General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Why we must resist the bullying of Will Pitt and others here. [View all]Bluenorthwest
(45,319 posts)He was also a rather enormous racist and anti Semite. I understand that many of you hear a quote or two and think Mencken was like Will Rogers or something but he was not. Here is a passage from H.L. Mencken on African Americans:
"I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. The educated negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him."
From his diary, 1943: "...it is impossible to talk anything resembling discretion or judgment to a colored woman. They are all essentially child-like, and even hard experience does not teach them anything."
He cut this portion from later editions, but here he is in 1930 on the Jews:
"The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered, they lack many of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display."
People need to read up on Mencken and actually read his works prior to claiming him as their own.
Mencken was opposed to populism, representative democracy and to the New Deal. You claim to be a big giant populist, when you are not saying civil rights are unimportant, you are all about the populism. You seem to like the New Deal. HL did not. On some days you affect language of racial equality and justice, HL had very different views.
He is often cited on DU by people who want to be seen as very progressive. This is a huge error.