Vintage Mercury

Jailbirds

Published by Ann Hendon on June 7, 2017

by Jim Tully; from The American Mercury, September, 1928; transcribed by Kevin I. Slaughter THE jail room was thirty-five feet long, twenty-five feet wide, and seven feet high. In this large cage were fifty prisoners. Some had been sentenced and were serving jail terms; others awaited trial, or removal to the penitentiary. The floor was of […]

Genesis of the Southern Cracker

Published by Ann Hendon on May 7, 2012

by W.J. Cash (pictured) FOR years it has been the fashion with historians to explain the white cracker of the South as simply the product of degenerate blood-strains from Europe — the progeny of the convict-servants and redemptioners of Old Virginia. But the theory defies logic and the known facts. Actually, the source of the […]

Sensitivity International: Network for World Control

Published by Ann Hendon on February 6, 2011

by Ed Dieckmann, Jr. from The American Mercury, Winter, 1969 EARLY IN MAY of this year, a courageous mother, Mrs. Lois Godfrey of Garden Grove, California, succeeded in getting sensitivity training outlawed, at least temporarily, in the Garden Grove Unified School District. Mrs. Godfrey withdrew two of her children from a class in which the […]

Israel’s Grand Design

Published by Ann Hendon on January 4, 2011

Israeli Leaders Crave Area from Egypt to Iraq by John Mitchell Henshaw From the Spring, 1968 issue of The American Mercury. John Henshaw wrote this article shortly after Israel’s conquests in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. THE METAMORPHOSIS OF TINY Israel from a midget to a giant is in the making. The grand design of Judaic-Zionist […]

The Annihilation of Freemasonry

Published by Malcolm P. Shiel on September 22, 2010

by Sven G. Lunden from The American Mercury , February 1941 THERE IS ONLY ONE group of men whom the Nazis and the Fascists hate more than the Jews. They are the Freemasons. In Italy, indeed, the anti-Jewish feeling is of recent vintage and largely artificial, whereas the blackshirt hatred of Freemasonry is old and […]

Sterilizing Criminals

Published by Ann Hendon on September 12, 2010

Today is H.L. Mencken’s 130th birthday, and we commemorate it here with two important and seldom seen essays by the Master of the Pen himself. –Ed. by H.L. Mencken THE RECURRENT EFFORT to eliminate criminal stocks by sterilizing criminals is opposed violently by sentimentalists, and also by the pseudo-scientists who argue fatuously that character is […]

Utopia by Sterilization

Published by Ann Hendon on September 12, 2010

by H.L. Mencken First published in The American Mercury, August 1937 DISCUSSING IN THE PLACE a few months ago the sorrows roweling the great Republic we live in, I ventured to throw out a double-headed suggestion. The first part of it was to the effect that an easy way to reduce those sorrows today, and […]

Liberals Never Learn

Published by Ann Hendon on July 21, 2010

by Albert Jay Nock from The American Mercury, vol. XLI, no. 164 (August 1937), pp. 485-90. THERE IS NO question that the Liberals and Progressives are in the political saddle at the moment, fitted out with bucking-straps and a Spanish bit, and are riding the nation under spur and quirt. Liberalism became the fashion in […]

One Hundred Percent American

Published by Ann Hendon on July 21, 2010

by Ralph Linton The American Mercury vol. 40 (1937) THERE CAN be no question about the average American’s Americanism or his desire to preserve this precious heritage at all costs. Nevertheless, some insidious foreign ideas have already wormed their way into his civilization without his realizing what was going on. Thus dawn finds the unsuspecting […]

Anarchist’s Progress

Published by Ann Hendon on June 1, 2010

by Albert Jay Nock This classic essay on freedom was published in The American Mercury in 1927. I. The Majesty of the Law When I was seven years old, playing in front of our house on the outskirts of Brooklyn one morning, a policeman stopped and chatted with me for a few moments. He was […]

Zionist Fraud

Published by Ann Hendon on April 23, 2010

Famed historian and American Mercury contributor Harry Elmer Barnes wrote this article as a friend of the Jewish people, but an enemy of the fraud that caused — and may well cause — wars between peoples in which millions on all sides lost their lives. It originally appeared in the Fall 1968 issue of The […]

American Mercury Editor’s Home Now a Public Monument

Published by Ann Hendon on April 21, 2010

JASON CHILTON MATTHEWS was an American renaissance man — composing poetry and music, fighting against Communism and for the self-determination of indigenous peoples — and he was the editor of The American Mercury, working there during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s. His home in McAllen, Texas — which he named Quinta Mazatlan, and from which […]

H.L. Mencken: His Arrest on Obscenity Charges

Published by Ann Hendon on April 20, 2010

This recent piece from the Bibliophile Web site describes the famous “Hatrack” case in which the Mercury was literally “banned in Boston,” and its editor arrested on obscenity charges — see Mencken’s recollections below. ON APRIL 5, 1926, reporter and literary critic H.L. Mencken was arrested on Boston Common for selling a magazine that had […]

The Criminality of the State

Published by Ann Hendon on April 14, 2010

from the American Mercury for March, 1939 by Albert Jay Nock AS WELL AS I can judge, the general attitude of Americans who are at all interested in foreign affairs is one of astonishment, coupled with distaste, displeasure, or horror, according to the individual observer’s capacity for emotional excitement. Perhaps I ought to shade this […]