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- <text id=89TT3295>
- <title>
- Dec. 18, 1989: American Notes:Maryland
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
- Dec. 18, 1989 Money Laundering
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- NATION, Page 49
- American Notes
- MARYLAND
- Mencken's Musings
- </hdr><body>
- <p> H.L. Mencken, the iconoclastic journalist who delighted in
- debunking the "booboisie," is being debunked himself. An
- abridged version of his diaries will arrive in bookstores this
- month. In journal entries written between 1930 and 1948, Mencken
- emerges as a hypochondriac with an anti-Semitic streak. In one
- passage he noted that a house on his street had been bought by
- "some Jews ... with various ratty tenants." In a segment that
- the editor omitted, Mencken referred to two Baltimore
- businessmen as "dreadful kikes."
- </p>
- <p> Mencken ordered that the diaries be sealed for 25 years
- after his death, which occurred in 1956, and thereafter be made
- available to students only. But in 1985 the Maryland Attorney
- General ruled the restriction not legally binding. Mencken would
- probably have put down controversy over the diaries to what he
- called "the virulence of the national appetite for bogus
- revelation." But admirers of Mencken's wit may now find it
- harder to laugh with him.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-