Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 –
January 29, 1956), better known as H. L. Mencken, was a
twentieth-century journalist, satirist, social critic, cynic, and
freethinker, known as the "Sage of Baltimore".
He is often regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the early 20th century.
Life
Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of August Mencken, a cigar factory owner of German extraction. Having moved into the new family home at 1524 Hollins Street (in the
Union Square neighborhood) when he was three years old, he lived in the house
for the rest of his life, apart from five years of married life. He became a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald in 1899 and moved to The
Baltimore Sun in 1906. At this time, he had also begun writing editorial columns that demonstrated the author he would
soon become. On the side, he wrote short stories, a novel,
and even poetry (which he later reviled). In 1908, he became a literary critic for the magazine The Smart Set. Together with George Jean Nathan, Mencken
founded and edited The American Mercury, published by Alfred A. Knopf, in January 1924. It soon had a national circulation and became highly influential on
college campuses across America.
Mencken is perhaps best remembered today for The American Language, a
multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States, and his satirical reporting on the prosecution,
judge, jury, and venue of the Scopes trial, which he is credited for naming the "Monkey"
trial.
Among Mencken's influences were Rudyard Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, and especially Mark Twain.
In his capacity as editor and "man of ideas" Mencken became close friends with the leading literary figures of his time,
including Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, and Alfred Knopf, as well as a mentor to several young
reporters, including Alistair Cooke. He also championed artists whose works he considered
worthy. For example, he asserted that books such as Caught Short! A Saga of Wailing Wall Street (1929), “by”
Eddie Cantor (ghost written by David Freedman) did
more to pull America out of The Depression than all government
measures combined. He also mentored John Fante.
As a nationally syndicated columnist and author of numerous books he notably attacked fundamentalist Christianity and the "Booboisie," his word for the ignorant middle classes.
In 1926, he was arrested for selling an issue of The American Mercury banned in
Boston.[1] Mencken heaped scorn not only upon some
public officials but the contemporary state of American democracy itself: in 1931, the Arkansas
legislature passed a motion to pray for Mencken's soul after he had called the state the "apex of moronia."
Mencken sometimes took positions in his essays more for shock value than for deep-seated conviction, such as his essay arguing
that the Anglo-Saxon race was demonstrably the most cowardly
in human history, published at a time when much of his readership considered Anglo-Saxons the noble pinnacle of civilization.
Mencken married Sara Haardt, an Alabama writer and professor 18 years his junior, in 1930.
Haardt was a professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore who wrote short
stories and had led efforts in Alabama to ratify the 19th Amendment[2]. The two met in 1923 after Mencken delivered a lecture at the college. Mencken promoted her short
stories, and a seven-year courtship ensued[3]. The marriage
made national headlines, and many were surprised that Mencken, who once called marriage "the end of hope," had gone to the altar.
"The Holy Spirit informed and inspired me," Mencken said. "Like all other infidels, I am superstitious and always follow hunches:
this one seemed to be a superb one." [4] Haardt was in poor
health throughout their marriage, and died in 1935 of meningitis. Mencken later published
Southern Album, a posthumous collection of her short stories.
Mencken suffered a cerebral thrombosis in 1948, from which he never fully recovered. The
damage to his brain left him aware and fully conscious but unable to read or write. In his later years he enjoyed listening to
classical music and talking with friends, but he sometimes referred to himself in the
past tense as if already dead.
Mencken was, in fact, preoccupied with how he would be perceived after his death, and he spent this period of time organizing
his papers, letters, newspaper clippings and columns. His personal materials were released in 1971, 1981, and 1991 (starting 15
years after his death), and were so thorough they even included grade-school report cards. Hundreds of thousands of letters were
included - the only omissions were strictly personal letters received from women.
He died in 1956 at the age of seventy-five, and was interred in the Loudon Park
Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland. His epitaph reads:
- If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner, and wink your
eye at some homely girl.
Mencken suggested this epitaph in The Smart Set. After his death, it was inscribed on a plaque in the lobby of The
Baltimore Sun.
Mencken's papers as well as much of his library, which includes many books inscribed by major authors, are in the collections
of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, in Baltimore. Some of the items are displayed
in a special room in the 2003 wing of the library, the Mencken Room.
H. L. Mencken is honored as a Saint in the Church of the SubGenius. His sacred day is September 5th.
Style
Perhaps Mencken's most important contribution to American letters is his satirical style. Mencken, influenced heavily by
Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift, believed the lampoon
was more powerful than the lament; his hilariously overwrought indictments of nearly every subject (and more than a couple that
were unmentionable at the time) are certainly worth reading as examples of fine craftsmanship.
The Mencken style influenced many writers; American author Richard Wright
described the power of Mencken's technique (his exposure to Mencken would inspire him to become a writer himself). In his
autobiographical Black Boy, Wright recalls his reaction to A Book of Prefaces
and one of the volumes of the Prejudices series:
- I was jarred and shocked by the clear, clean, sweeping sentences ... Why did he write like that? I pictured the man as a
raging demon, slashing with his pen ... denouncing everything American ... laughing ... mocking God, authority ... This man was
fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club ... I read on and what amazed
me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it. (Quoted from Scruggs, pg. 1)
Mencken was at the top of his game in the 1920s, when a backlash against WWI-era
superpatriotism and government expansion (exemplified in the Palmer Raids) produced many
overtly anti-American protests by literati, among whom Mencken was arguably the most pugnacious. The "anti-American" label is an
epithet today (and to a lesser degree in Mencken's time); the term is not used here to defame HLM. He would have delighted in
being called "anti-American"; his contrarian spirit and envy of more cultured states (Germany
especially) compelled him to mount unapologetically scathing attacks on nearly all aspects of American culture.
In his classic essay "On Being an American" (published in his Prejudices: Third Series), Mencken fires a salvo at
American myths. The following choice quote displays his amusing take on why the United States is the "Land of Opportunity", and
segues into a laundry-list of national pathologies as he sees them:
- Here the business of getting a living ... is enormously easier than it is in any other Christian land—so easy, in fact, that
an educated and forehanded man who fails at it must actually make deliberate efforts to that end. Here the general average of
intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade,
does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a
wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy. And here, more than anywhere else I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human
existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial
brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of
miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so
perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an
almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to
sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent
touring the Paris peep-shows.
Whether the reader agrees with Mencken or finds him infuriatingly coarse and incorrect, all can observe his technique with
profit; it is rare in contemporary discourse. The criticisms he poses are nearly the same as those of famous literary expatriates
including Richard Wright, Ernest
Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; the injustices (or at least
incongruities) are the same ones fought by period Muckraker journalists such as
Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. However,
instead of decrying the "daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly" and calling for reform or improvement,
Mencken says he is "entertained" by them. On its face, this approach displays a crass indifference and total lack of compassion;
Mencken admitted as much, as it was part of his personal philosophy: a kind of fierce libertarianism inspired by a
Nietzschean contempt for the "improvers of mankind", a social Darwinist outlook derived from Herbert Spencer and
William Graham Sumner, and a "Tory" elitism.
The power of satire comes from the transformation of enemies and villains into a source of entertainment; they are reduced
from powerful people to be contended with into farcical creatures deserving of mockery. Black journalist and Mencken contemporary
James Weldon Johnson celebrated this technique as a way of fighting racism without
stooping to the level of Jim Crow enforcers and the Ku Klux
Klan:
- Mr. Mencken's favorite method of showing people the truth is to attack falsehood with ridicule. He shatters the walls of
foolish pride and prejudice and hypocrisy merely by laughing at them; and he is more effective against them than most writers who
hurl heavily loaded shells of protest and imprecation.
- What could be more disconcerting and overwhelming to a man posing as everybody's superior than to find that everybody was
laughing at his pretensions? Protest would only swell up his self-importance. (quoted from Scruggs, pg. 57)
Mencken, in "On Being an American" called the United States "... incomparably the best show on Earth..."; he clearly took joy
in covering religious controversies, political conventions, and unearthing new "quackeries" (among his favorite targets are the
Baptist and Methodist churches, Christian Science, Chiropractics, and most of all,
Puritanism, which he defined as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy").
Although he attacked every President of the United States who served
during the years of his career as a writer and critic, from Taft to Truman, Mencken reserved a special ire for his attacks on
Woodrow Wilson, whose administration he saw as epitomizing the moralistic, Puritanical
impulses of American life. Mencken's snipes at Wilson resulted in Mencken being singled out by the Bureau of Investigation (the predecessor of the FBI) and other law enforcement agencies
as a potential subversive during Wilson's administration.
It is no coincidence he regarded Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn to be the finest work of American literature; much of that book
details episodes of gullible and ignorant people being swindled by Confidence Men like
the (deliberately) pathetic "Duke" and "Dauphin" roustabouts with whom Huck and Jim travel down the Mississippi River. These scam-artists swindle country "boobs" (as Mencken referred to them); by posing
as enlightened speakers on temperance (to obtain the funds to get roaring drunk),
pious "saved" men seeking funds for far off evangelistic missions (to pirates on the high seas, no less), and learned doctors of
phrenology (who can barely spell). The book can be read as a story of America's hilarious
dark side, a place where democracy, as defined by Mencken, is "... the worship of Jackals by Jackasses."
One of the disadvantages of slashing satire is that it does only that: slash. Alfred
Kazin called Mencken's criticisms impotent since "Every Babbitt read him
gleefully and pronounced his neighbor a Babbitt" -- they permitted a circular firing
squad of self-righteous viciousness. ("Babbitt" is a now-rare epithet derived from the
Sinclair Lewis book of the same name; it can be loosely defined as an uncultured,
"square", typically middle-aged and middle-class businessman characterized by timidity and ignorance of their philistinism. It is a very similar concept to the more commonly used German terms Spiesser and
Spiessbürger.) Critics must walk a thin line between declaring "The Emperor has no clothes" (a fine service to all), and
going too far by furiously tearing the clothes off of undeserving bystanders. Mencken tended to go too far as matter-of-course;
consequently he was the first to say what needed to be said in his criticisms of lynching,
World War I-era civil liberties abuses, and especially the dismally moral and philistine
American arts. On the other hand, this extremism left him with a body of work filled with unsubtle reviews of the subtle and
scores of openly vicious statements about all ethnicities.
This viciousness was summed up in the play Inherit the Wind, a fictionalized
version of the Scopes Monkey Trial. As the story ends, the protagonist tells Hornbeck (the
character representing Mencken):
-
- You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.
In a 26 July 1920 article in the Baltimore Evening Sun,
Mencken wrote about the difficulties of good men reaching national office when such campaigns must necessarily be conducted
remotely:
- The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his
way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be
waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on
the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his
mind is a virtual vacuum.
- The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more
closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land
will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
Mencken's paper published his "secret diary" in 1989, kept sealed for 25 years after
his death in 1956, on his instructions. According to an item in the South Bay (California) Daily
Breeze [1] on December 5, 1989, titled "Mencken's Secret Diary Shows Racist Leanings,"
Mencken's views shocked even the "sympathetic scholar who edited it," Charles A. Fecher of Baltimore. There was a club in
Baltimore called the Maryland Club which had one Jewish member, and that member died. Mencken said
"There is no other Jew in Baltimore who seems suitable," according to the
article. And the diary quoted him as saying of blacks, in 1943, "...it is impossible to talk anything resembling discretion or
judgment to a colored woman..." The Diary of H. L. Mencken was published by Alfred A. Knopf.
Elitism
Instead of arguing that one race or group was superior to another, Mencken believed that every community — whether the
community of train porters, African-Americans, newspapermen, or artists — produced a few people of clear superiority. He
considered groupings on a par with hierarchies, which led to a kind of natural elitism and natural aristocracy. "Superior" individuals, in Mencken's view, were those wrongly oppressed and disdained by their
own communities, but nevertheless distinguished by their will and personal achievement — not by race or birth. Of course, based
on his heritage, achievement, and work ethic, Mencken considered himself a member of this group.
Mencken's The Negro as Author began as a straightforward critique of a fictional work
of a black author writing with racial themes as a focus:
The Shadow, by Mary White Ovington, is a bad novel, but it is interesting as a
first attempt by a colored writer to plunge into fiction in the grand manner.
In fact Mary White Ovington was not "colored," as Mencken conveniently pretends not to know. He instead uses this omission as
a means to single out her work as an example of sympathetic, liberal-esque anti-racist activism (among educated whites) which in
the end only turned out bad writing that undercut the public image of genuine emerging black authors. Within this humorous
context, Mencken then commented positively on the future of black writing:
The thing we need is a realistic picture of this inner life of the negro by one who sees the race from within--a self portrait
as vivid and accurate as Dostoyevsky's portrait of the Russian or Thackeray's of the Englishman. The action should be kept within
the normal range of negro experience. it should extend over a long enough range of years to show some development in character
and circumstance. It should be presented against a background made vivid by innumerable small details.
Mencken, in his legendary salvo against Southern American culture, "The Sahara of the Bozart" ("Bozart" being a mock
misspelling of "Beaux-Arts"), argued that the whole Confederate region fell into cultureless savagery and backwardness after the
Civil War — with the exception of the African-American community. In what was an audacious (and seriously intended) argument,
Mencken claimed Southern blacks were actually the heirs and descendants of the talented aristocrats — by way of African-American
mistresses of Caucasian men. Further Mencken opined that this community was the only site of cultural vitality or activity
whatsoever, in spite of being hindered by the barbaric oppression of a culture that condoned and enforced Jim Crow laws and still tacitly sanctioned lynching.
The most authoritative work on this subject is Charles Scruggs' book, The Sage in Harlem — a survey of Mencken's
influence on and support of African-American intellectuals. Mencken, as the editor and main creative force behind
The American Mercury magazine, was responsible for publishing more black authors
than any other publication of its stature — certainly more than any other white dominated publication. The articles by
African-Americans ranged from a Pullman Porter's account of life in that occupation to
sophisticated articles by important black thinkers.
Democracy
Mencken's views on democracy were well-known by his familiar readers. Rather than simply
dismissing democracy as a popular fallacy (like Nietzsche, for example) or treating it with open contempt, Mencken's response to it was a publicized
sense of amusement.
His feelings on this subject (like his casual feelings on many other such subjects) are sprinkled throughout his writings over
the years, very occasionally taking center-stage with the full force of Mencken's prose:
[D]emocracy gives [the beatification of mediocrity] a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man,
functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world - that he is genuinely running things. Out of his
maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes
archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too,
a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters - which is what makes United States
Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty
triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.
This sentiment[2] is, of course,
fairly consistent with Mencken's distaste for common notions and the philosophical outlook he unabashedly set down throughout his
life as a writer (drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer, among others).
Also, much of Mencken's enthusiasm for Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany was based
upon that nation's inward autocracy, despite a nominally representative system.
Perceived racial issues
Most commentators regard his views as libertarian - yet some of Mencken's writing
displays elitism, and contemporaneously fashionable Social
Darwinist thinking. In addition to these allegations, Mencken has been referred to as anti-Semitic and misogynistic. In a letter to Upton Sinclair published in the American Mercury, Mencken
described Hitler as "hardly more than a common Ku
Kluxer"[5] (which, given his disgust with the Ku
Klux Klan, is a rather nasty insult). Another allegation levelled against him was that he was frequently obsessed with the
importance of social status or class. For example,
Mencken broke off a relationship of many years with his lover, Marion Bloom, when they were
arranging to be married. Critics saw this as being due to Bloom being insufficiently wealthy, upper-class, and sophisticated for
him. Mencken, however, claimed he ended the relationship because she converted to Christian
Science.
While Mencken's essays are sprinkled liberally with racial epithets ("blackamoor," "niggero," "coon," "prehensile kikes,")
Mencken considered the African-American intellectual George Schuyler to be a life-long
friend — rare in any case, considering Mencken's infamous capacity for personal criticism. On the other hand, while Mencken was
fair to individuals, he was deeply negative in regard to social groups and other groupings of people, and ethnic groups were no exception. Writing an introduction to The
Antichrist by Nietzsche, Mencken displays sentiments which have been
characterized as "indisputably anti-semitic"[6]:
On the Continent, the day is saved by the fact that the plutocracy tends to become more and more Jewish. Here the intellectual
cynicism of the Jew almost counterbalances his social unpleasantness. If he is destined to lead the plutocracy of the world out of Little Bethel he will fail, of course, to turn it into an aristocracy--i.
e., a caste of gentlemen--, but he will at least make it clever, and hence worthy of consideration. The case against the Jews
is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world. But whenever you find a
Davidsbündlerschaft making practise against the Philistines, there you will find a Jew laying on. Maybe it was this fact
that caused Nietzsche to speak up for the children of Israel quite as often as he spoke against them. He was not blind to their
faults, but when he set them beside Christians he could not deny their general superiority. Perhaps in America and England, as on
the Continent, the increasing Jewishness of the plutocracy, while cutting it off from all chance of ever developing into an
aristocracy, will yet lift it to such a dignity that it will at least deserve a certain grudging respect.[7]
H.L. Mencken House
Mencken's home at 1524 Hollins Street in Baltimore's Union Square
neighborhood was bequeathed to the University of Maryland, Baltimore
on the death of Mencken's younger brother August in 1967. The City of Baltimore acquired the
property in 1983 and the "H. L. Mencken House" became part of the City Life Museums. The house has
been closed to general admission since 1997, but is opened for special events and group visits by
arrangement.
The H. L. Mencken Room & Collection
The H. L. Mencken Room and Collection is located at the Central branch of the Enoch
Pratt Free Library on Cathedral Street in Baltimore.
Shortly after World War II, Mencken expressed his intention of bequeathing his books and papers to the Pratt Library. At the
time of his death in 1956, most of the present large collection had been received by the Library and a special room on the third
floor was being prepared to house the collection suitably. The Mencken Room was dedicated on April
17, 1956.
The collection contains Mencken's typescripts, his newspaper and magazine contributions, his published books, family documents
and memorabilia, personal clipping books, a large collection of presentation volumes, a file of correspondence with prominent
Marylanders, and the research material used in preparing The American
Language.
There are additional collections of Mencken memorabilia at Dartmouth College,
Harvard University, Princeton
University, and Yale University. The Sara Haardt Mencken collection is held at
Goucher College. The New York Public
Library has collections of Mencken's vast literary correspondence.
Works
Trivia
- H.L. Mencken is credited with coining the word 'ecdysiast,' which means 'a person who stripteases.' He did so in response to
a request from a stripteaser who requested a "more dignified" way to refer to her profession[8].
See also
Further reading
- Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Mencken: The American Iconoclast. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press (2005) ISBN
0-19-507238-3
- Terry Teachout, The Skeptic : A Life of H. L. Mencken. New York: Harper Collins Publishers (2002) ISBN
0-06-050528-1
- Fred Hobson, Mencken, A Life. New York: Random House (1994) ISBN 0-8018-5238-2 Also published as paperback. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press (1995)
References
External links
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