{"id":42360,"date":"2019-11-18T01:00:29","date_gmt":"2019-11-18T06:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=42360"},"modified":"2019-11-17T10:52:31","modified_gmt":"2019-11-17T15:52:31","slug":"qotd-h-l-mencken-on-moral-crusades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/11\/18\/qotd-h-l-mencken-on-moral-crusades\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: H.L. Mencken on &#8220;moral crusades&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><div id=\"attachment_48842\" style=\"width: 425px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/H.L.-Mencken-1928.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-48842\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/H.L.-Mencken-1928-415x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"415\" height=\"600\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-48842\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/H.L.-Mencken-1928-415x600.jpg 415w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/H.L.-Mencken-1928-104x150.jpg 104w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/H.L.-Mencken-1928-443x640.jpg 443w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/H.L.-Mencken-1928.jpg 709w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 415px) 100vw, 415px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-48842\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">H.L. Mencken in 1928.<br \/>Photo by Ben Pinchot for <em>Theatre Magazine<\/em>, August 1928.<\/p><\/div><br \/>\nThe loud, preposterous moral crusades that so endlessly rock the republic \u2013 against the rum demon, against Sunday baseball, against Sunday moving-pictures, against dancing, against fornication, against the cigarette, against all things sinful and charming \u2013 these astounding Methodist jehads offer fat clinical material to the student of mobocracy. In the long run, nearly all of them must succeed, for the mob is eternally virtuous, and the only thing necessary to get it in favor of some new and super-oppressive law is to convince it that that law will be distasteful to the minority that it envies and hates.<\/p>\n<p>H.L. Mencken, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/18948\/18948-h\/18948-h.htm#Page_14\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Moral Indignation&#8221;, <em>Damn! A book of calumny<\/em><\/a>, 1918.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The loud, preposterous moral crusades that so endlessly rock the republic \u2013 against the rum demon, against Sunday baseball, against Sunday moving-pictures, against dancing, against fornication, against the cigarette, against all things sinful and charming \u2013 these astounding Methodist jehads offer fat clinical material to the student of mobocracy. In the long run, nearly all [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,41,13],"tags":[262,591,931,1020,1310],"class_list":["post-42360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-culture","tag-hlmencken","tag-moralpanic","tag-progressives","tag-puritanism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-b1e","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42360"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52807,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42360\/revisions\/52807"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}