Adams, Charles. For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization. Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1993.
p. 436: (Adams is describing the US Supreme Court’s technique of interpreted inconvenient Constitutional limitations on state power in such a way as to render them “empty shells”): “This empty shell process began with this century, at the same time that many provisions of the Bill of Rights were “boldly thrown overboard,” as the recently appreciated journalist H.L. Mencken observed in the 1920s. “How caused, I don’t know,” said Mencken, but “Holes began to be punched in the Bill of Rights, and new laws of strange and often fantastic shape began to slip through” (Chicago Tribune, January 17, 1926).”
Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression. Vintage, 1983. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1982.
p.73: “He [Huey Pierce Long] was, H.L. Mencken once venemously charged (in a description that echoed the views of many), “simply a backwoods demagogue of the oldest and most familiar model—impudent, blackguardly, and infinitely prehensile.””
p. 173: “He [Fr Charles Edward Coughlin] was, wrote an amused but impressed H.L. Mencken, “the gutsiest and goriest, loudest and lustiest, the deadliest and damdest orator ever heard on this or any other earth …, the champion boob-thumper of all epochs.””
Gordon, David (Editor), 1948-. Secession, State and Liberty. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998.
p. 31: “As H.L. Mencken cynically observed of the Gettysburg Address, it was not the Union forces that were fighting for government of the people, by the people, and for the people (a phrase Lincoln borrowed from Webster), but the people of the southern states.”; p. 46n19: “As H.L. Mencken puts it in his cynical Notes on Democracy, “The common man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), p.148.”
Hummel, Jeffrey Roger. Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996.
p. 125: “As H.L. Mencken observed in 1931 (in a story reprinted in Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, The Impossible H.L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories [New York: Doubleday, 1991], p. 423), Lincoln “has become one of the national dieties, and a realistic examination of him is thus no longer possible.””
Kaveney, Roz. "A Charming Chancer" [review of biographies of Kahlil Gibran, one by R.Waterfield and a second by S. Bushuri and J. Jenkins]. Times Literary Supplement, 1998 Aug 12 (No 4978), p. 36.
“He [Gibran] was a regular contributor to the liberal journal The Seven Arts, whose pages he shared with Bertrand Russell, Robert Frost and H.L. Mencken.”
Rand, Ayn. Journals of Ayn Rand. Edited by David Harriman; Foreword by Leonard Peikoff. NY: Dutton, 1997.
p. 69 [Excerpt from entry for 1934 May 9] “And if, as according to [H.L.] Mencken, the question of “freedom of the will” has to be studied on the basis of psychology, with all its dark complexes—then what are we
p. 182 [Excerpt from entry for 1938 Jun 15, plot outline for The Fountainhead, item XIII] “Spring 1926. Roark gets his first commission from the critic [Austin Heller, whom she refers to as “Mencken” in one cryptic note from this period].”
Note: Readers interested in Rand are directed to Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s review of Journals, “Bowderlizing Ayn Rand”, in Liberty [Port Townsend, WA] 12(1):65-66 (1998-09).
Rothbard, Murray N., 1926-1995. Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor. Auburn, AL: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1991. Reprint, with a new introduction (1991), of a work originally prepared as an essay for the Symposium on Human Differentiation, held in August 1970 at the Institute of Paper Chemistry in Appleton, Wisconsin, and sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies.
p. 68: Long quote (c. 150 words) from the article “Its Inner Nature”, A Mencken Crestomathy (Knopf, 1949), p. 145, which begins: “All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man …”
Szasz, Thomas. A Lexicon of Lunacy: Metaphoric Malady, Moral Responsibility, and Psychiatry. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993.
p. 29: “I would add that, as Mencken emphasized, slang is also “a form of colloquial speech created in a spirit of defiance and aiming at freshness and novelty … [that] embodies a kind of social criticism.””
p. 78: “Mencken catalogued both kinds [euphemisms for acts and for things]with equal enthusiasm.”
p. 81-82: “Mencken revels in the rain forest of terms that sprung up from the soil of American English fertilized with the manure of Prohibition.”
Winchester, Simon. The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998.
p. 219: “H.L. Mencken--no mean lexicographer himself—wrote that he fully expected Oxford to celebrate the culmination of the seventy-year project with “military exercises, boxing matches between the dons, orations in Latin, Greek, English and the Oxford dialect, yelling matches between the different Colleges and a series of medieval drinking bouts.”