In the early twentieth century, the pronouncements of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche were admired and championed by many prominent American secularists including Clarence Darrow, Walter Lippmann, Jack London, H.L. Mencken, Eugene O’Neill, Margaret Sanger, and Upton Sinclair. Mencken proclaimed that Nietzsche was “the greatest individualist” since Adam. O’Neill and London described him as their “Christ.”
In the recently published, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Idols, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen explains that Nietzsche was chic with Greenwich Village bohemians and the anti-egalitarian crowd because he hated Christianity, democratic government, and the middle class. One reviewer of the Rosenhagen book hailed Nietzsche as the thinker who “helped Americans to acquire a better sense of cultural identity and, as a culture, a higher level of intellectual maturity.”
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