ruling currents of opinion, one finds the prevailing apathy shot
everywhere with acquiescence. The war is a bad business, which somehow got
fastened on us. They won’t want to go, but they’ve got to go. One decides that
nothing generally obstructive ... (From: fair-use.org.) To most Americans of the classes which consider themselves significant the war [World
War II brought a sense of the sanctity of the State which, if they had had time to think
about it, would have seemed a sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought.
In times of peace, we usually ignore the State in favor of partisan political
controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the pursuit of party policies. It is
the Government rather than the State with which the politically minded are concerned. The
State is reduced to a shadowy emblem which comes to consciousness only on occasions of
patriotic holiday.
Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is thus a
legitimate object of criticism... (From: bopsecrets.org.) My western friend who runs a prosperous stove-factory has been finding fault with my insistent use of the word exploitation. My outlook on life is not sufficiently cheerful, and I am inclined to see malevolence where everything is, as they say at college, healthy, hearty, and happy. Our quarrel rose over the Mesaba strike, and my acceptance of an I. W. W. pamphlet as a plausible account of what was going on there. The accounts of the insecurity of pay, the petty robberies, the reeking houses, the bigoted opposition to labor organization, seemed to me to smell of truth, because I had read the maddening tales of Colorado and West Virginia, and seen with my own eyes in Scranton and Gary and Pittsburgh the way workers live, not in crises of ind... (From: fair-use.org.)
