In the postwar climate of discouragement and cynicism, all these issues quickly dropped out of public discussion. Many intellectuals, in fact, began to question the very possibility of public discussion. H. L. Mencken's ridicule of the "booboisie" set the tone of the twenties. "Mr. Mencken has arrived," wrote John Gunther in 1921. "... His name, already the war cry of the younger generation, is beginning to penetrate all quarters, even the most holy and reverend. One finds him everywhere." He and Sinclair Lewis had become the "most read and considered interpreters of American life," according to Robert Morss Lovett. Mencken had "assumed such importance as an influence on American thought," Edmund Wilson declared, that "optimism, Puritanism, and democratic ineptitude" had become "stock reproaches among the intelligentsia." F. Scott Fitzgerald said that he valued Mencken's opinion more highly than that of anyone else in America. In 1926, Walter Lippmann described him as the "most powerful influence on this whole generation of Americans." Mencken returned the compliment in a laudatory review of Lippmann's Phantom Public: having "started out in life with high hopes for democracy," Lippmann had "come to the conclusion that the masses are ignorant and unteachable." This was high praise from the editor of Smart Set and the American Mercury. Lippmann's disillusionment with popular government identified him as a member of the "civilized minority," as Mencken liked to call it.

Sometimes mistaken by liberals as one of themselves, Mencken preferred to label himself a "libertarian." Liberty, he insisted, was the "first thing and the last thing." Liberals wanted to reform people, to free them "against their will," often "to their obvious damage, as in the case of the majority of Negroes and women." Mencken wanted only to leave them alone, not just because he believed in free speech but because it was a mistake, in his opinion, to interfere with the laws of natural selection. He took his social views straight from William Graham Sumner, the nineteenth-century social Darwinist. Liberals now repudiated social Darwinism, but many of them had come to share Mencken's belief that the "finest fruits of human progress, like all the nobler virtues of man, are the exclusive possession of small minorities." The democratization of virtue now struck them as a contradiction in terms.

A disillusioned educator, writing anonymously in the New Republic, recalled the heyday of "uplift and enlightenment," when people believed in education as a "general religion." As a young man, he was inspired by

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