MENCKEN, SUPERMAN

The third, and most intriguing, [WW1-era] essay--"After Germany's Conquest of the United States"--talked about the benefits to America of being ruled by the hard men of a superior Kultur. Known only because of the exchange of letters between Mencken and the editor of the Atlantic, the article was withdrawn and never published. Interestingly, despite Mencken's extraordinary efforts to document his own life, the manuscript, according to Vincent Fitzpatrick, curator of the Mencken collection, cannot be found. Mencken's reputation, it seems, was saved by wartime self-censorship...

The man who is still selectively celebrated by people like Rodgers, as if he were nothing more or less than an American iconoclast, was one of a number of anti democratic thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of them, like D.H. Lawrence, were proto-fascists; others, like H.G. Wells, were apologists for Stalin. But they all denounced democracy in the name of vitalism, eugenics, and a caste system run by an elite of superior men.

Fred Siegel, "Mencken the Teuton".

Comments

[Roy]

Of course your excerpt fails to mention that this support for Germany was support for the Kaiser's Germany and not Hitler, just as the standard article ignores the moral difference between a victory for Wilhelmine Germany and a victory for the Nazis.
While not a fan of Mencken for anything more than the occasional wit. I find the idea of American support for the Kaiser to be equivalent in distatefulness as the Anglophilic support of the British Empire that is totally the norm in discussions of World War I. A war that only France had any moral high ground in, and a war that by the time of American entry had no moral side at all.

[Clive D]

Thanks. It wasn't deliberate. I've added a little note to make things clearer. I do think there is a difference between taking a specifically anti-democratic stance, as Mencken did, and supporting the White Man's burden, but that's an argument for another day, I guess.