The Smart Set

Articles from The Smart Set

H.L. Mencken on American English (The Smart Set, 1921)

Culture critic H.L. Mencken (1880 – 1956; author of The American Language reviewed American Englishstyle=border:none by Gilbert M. Tucker.

The fact is, of course, that American English is noticeably superior to British English in several important respects, and that not the least of these superiorities lies in the learned department of spelling. Here even the more intelligent Englishmen are against their own rules, and in favor of the American rules, and every year one notices a greater tendency among them to spell wagon with one g instead of two…The English -our ending, the main hallmark of English spelling, dies harder.

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Odd Post-War Thinking from H.L. Mencken (The Smart Set, 1920)

Perhaps in his haste to be the reliable cynic, H.L. Mencken (1880 – 1956) decided to ignore the haphazard nature of industrial warfare and indulged in some Darwinian thinking. There is no doubt that this column must have infuriated the Gold Star Mothers of W.W. I, who were still very much a presence at the time this opinion piece appeared, and it can also be assumed that the veterans of The American Legion were also shocked to read Mencken’s words declaring that:

The American Army came home substantially as it went abroad. Some of the weaklings were left behind, true enough, but surely not all of them. But the French and German Armies probably left them all behind. The Frenchman who got through those bitter four years was certainly a Frenchman far above the average in vigor and intelligence…

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H.L. Mencken on Immigration (The Smart Set, 1921)

This article from THE SMART SET was published at a time when America was marking the three-hundredth anniversary of the Puritan arrival at Cape Cod and written by H.L. Mencken with his characteristic sense of hopelessness, this small piece remarks that (up to that point in time) immigrants to America were all cut from the same Puritan cloth. The Puritan has been a reoccurring figure in America

and will not die out…until the delusion of moral perfection is lost and forgotten.

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