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What Wilmington, Del, Thinks Of Mencken's Attack On The Shore
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the professional muckraker to vent his spleen upon those people of his own State with whom he should be upon friendly terms. Because a few have defied the law and outraged justice he condemns an entire community, and in terms which no self-respecting people would submit to without a protest. He slanders a people and a community in language that is insulting and makes statements which he himself must know to be untrue. And so the people of the Eastern Shore are bitter in resentment of all the unkind and untrue and insulting things that this Balti more writer has said about them. A they should be.
In the meantime we of Delaware can at least be sympathetic and say to our friends to the south that the doors of Wilmington are wide open, that many splendid highways lead in this direction and they are as welcome as the flowers of May. Why worry about the things that Mr. Mencken has written about them? They know they are not true, and we of Delaware know they are not true. And if matters should get to the point where they may desire to actually secede from Maryland, we would be mighty glad to have them as a part of us."
The Wilmington Every Evening of Tuesday had this to say editorially:
"Our good friends of the Eastern Shore have been much wrought up the past few days as the result of certain critcisms visited upon them over the lynching of a colored man at Salisbury, following the murder of one of the city's outstanding business men. The result promises to be far reaching, and it is not to be wondered at by those who are familiar with the character of the people who make up that section of the Del-Mar-Va Peninsula.
Lynch law is never justifiable, and we are quite certain that all right thinking citizens of the Eastern Shore will thoroughly agree with us in that statement. But neither is it justifiable to condemn the people of an entire community for the act of a small group—call it a mob if you will—who takes the law into its own hands. And it is this criticism, vindictive and insulting as it has been, that has so aroused the righteous indignation of the people of the Eastern Shore.
Henry L. Mencken, in a Baltimore newspaper, for possibly no reason other than the fact that he is what he is, has summoned all the language of
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