by H.L. Mencken April 13, 1945 THE BALTIMORE Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: “Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man.” There are heavy black dashes above and below it. The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when “he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a Continue Reading →
by Gideon Dene THE WORKS of American Mercury contributor and editor Henry Hazlitt (he was H.L. Mencken’s chosen successor) are brilliant gems of economic insight which, if they were only more well known, could change the downward spiral of the West’s economic fortunes. Did you know, for example, that inflation is not a rise in prices? Did you know that Continue Reading →
or, Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences by Edgar Allan Poe [Editor’s Note: Poe’s hilarious essay – on the subject of cons and con men – shows that the master of the macabre had an understanding of human nature rivaling Mencken’s. ] Hey, diddle diddle, The cat and the fiddle SINCE THE world began there have been two Continue Reading →
by H.L. Mencken A review of Meet General Grant by W. E. Woodward (Horace Liverwright, publishers); The American Mercury, 1928 THE DREADFUL title of this book is not the least of its felicities. If they had been saying such things in his day it seems unquestionable that Grant would have said, “Meet the wife.” He was precisely that sort of Continue Reading →
by H.L. Mencken The American Mercury, September 1930 NO AMERICAN historian, so far as I know, has ever tried to work out the probable consequences if Grant instead of Lee had been on the hot spot at Appomattox. How long would the victorious Confederacy have endured? Could it have surmounted the difficulties inherent in the doctrine of States’ Rights, so Continue Reading →