Betrayal of the American Right - Ludwig von Mises Institute

10 The Betrayal of the American Right
and Barnes’s student, C. Hartley Grattan, whose delightful series
in the magazine, “When Historians Cut Loose,” acidly demolished
the war propaganda of America’s leading historians. Mencken’s
cultural scorn for the American “booboisie” was embodied in his
famous “Americana” column, which simply reprinted news items
on the idiocies of American life without editorial comment.
The enormous scope of Mencken’s interests, coupled with his
scintillating wit and style (Mencken was labeled by Joseph Wood
Krutch as “the greatest prose stylist of the twentieth century”),
served to obscure for his generation of youthful followers and
admirers the remarkable consistency of his thought. When,
decades after his former prominence, Mencken collected the best
of his old writings in A Mencken Chrestomathy (1948), the book was
reviewed in the New Leader by the eminent literary critic Samuel
Putnam. Putnam reacted in considerable surprise; remembering
Mencken from his youth as merely a glib cynic, Putnam found to
his admiring astonishment that H.L.M. had always been a “Tory
anarchist”—an apt summation for the intellectual leader of the
1920s.
But H.L. Mencken was not the only editor leading the new
upsurge of individualistic opposition during the 1920s. From a
similar though more moderate stance, the Nation of Mencken’s
friend Oswald Garrison Villard continued to serve as an outstanding
voice for peace, revisionism on World War I, and opposition to
the imperialist status quo imposed at Versailles. Villard, at the end
of the war, acknowledged that the war had pushed him far to the
left, not in the sense of adopting socialism, but in being thoroughly
“against the present political order.” Denounced by conservatives
as pacifist, pro-German, and “Bolshevist,” Villard found himself
forced into a political and journalistic alliance with socialists and
progressives who shared his hostility to the existing American and
world order. 1
1 Villard to Hutchins Hapgood, May 19, 1919. Michael Wreszin,
Oswald Garrison Villard (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965),
pp. 75 and 125–30.