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Governor Ritchie's Clipping File on Lynching msa_s1048_1_and_10-0757 Enlarge and print image (48K)  Notes  Transcribe << PREVIOUS NEXT >> |
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Governor Ritchie's Clipping File on Lynching msa_s1048_1_and_10-0757 Enlarge and print image (48K)  Notes  Transcribe << PREVIOUS NEXT >> |
| about the Presidents of the Unit- | ed State, beginning with George Washington, the first President and continuing down the line to Woodrow Wilson, and he paid no compliments to any of them. "We suggest that the Sunpapers republish the article for, no doubt, many persons have forgotten it, especially that portion of the article which referred to William Jennings Bryan, whom he would have taken to the top- of the Washington Monument in Washington, disemboweled and hurled his remains into the Potomac River. Possibly a rather poLHe form of lynching. "We are republishing Mr. Mencken's article of Monday and we living vjuu. The Observer, Baltimore:— "Too much hooey and fol-de-rol has betn published about the summary execution of a murder- | er at Salisbury, Md., on Friday night last. "While columns have been written about the poor unfortunate who was taken from a hospital bed and hanged in front of the court house we note nothing worth while about the business man who was shot down at his desk by the wretch who sneaked up behind him and fired without warning. He has been lost sight of by the editorial writers and the weeping willies. Nobody desires a lynching as a ZSWJ2£EL ^IZt ^ than a score of executions order- opposed to lynching, that we de- Some may is a fact. It is altogether unfair to paint as inhabited lag* th£ ^»^^it^\^J^a3;e^S^t tws, but * I that occurred last week and we !; I deeply resent the implication that 'the people of the Eastern Shore, i, , either by silence or expression,! *he ^^^eopkT There is no give their approval to such law-, £>orf "^ P Jetion of Maryland less method But. tn, also resent |^^ppily most of the" city that form of publicity which day £ d ^^erstand the situa-ttt\JfI^Tl^L ^Ta£and.aition in the rural sections and the ; smaller towns. If society has a that tends to eneite the less re sponsible citizenship to violence j ;^"to -pro7ect Ttself ~ then there and. then after having sow the {ng ^ F complaJnt when thflt are too slow 1 that is not the fault of the aver-! age citizen. "The Salisbury lynching was | encouraged in a way by the fool-I ery over the Worcester County murder case. And in this affair \ too, some of the papers weep . over the accused man but are almost silent over the wiping out of a family by a fiend. Tb* seeds of violence, attempts to I shift the responsibility for the «*& ^S^rtS crop produced." The Crisfield Times:— "Filled with venom as poisonous as that used by the aborigines on the tips 01 tneir arrows, an article, appeared in the Baltimore Hivemng sun ol JDecemo^r 7 th, written by H. L. Mencken, that should redound to the everlasting shame of the paper whicn published it. "Attacking the manhood and the womanhood of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the laity and the men who labor tor the Glory 01 liod alike, mocking the partiotism of the people 01 the r-eninsuia and likening them to the beast oi the jungle, ridiculing the family life ana condemning the standard of our morals ,religion and ethics the outpourings 01 me sewage oi a great city would be as incense in comparison with the noxiousness of the matter printed. "Eastern Shoremen generally, at home and abroad, are incensed, I and justly so, that any newspap-' er, supposedly of character and j standing, would allow a writer to i so endeavor to insult and degrade a whole section of the State of Maryland for an unfortunate happening in one city of that section. "There may be no justification for the people of a community to take the law into their own hands, and mete out what they consider justice, but there is less justification for the Mencken article regarding the occurrence. "It does not take a great deal of courage to condemn the action of a mob either privately or publicly. It takes less courage to endeavor to outrage the sensibilities of thousand of people in such manner that they have no personal redress. "Mencken and Ades—Ades and Mencken, the two name that will live long in the memory of our people. One as the write of the most scurrilous article that we have ever seen in print, the other as the primary cause of unrest and dissatisfaction that reaches from one end of the Peninsula to the other. "There are no words in any language fit to express our opinion of the aritcle and of the paper in which it appeared. The attack on our Judiciary, on all of the fine things of our community life, can |