Have you ever read something and it gets you digging around a little?  Next thing you know you’ve disappeared down a rabbit hole of information that you knew nothing about that may possibly be of interest to no one else but yourself? That happened to me yesterday. Let me tell you all about it.

Amelia reported on the Wren’s Nest Blog that the Joel Chandler Harris WikiPedia page had been vandalized. Apparently the perp was a bored 12 year old. The first clue was liberal use of the words hump, humping, humpers, etc. The second clue was describing JCH as “A STRIPPER!!!” It has since been repaired to its pre-humped condition.

As I read back through the Joel Chandler Harris entry, I noticed a quote that was critical of JCH that was attributed to H.L. Mencken with the citation “from The Sahara of the Bozart.” My first thought, this being a vandalized page, was that the citation was bogus. I hadn’t heard of the “The Sahara of the Bozart,” so I checked it out. It turns out (and you may already be aware of this) that it’s a title of an essay that is incredibly critical of the American South (and many other groups, countries, land masses, and individuals. “Bozart” is a malapropism of Beaux Arts.

I found the essay via Google Book Search in a collection of Mencken essays called Prejudices: Second Series (published in 1920 by Knopf). Mencken’s prejudices needed multiple volumes to be explored and enumerated thoroughly, apparently. From Menken’s non-humped WikiPedia page, it appears that he was the Christopher Hitchens of his day, an unrepentant contrarian. This may be old news to you, but I was learning something.

Back to the essay. It is certainly a scathing indictment of the South. The main thrust of the essay seems to be that following the Civil War, the elite class of Southern aristocracy was removed leaving behind a cultural wasteland that was being run by a lesser class of people that Mencken actually refers to as “animals” at one point.

There is certainly plenty of scorn in the essay that extends well beyond just Southerners. A quick catalog of groups/regions/countries that may take offense from its contents: Baptist and Methodists, the Welsh, Yankees, New Englanders, Asia Minor, Armenians, Greeks, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Esthonia, the Mid-West, Gobi, Lapland, Nicaragua, Balkans, the China Coast, the Irish, French, Spanish, and Germans. I’m sure that I’m leaving somethone out.

At one point it appears that Joel Chandler Harris’ 12 year-old took over the writing of the essay. I’m not sure how else to explain this statement used in the lambasting of the State of Virginia:

It was in Virginia that they invented the device of searching for contraband whiskey in women’s underwear…

What? No wonder Prohibition was so popular. Menken saves his best though for the people of the State of Georgia:

If one turns to such a commonwealth as Georgia the picture becomes far darker. There the liberated lower order of whites have borrowed the worst commercial bounderism of the Yankee and superimposed it upon a culture that, at bottom, is but little removed from savagery. Georgia is at once home to the cotton-mill sweater and the most noisy and vapid sort of chamber of commerce, of the Methodist parson turned Savonarola and of the lynching bee… There is state with more than half the area of Italy and more population than either Denmark or Norway, and yet in thirty years it has not produced a single idea.

Granted, Georgia was not exactly a model of an enlightened populace at the time.

This is such a strange essay. On the one hand, Mencken appears to promote racial tolerance on some level. Yet he rambles on about “good blood” and “bad blood” like someone in Harry Potter book. He says that the former Southern aristocracy (i.e. slave owners) created the highest level of civilization that this country had ever seen. He even “doubts very much” that the “poor white trash” remaining in the south are actually of Anglo-Saxon blood.

It’s crazy talk I tell ya. At best, the essay just didn’t age very well. I am certainly no Mencken scholar, so I don’t know if this essay is representative of his output. I hope not.