Prejudices: Second Series

Overview

Published in 1920, H. L. Mencken’s Prejudices: Second Series gathers a fresh tranche of his magazine pieces, revised and sharpened, into a sustained assault on American pieties after World War I. It continues the project begun in the First Series: testing the nation’s political, religious, and literary orthodoxies with a corrosive irony that seeks not to reform them so much as to expose their pretenses. The book’s targets range from the uplift zeal of reformers to the complacencies of the press and the cultural anemia Mencken believed endemic to vast stretches of the republic.

Mencken’s Case Against Puritanism

At the heart of the volume is a thesis Mencken hammered throughout the 1910s: that an enduring Puritan impulse, suspicious of pleasure, hostile to art, and credulous toward authority, distorts American life. He links this temper to recurring waves of moral legislation and censorship, culminating in Prohibition. To him, the dry crusade is less a triumph of virtue than a panic of the “booboisie, ” a class of well-meaning but culturally obtuse citizens easily mobilized by preachers, politicians, and uplift clubs. The result, he argues, is a public order that flatters the majority’s fears while penalizing individual eccentricity and aesthetic experiment.

Democracy, Reform, and the Press

Mencken’s skepticism extends to democratic politics and the institutions meant to sustain it. He treats elections as carnivals of flummery where candidates retail platitudes and voters purchase illusions. Reformers fare no better: professional moralists, he says, convert private irritations into public law, and the courts too often oblige under the pressure of wartime patriotism and postwar jitters. The press, quick to sanctify crusades and slow to examine them, becomes a vast megaphone for cant. His proposed counterweight is not a new program but an older liberalism built on individual liberty, voluntary choice, and a robust tolerance for minority tastes.

Culture and the “Sahara of the Bozart”

Among the book’s most notorious items is “The Sahara of the Bozart, ” an indictment of the American South’s cultural barrenness after the Civil War. Mencken portrays a landscape rich in oratory and suspicion but meager in serious arts, blaming poverty, provincial schooling, and fundamentalist religion. He admits exceptions, isolated eccentrics who keep a tenuous flame, but insists the prevailing climate stifles talent or drives it north. The essay’s swaggering hyperbole sparked immediate outrage and enduring debate, a case study in Mencken’s method: exaggeration as a probe of civic nerves.

Letters, Taste, and the Critic

The Second Series also presses his campaign against the genteel tradition in letters. Mencken urges American writers to shed moral uplift and write with muscular candor about actual lives, not Victorian parlor dreams. He champions aesthetic autonomy, arguing that art requires freedom from pedagogues, churchmen, and censors; the critic’s task, in his view, is to clear the ground of philistinism and name excellence without deference to patriotic or didactic demands. European models and a handful of native iconoclasts supply his touchstones; mediocrity, however earnest, does not.

Style, Limits, and Legacy

The volume’s energy lies in its style: a bristling mix of aphorism, invective, and comic derision that turns argument into theater. Mencken’s provocations can lapse into overstatement and his disdain for mass taste often reads as patrician; yet the exaggeration is calculated, a rhetorical lever to pry open settled opinions. Read together, the essays capture a moment when war, prohibition, and cultural policing converged, and a voice determined to defend private liberty and artistic insolence against the consolations of herd virtue. The Second Series thus solidifies Mencken’s persona as the republic’s resident heretic and fixes his “prejudices” as a permanent goad to American self-satisfaction.