Mencken: The American Iconoclast
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
Abstract
Mencken believed that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were sacred documents that set clear lines of demarcation that no government should trespass. “The two main ideas that run through all of my writing”, he said, “whether it be literary criticism or political polemic, are these: I am strongly in favor of liberty and I hate fraud”. Freedom had always been an issue with Mencken: first, freedom from his father's choice of a career; later, as he developed as a critic, from the Victorian Puritanism that stifled American life; then, from governmental laws that violated civil liberties for white ... More
Keywords: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, Bill of Rights, The American Mercury, Scopes Trial, iconoclasm, Franklin D. Roosevelt, censorship, Alfred Knopf
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2006 | Print ISBN-13: 9780195072389 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2007 | DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195072389.001.0001 |
