This book should come with a warning label. It is surely one of the most bracing books on politics in the history of the English language. There is more truth in these pages than most Americans are willing to face. What Mencken delivers here is probably the most scathing attack on the idea of mass rule that has ever been written.
Mencken is known as the chief heretic of the American civic religion, and this book shows why. Your eyes will pop out at not only his dazzling prose but, and most especially, at the thoughts that he dares put in print, almost as a revolutionary act.
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H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote this translation in the days during and after World War I. Woodrow Wilson's wartime central planning, which led to arrests of businessmen and other dissenters, caused him to wonder what happened to the ideals of the American Revolution. Perhaps the language of the original Declaration was too anachronistic for modern ears? He offered his own translation into American dialect.
