There is no irony in the fact that H.L. Mencken is a tall figure in
the history of letters, and Robert Rives La Monte is wholly
forgotten. La Monte, who worked at the Baltimore News as well as
being an editor for the International Socialist Review, was a true
believer in the promise of Socialism. Here he writes six letters
trying to convince H.L. Mencken to reject his selfish ways and
become a comrade in the revolution, to usher in a perfect world of
total equality and universal brotherhood. Mencken, long time writer
for the Baltimore Sun, editor of The American Mercury, and prolific
author and essayist, was the absolute worst choice of target for an
evangelist of the common man. There have been few who were as
openly resolved to a robust Nietzschean individualism. And so, in
one of the turn of the last centuries greatest "flame wars," we
have the Bard of Baltimore's six responses to those appeals. The
battle of the "collective good" versus "individual liberty" still
rages in pitched battles. La Monte's voice is rightfully now just
one of many faceless advocates of class-warfare, and Mencken's
personality survives as the greatest advocate of social Darwinism
and thus ultimately Mencken's own views. "(It) shows how
(Mencken's) political thinking had solidified-hardened, really. The
law of the survival of the fittest, he declares, is "immutable,"
thus making socialism an absurdity; human progress is the product
of the will to power, and all social arrangements failing to take
this fact into account are doomed to failure; inequality is
natural, even desirable, both in and of itself and as an
alternative to mob rule; the world exists to be run by "the
first-caste man." -Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L.
Mencken "The argument ofMen versus the Manis one we are still
having today. The content of the argument is the relative
desirability of two approaches to our social life. On the one hand
is proposed a society ofmen: a society in which none is allowed to
rise too high above another, a society that subtracts great
resources from the more able in an effort to raise up the less
able. On the other hand is a society ofthe man: a society in which
individuals are left to do what they can with their inherited
capabilities, in conditions of maximum personal freedom and minimal
state control." -John Derbyshire, from the preface
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