Second Mencken Chrestomathy Read Online Free

tailing on certain passages extracted from books or longer articles, and silently made a few cuts of my own in order to prune redundancies and now-obscure topical references. All ellipsis points are Mencken’s and, as in the original
Chrestomathy
, are
not
intended to indicate cuts (except in “A New Constitution for Maryland” and “Nietzsche on Christianity”). All footnotes are Mencken’s except for the one in “Robert Louis Stevenson,” which is mine.
    Needless to say, this book is a speculative reconstruction of the
Second Chrestomathy
Mencken would have prepared for publication had he not fallen ill in 1948. He would certainly have revised the text further, and his final choice of material, not to mention his arrangement of it, would just as certainly have differed from mine in many ways. But it is not misleading to say, as I have said on the title page, that
A Second Mencken Chrestomathy
was “selected, revised and annotated by the author,” and I hope Mencken would have viewed my modest editorial contributions as a plausible substitute for the finishing touches he was unable to apply.
    A LL SERIOUS students of the life and work of H. L. Mencken sooner or later make their way to the Mencken Room of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, where they are treated not as hostile intruders but as honored guests. It has been my pleasure to work with Averil Kadis, Neil Jordahl and their colleagues at the Pratt, without whom this volume would never have seen print. I am especially grateful to Vincent Fitzpatrick, assistant curator of the Mencken Collection and a scholar of limitless unselfishness. He probably knows more about the Mencken Room than anybody else in the world, and his aid and counsel were invaluable to me.This is Mencken’s book, but if it were mine, it would be dedicated to Vince.
    I also want to thank my wife, Elizabeth, who took time from her own work to read, comment on and improve mine; Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, my ever-vigilant agents; William F. Buckley, Jr., for his prompt and characteristic assistance; and Ashbel Green of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., who had the wit to realize that his old boss missed a bet when he turned down Betty Adler’s proposal of thirty years ago.
    T ERRY T EACHOUT
    New York City
    May 9, 1994
    * A longer discussion of Mencken’s revisions can be found in Charles Fecher’s
Mencken: A Study of His Thought
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), pp. 320–48.
    † A few passages from
A Second Mencken Chrestomathy
were subsequently included in the posthumous collection
Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks
. Where the versions vary, I have followed the text of
Minority Report
, which Mencken edited in the ’40s and revised for publication prior to his death in 1956.

I. AMERICANA

The Commonwealth of Morons
    From O N B EING AN A MERICAN ,
P REJUDICES : T HIRD S ERIES , 1922, pp. 12–28, 59
    I N THE United States the business of getting a living is enormously easier than it is in any other Christian land—so easy, in fact, that a forehanded man who fails at it must almost make deliberate efforts to that end. Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head. And here, more than anywhere else that I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries, and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and