conveyed the same impression, on the whole; even more than the Stearns collection, "These United States" revealed liberals' deep revulsion from American politics and popular culture.

In launching the series, the editors of the Nation expressed the hope that "variety and experiment" in the United States would prevail over the forces making for "centralization and regimentation." The picture of America that emerged from most of the articles, however, looked more like the one made familiar by Mencken and Stearns. Mencken himself contributed the piece on Maryland: "No light, no color, no sound!" Several articles were written by authors well known for savage satires of provincial life: Sinclair Lewis on Minnesota ("Scandinavians Americanize only too quickly"); Sherwood Anderson on Ohio ("Have you a city that smells worse than Akron, that is a worse junk-heap of ugliness than Youngstown, that is more smugly self-satisfied than Cleveland?"); and Theodore Dreiser on Indiana ("dogmatic religion," "political somnolence," "pharisaical restfulness in its assumed enlightenment"). At least two articles ("Michigan: The Fordizing of a Pleasant Peninsula" and "West Virginia: A Mine-Field Melodrama") were written by protégés of Mencken on the Baltimore Sun; another ("Arkansas: A Native Proletariat") referred to him repeatedly; and several others, including Ludwig Lewisohn's scatching piece on South Carolina ("appalling and intolerant ignorance and meanness of spirit"), were done in the Mencken manner. Evidently the editors of the Nation saw no contradiction between a celebration of regional diversity and a satire of local customs bound to leave the impression that the United States was populated largely by rednecks, fundamentalists, and militant adherents of the Ku Klux Klan. They conceived of the series as a "contribution to the new literature of national self-analysis"; but they did not distinguish between self-analysis founded on a writer's identification with his community and a social criticism that reflected an impregnable sense of superiority to the surrounding culture.

The South in particular—condemned as much for the backwardness of its provincial culture as for its deplorable race relations—elicited this second type of criticism. In Alabama, a state "saturated with provincialism," the ideas of the arch-reactionary G. K. Chesterton "would be considered advanced," according to Clement Wood. The state's "mental and spiritual sterility" had been analyzed "with devastating impertinence" in Mencken's well-known diatribe against the South, "The Sahara of the

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