At one point, H. Mencken and Theodore Dreiser were so close they were dating two sisters. Mencken and Randolph Bourne both loved Nietzsche and wanted to subvert Victorian culture and push American culture in a more libertarian direction. Mencken was a hugely important figure in the death of the Victorian mainstream and the origins of the Modern mainstream.
He popularized naturalism and aestheticism. The following excerpt comes from Henry F. One has only to glance at the family photograph album, or to pick up a book or magazine dated, say, , to find oneself in a completely vanished world. On one side of some historical boundary lies the America of Theodore Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan, of Chautauqua and Billy Sunday and municipal crusades, a world so foreign, so seemingly simple, that we sometimes tend, foolishly enough, to find it comical.
On the other side of the barrier lies our own time, a time of fearful issues and drastic divisions, a time surely including the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the atom bomb. Clearly on one side of this line lie Booth Tarkington and O. Clearly on our side lie Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Stearns Eliot, and also the writers of television advertising. At some point, if not an instantaneous upheaval, there must have been a notable quickening of the pace of change, a period when things began to move so fast that the past, from then on, looked static.
Some of these paradoxes are, of course, more apparent than real. We do not have to choose between the two pictures of prewar America: the end of Victorian calm and the beginning of cultural revolution. Both of these pictures are true. In the years we are going to examine, the few years just before the impact of war on America, we are uniquely able to look at both pictures at once.
We can see the massive walls of nineteenth-century America still apparently intact, and then turn our spotlight on the many different kinds of people cheerfully laying dynamite in the hidden cracks. It is my hope that a concentrated but fairly wide-ranging study of this short period, of its thought and literature and politics, may tell us something about the old America and something about the beginnings of our own times.
In Nietzsche Mencken found, for one thing, a way of combing his naturalism and aestheticism. Despite his misunderstandings, Mencken really could draw from his early master much that he needed: nobody else was so deeply versed in European tradition and yet, without being at all an uplifter, so revolutionary.
Nobody else could be quoted so aptly against women, Christianity, progress, and Anglo-Saxondom. More completely than anybody else so far, Mencken had by the early and middle teens raised the standard of battle against all three of the main elements of the dominant American culture. His dislike of the assumptions of practical idealism was central and pervasive.
Mencken, the Young Intellectuals and the other Modernists agreed that religion and morality were a farce and that Americans could along just fine without the Victorian cultural consensus on national identity, religion and morality. This is what makes them Moderns.
Moderns value self-expression, self-liberation and self-realization above collective ties. They value cultural liberation and cultural egalitarianism. In contrast, Victorians valued self-denial, religion and morality and racial and cultural hierarchies above aesthetic self-expression.
From the Compromise Generation born through the Missionary Generation born , Americans were Victorians. From the Lost Generation born through the Millennials born , Americans have been Moderns. One reason? The establishment Protestants, while promising reforms, just ruled exactly like the former Catholic aristocracy — and their Court Jews — had ruled.
What did we set up? A decentralized, libertarian, sovereign system…. The movie came out in Yes, but I bring tidings of good news today. There have been several stories on Zero Hedge and other sites that the re-opening plan for Broadway has been postponed until May 31, Good luck with that, re-opening in May, would be some kind of miracle the way things are going.
The White, normal i. Ironically, many of the audience members at the shitty Broadway plays like Rent were Babbits from the despised flyover country who went to one of the overpriced shows because they were doing the tourist thing in NYC. To loosely quote that spiteful mutant H. Southern as an identity is not monolithic, never has been. Southern Society was always a caste system. The remnant of the South, of which we are arguably comprised, is descended of the lower classes, the yeomanry and the barbarians of Appalachia and the swamp lands of the deep South.
The upper class of that caste system no longer exists. They either lost everything they had in the war and joined the yeomanry in disenfranchisement, or they betrayed the South and went North or to Europe and cached out of their culture. None of this shit applies to me or my family. Why not at least talk about modernism and the labor movement. Fuk the pre enlightenment reactionaries. They failed and here we are.
Fuk the victorians for the same reason. Get to the fucking point already. In the s, the overwhelming majority of White Southerners shared Victorian values and beliefs. They saw themselves as White, Christian and Southern as identitarians like yourself do today. They practiced their Christian faith and took traditional moral values for granted. Southern communities even in your neck of Appalachia were based on kinship and shared religious and moral values which is why Tennessee passed that state law that led to the Scopes Trial.
Well, obviously, something changed between and that has transformed the South beyond recognition. There is no longer a consensus about these things. Millions of Southerners now reject your identitarianism and your values. They share basically the same Modern values, beliefs and lifestyles as people who live elsewhere in the country. This is what is stupid about identitarianism. It has been just as impacted by this transformation as the North.
It only happened somewhat later here in the s and s because the South urbanized and industrialized later than the North in the s and s. The boomers of Dayton, alas, had no skill at such things, and the experts they called in were all quacks. The result now turns the communal liver to water. Two months ago the town was obscure and happy. Today it is a universal joke. I have been attending the permanent town meeting that goes on in Robinson's drug store, trying to find out what the town optimists have saved from the wreck.
All I can find is a sort of mystical confidence that God will somehow come to the rescue to reward His old and faithful partisans as they deserve--that good will flow eventually out of what now seems to be heavily evil.
More specifically, it is believed that settlers will be attracted to the town as to some refuge from the atheism of the great urban Sodoms and Gomorrah. But will these refugees bring any money with them? Will they buy lots and build houses? Will they light the fires of the cold and silent blast furnace down the railroad tracks? On these points, I regret to report, optimism has to call in theology to aid it. Prayer can accomplish a lot. It can cure diabetes, find lost pocketbooks and retain husbands from beating their wives.
But is prayer made any more officious by giving a circus first? Coming to this thought, Dayton begins to sweat. The town, I confess, greatly surprised me. I expected to find a squalid Southern village, with darkies snoozing on the horse blocks, pigs rooting under the houses and the inhabitants full of hookworm and malaria. What I found was a country town of charm and even beauty July 10 the first day The town boomers have banqueted Darrow as well as Bryan, but there is no mistaking which of the two has the crowd, which means the venire of tried and true men.
Bryan has been oozing around the country since his first day here, addressing this organization and that, presenting the indubitable Word of God in his caressing, ingratiating way, and so making unanimity doubly unanimous.
From the defense yesterday came hints that he was making hay before the sun had legally begun to shine--even that it was a sort of contempt of court. But no Daytonian believes anything of the sort. What Bryan says doesn't seem to these congenial Baptists and Methodists to be argument; it seems to be a mere graceful statement to the obvious July 11 The selection of a jury to try Scopes, which went on all yesterday afternoon in the atmosphere of a blast furnace, showed to what extreme lengths the salvation of the local primates has been pushed.
It was obvious after a few rounds that the jury would be unanimously hot for Genesis. The most that Mr. Darrow could hope for was to sneak in a few bold enough to declare publicly that they would have to hear the evidence against Scopes before condemning him. The slightest sign of anything further brought forth a peremptory challenge from the State.
Once a man was challenged without examination for simply admitting that he did not belong formally to any church. Another time a panel man who confessed that he was prejudiced against evolution got a hearty round of applause from the crowd In brief this is a strictly Christian community, and such is its notion of fairness, justice and due process of law.
Try to picture a town made up wholly of Dr. Crabbes and Dr. Kellys, and you will have a reasonably accurate image of it. Its people are simply unable to imagine a man who rejects the literal authority of the Bible. The most they can conjure up, straining until they are red in the face, is a man who is in error about the meaning of this or that text.
Thus one accused of heresy among them is like one accused of boiling his grandmother to make soap in Maryland July 13 the second day It would be hard to imagine a more moral town than Dayton.
If it has any bootleggers, no visitor has heard of them. Ten minutes after I arrived a leading citizen offered me a drink made up half of white mule and half of coca cola, but he seems to have been simply indulging himself in a naughty gesture.
No fancy woman has been seen in the town since the end of the McKinley administration. There is no gambling. There is no place to dance. The relatively wicked, when they would indulge themselves, go to Robinson's drug store and debate theology July 14 the third day The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seems to be preciously the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan.
That is, locally, upon the process against the infidel Scopes, upon the so-called minds of these fundamentalists of upland Tennessee. On the other hand, Jewish publisher Alfred A. In , following the death of his wife Sara Haardt, Mencken moved back into his childhood home at Hollins Street in Baltimore, where he completed a great deal of his work in a study on the second floor of the house.
This article was originally written by Sarah Amandolare; it was updated September 3, Home 2Day's Biography H. Associated Press. Joseph Pulitzer, Founder of the Pulitzer Prizes.
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