In the 1930s, he had Freud pegged for a quack and predicted that the Soviet Union would run out of gas and collapse. People also still read Mencken because he wrote—in the bluntest possible way—that men are not equal and that it was insane to pretend that they were. He was a eugenicist and he ridiculed democracy. In our era of “sensitivity,” reading Mencken is almost a guilty pleasure.
