Search Results

Although no longer writing for the Sun, Mencken remained a prominent board member. His relationship with the Newspaper Guild reflected the contradiction in his role as a free speech advocate: he refused to recognize the difference between an employee with no economic power advocating membership, and management officials, like himself, who pressured employees against their right to join unions. Mencken clung to the belief that a man's individual efforts must speak for him.

Mencken was hired by the Baltimore Sun, the newspaper he would be associated with for the rest of his life. As Sunday editor, he pushed for innovations such as new illustrations, printing changes, and exciting articles on medicine, humor, music, and theater. However, Mencken once again began to feel restless. He wrote a book on Nietzsche, the first one published in the United States, and set forth his own iconoclastic views. He continued with his drama criticism, and broke away from Anglophile models by translating Henrick Ibsen's plays into colloquial American English. He thought about marriage, but felt that he did not have the time. He also met Theodore Dreiser.

The 1920s began with the advent of the Eighteenth Amendment, Prohibition, which Mencken viewed as the ultimate violation of the civil liberties that he cherished. His battle against Prohibition was accompanied by his efforts to reinvigorate the Baltimore Sun, to make it free to deal honestly and realistically with politicians and the American scene. Mencken's efforts to embrace these ideals in his newspaper prepare the reader to comprehend his disillusionment with the practice of journalism in the years ahead. For the next eighteen years until 1938, Mencken wrote a weekly “Monday Article”, different from “The Free Lance” diatribes that he wrote years earlier. Without straining for effect, Mencken addressed issues of civil liberty and free speech, and became a leading national voice.

Mencken's penchant for battling with reformers took on a new stand when he launched a public outcry against the censorship of The Genius by Theodore Dresier. Together, Mencken and Dreiser were viewed as the drivers of a major literary revolution. At the same time, Mencken met the sister of one of Dreiser's girlfriends — a young writer named Marion Bloom — and began a passionate affair that would continue well into the 1920s. Despite this, Mencken remained depressed about the world situation and his own professional future, and he found life growing unendurably stagnant. Throughout 1916, he constantly thought of Germany, and headed to Berlin to cover the war as a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun.

This chapter finds in Frederick Douglass’s final autobiography a case study for what it means to narrate the present-past. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass points backward to bondage, bringing the author face to face with his former master. For nineteenth- and twenty-first-century readers alike, the tableau of the ex-slave sharing a sentimental moment with the man who once abused him suggests that the radical abolitionist had become a reactionary. But this chapter advances a different interpretation of the signal episode. By underscoring the elisions, revisions, and omissions that distinguish this moment in Life and Times from contemporaneous news coverage of the event, and by deploying narrative theory to illuminate both accounts, the chapter argues that Douglass’s work enacts the challenge of fighting for black equality amid a political landscape that posed the forgetting of bondage as the condition for national reunion.

Europeans Often Regard America as a country of bigness: big people, big cars, big houses. People we have already touched on; cars will come. American housing standards do fall in the upper half—but still well within— the European scale. Two rooms per inhabitant is the U.S. average. Residents of Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the UK, and Belgium have more (figure 88) The Irish have a higher percentage of their households occupying at least five rooms, the English and Spanish are very close runners-up. For social or public housing, transatlantic discrepancies pale before even more impressive disparities within Europe itself. Approximately a fifth of all accommodation in England and France is public housing, but those are by far the highest figures in Europe. In Italy, it is only 7%. In Spain, the fraction of the public housing stock of all dwellings is even less than in the United States, namely 1%. According to figures from the OECD, social housing scarcely exists at all in Portugal, at least to judge from the sums the government spends on it. Sweden, a country with a somewhat smaller population, spends well over 500 times as much. In any case, the range of state spending on housing in those nations with figures high enough to register as a fraction of GDP varies from 0.1% in Austria and Luxembourg to 14 times that in the UK. It is hard to call a penchant for social housing a defining European characteristic. Moreover, despite the absence of much public housing in the United States, the poorest fifth of tenants in America pay less of their income for housing than their peers in Sweden or Switzerland, and only a bit more than in the UK. America is oft en considered a stingy helper of Third World nations in distress. It is true that American foreign aid, in the form of direct cash grants, is not impressive if measured per capita. Nor is that of Austria or the Mediterranean nations, except France, which are all lower (figure 89).