Do you think that the present state of political discourse in the United States has hit an all-time low? Do you think the population has grown irrevocably divided? We hear words like "unprecedented," and "in all of our history," and other hyperbole nearly every time a political commentator opens their mouth. Along with blaming the mess on social media and technology. Well, read H.L. Mencken on U.S. politics of the 1920s through the 1930s, and then you will see that now, a hundred years later, our current situation does not look so unprecedented afterall. They didn't have Twitter or Facebook, but they had the same divisiveness and inflammatory remarks. The difference in Mencken's lifetime: they did a better job of proof-reading and had editors and typesetters to catch the more obvious errors.
Most people today only know Mencken from his quote, frequently turned into an internet meme, about how no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average American.* Mencken wrote for decades (mostly for the Baltimore Sun), however, employing a wit and invective that many a commentator today must envy. You do not need to recognize all of the names in order to enjoy his writing – Mencken's columns he wrote for the Baltimore Sun reprinted in this book, refer to many failed candidates and other people who everyone at the time recognized but have since fallen into obscurity. You do not have to have a detailed knowledge of the history of the time to enjoy this book (although it may help).
A few excerpts from Mencken are below.
On Presidential candidates:
“All of the great patriots now engaged in edging and squirming their way toward the Presidency of the Republic run true to form. This is to say, they are all extremely wary, and all more or less palpable frauds.”
On political discourse:
“It seems to me that this fear of ideas is a peculiarly democratic phenomenon, and that it is nowhere so horribly apparent as in the United States…”
“It has been, by God's will, a very bitter campaign, which is to say, an unusually honest one.”
On the urban-rural divide in America:
“What the average native yokel believes about the average city man is probably nine-tenths untrue, and what the average city man believes about the average yokel is almost as inaccurate.”
*Note: The actual quote is "No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”
