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Warning To Baldwin And Mencken
j To the Editor or The Evening Sun—Sir: I have just read Mr. William Woodward Baldwin's letter advising Salisbury to do its duty. I think Mr. Baldwin and that big fellow, Mr. Mencken, had better go down to Salisbury and pitch a tent and hold revival services. But here's where Mr.
I Baldwin had better take my advice and let that tent be a parachute fastened to a good airplane. For I can see that Williams' mobbing bunch give them the once-over look, and I am afraid Mr. Baldwin would want
j to use the plane. Yours truly for the Eastern Shore. Mrs. M. Richardson.
Cause Of The Lynching
To the Editor or The Evening Sun—Sir: I have just read Mr. Mencken's enlightened tirade on Eastern Shore Kultur. Like all of Mr. Mencken's pen products, it reeks with truth and uncanny insight into human frailties.
It seems to me that Mr. Mencken, in his terrific attack on the more bucolic sector of his own native State, works himself into a frenzy over a statement of mere facts that are apparent to any man not insane without such a literary eruption on H. L.'s part. As far as I can make out, Mr. Mencken alleges but two things, which no intelligent man will deny, viz:
1. The Eastern Shore of Maryland is a barbarous settlement of simian followers of Methodism.
[ 2. It was a mean and cowardly trick to lynch a man.
Again, Mr. Mencken, in his sterling Christian efforts to be just, crosses the border and becomes unjust on the other side. While he states in bristling rhetoric that the Eastern Shore barbarians fell upon the hapless Negro in a cowardly attack at odds of 1,000 to 1, he tells the truth, but he neglects to mention the fact that when the Negro shot his unarmed employer without any kind of warning and without giving him any opportunity to defend himself, he
I was not enacting a heroic role himself.
I As far as my pygmy brain can grasp after repeated attempts to translate Mr. Mencken's bombastic words and phrases, he states that the enlightened Marylanders (meaning Baltimoreans) were expecting something of the sort to emanate from the
'Eastern Shore shortly, mainly because of their lack of urban facilities, and their abundance of mountebanks gyrating in Methodist pulpits. In the interests of veracity, I should like to offer the more plausible explanation that it was the third or fourth crime of violence on the part of Negroes against whites in that community within recent weeks that really actuated the lynching. Thomas Cummings.
j Washington, D. C, Dec. 8.
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