by H.L. Mencken (1926)

AMERICANISM, a term first used by John Witherspoon, president of Princeton University, in 1781, designates (a) any word or combination of words which taken into the English language in the United States, has not gained acceptance in England, or, if accepted, has retained its sense of foreignness; and (b) any word or combination of words which, becoming archaic in England, has continued in good usage in the United States. The first class is the larger and has the longer history. The earliest settlers in Virginia and New England, confronted by plants and animals that were unfamiliar to them, either borrowed the Indian names or invented names of their own.

Examples are afforded by raccoon (1608), chinkapin (1608), opossum (1610) and squash (1642) among Indian words and by bull-frog, canvas-back, cat-bird and live-oak among inventions. The former tended to take anglicised forms. Thus the Indian isquontersquash (at least, that is how the early chroniclers recorded it) became squantersquash and was then reduced to squash, and otchock became woodchuck. Many other words came in as the pioneers gained familiarity with the Indian life. Such words as hominy, moccasin, pone, tapioca and succotash remain everyday Americanisms.

The archaisms, of course, showed themselves more slowly. They had to go out of use in England before their survival in America was noticeable. But by the beginning of the 18th century there was already a considerable body of them, and all through that century they increased. The English language in Great Britain, chiefly under the influence of pedantry in the age of Anne, was changing rapidly, but in America it was holding to its old forms. There was very little fresh emigration to the colonies, and their own people seldom visited England. Thus by the end of the century “I guess” was already an Americanism, though it had been in almost universal use in England in Shakespeare’s day. So, too, with many other verbs: to wilt, to whittle, to fellowship and to approbate. And with not a few adjectives: burly, catty-cornered, likely and clever (in the sense of amiable). And with multitudes of nouns: cesspool, greenhorn, cordwood, jeans, flap-jack, bay-window, swingle-tree, muss (in the sense of a row), stock (for cattle) and fall (for autumn).

Meanwhile, American English had begun to borrow words, chiefly nouns, from the non-English settlers, and to develop many new words of its own. To the former class the Dutch contributed cruller, cold-slaw, cockey, scow, boss, smearcase and Santa Claus, and the French contributed gopher, prairie, chowder, carry-all and bureau (a chest of drawers). Other contributions came from the Germans of Pennsylvania, the Spaniards of the southwest, and negro slaves. The native coinages were large in number, and full of boldness and novelty. To this period belong, for example, backwoods, hoe-cake, pop-corn, land-slide, shell-road, half-breed, hired-girl, spelling-bee, moss-back, crazy-quilt, stamping-ground and cat-boat. These words were all made of the common materials of English, but there was something in them that was redolent of a pioneer people and a new world. In their coinage the elegances were disdained; the thing aimed at was simply vividness. At the same time, verbs were made out of nouns, nouns out of verbs and adjectives out of both.

In 1789 Benjamin Franklin, who had lived in England, denounced to advocate, to progress and to oppose as barbarisms, but all of them are good American to-day, and even good English. Noah Webster, the lexicographer, gave his imprimatur to to appreciate (in value); to eventuate was popularised by Gouverneur Morris; and no less a hero than Washington is said to have launched to derange. Many inventions of that daring era have succumbed to pedagogical criticism, e.g., to happify, to compromit and to homologise. But others equally harsh have gradually gained acceptance, e.g., to placate and to deputise. And with them have come in a vast number of characteristic American nouns, e.g., breadstuffs, mileage, balance (in the sense of remainder) and elevator (a place for storing grain).

Divergent meanings of words

It was during the same period that a number of important words, in daily use, began to show different meanings in England and America. Some familiar examples are store, rock, lumber and corn. What Englishmen call a shop was called a store by Americans as early as 1770, and long before that time corn, in American, had come to signify, not grains in general, but only maize. The use of rock to designate any stone, however small, goes back still further, and so does the use of lumber for timber. Many of these differences were produced by changes in English usage. Thus cracker, in England, once meant precisely what it now means in the United States. When the English abandoned it for biscuit the Americans stuck to cracker, and used biscuit to designate something else. How shoe came to be substituted in America for the English boot has yet to be determined. There is indeed much that remains obscure in the early history of such Americanisms. Until very lately, American philologians kept aloof from the subject, which they apparently regarded as low. Until George P. Krapp, of Columbia University, took it up, there was not even any serious investigation of the history of American pronunciation.

Thus the American dialect of English was firmly established by the time the Republic was well started, and in the half-century following it departed more and more from standard English. The settlement of the West, by taking large numbers of young men beyond the pale of urbane society, made for grotesque looseness in speech. Neologisms of the most extravagant sorts arose by the thousand, and many of them worked their way back to the East. During the two decades before the Civil War everyday American became almost unintelligible to an Englishman; every English visitor marked and denounced its vagaries. It was bold and lawless in its vocabulary, careless of grammatical niceties, and further disfigured by a drawling manner of speech. The congressional debates of the time were full of its phrases; soon they were to show themselves in the national literature.

Policing the language

After the Civil War there was an increase of national self-consciousness, and efforts were made to police the language. Free schools multiplied in the land, and the schoolmarm revealed all her immemorial preciosity. A clan of professional grammarians arose, led by Richard Grant White; it got help from certain of the literati, including Lowell. The campaign went to great lengths. “It is me” was banned as barbarous, though it is perfectly sound historically; eye-ther was substituted in polite usage for ee-ther, though the latter is correct and the former is on the part of an American an absurd affectation.

But the spirit of the language, and of the American people no less, was against such reforms. They were attacked on philological grounds by such iconoclasts as Thomas R. Lounsbury; they were reduced to vanity by the unconquerable speech habits of the folk. Under the very noses of the purists a new and vigorous American slang came into being, and simultaneously the common speech began to run amok. That common speech is to-day almost lawless. As Ring Lardner reports it–and he reports it very accurately–it seems destined in a few generations to dispose altogether of the few inflections that remain in English. “Me and her woulda went” will never, perhaps, force its way into the grammar-books, but it is used daily, or something like it, by a large part of the people of the United States, and the rest know precisely what it means.

On higher levels the language of the Americans is more decorous, but even there it is a genuinely living speech, taking in loan-words with vast hospitality and incessantly manufacturing neologisms of its own. The argot of sport enriches it almost daily. It runs to brilliantly vivid tropes. It is disdainful of grammatical pruderies. In the face of a new situation the American shows a far greater linguistic resourcefulness and daring than the Englishman. Movie is obviously better than cinema, just as cow-catcher is better than plough and job-holder is better than public-servant. The English seldom devise anything as pungent as rubber-neck, ticket-scalper, lame-duck, pork-barrel, boot-legger or steam-roller (in its political sense). Such exhilarating novelties are produced in the United States every day, and large numbers of them come into universal use, and gradually take on literary dignity. They are opposed violently, but they prevail. The visiting Englishman finds them very difficult. They puzzle him even more than do American peculiarities of pronunciation.

Of late the increase of travel and other inter-communication between England and America has tended to halt the differentiation of the two dialects. It was more marked, perhaps, before the World War than since. But if it ever vanishes altogether the fact will mark a victory for American. The American cinema floods England (and the rest of the English-speaking world) with American neologisms, but there is very little movement in the other direction. Thus the tail begins to wag the dog. How far the change has gone may be observed in Australia. There a cockneyfied pronunciation holds out, but the American vocabulary is increasingly triumphant. In Canada it long ago overcame the last vestiges of opposition.

Bibliography

There is no satisfactory dictionary of Americanisms. The best is Richard H. Thornton’s American Glossary (1912), but it is based wholly on written records and is thus incomplete. George Philip Krapp’s The English Language in America (1925) is valuable to the student of American pronunciation, and contains much miscellaneous matter of interest, but there are gaps in it, and the author opposes his own evidence by arguing that English and American show few important differences. An extensive bibliography is in H.L. Mencken’s The American Language, 3rd ed. (1923). In 1925 Dr. Louise Pound, of the University of Nebraska, began the publication of a monthly, American Speech (Baltimore).

by H.L. Mencken

THIS preposterous quackery flourishes lushIy in the back reaches of the Republic, and begins to conquer the less civilized folk of the big cities. As the old-time family doctor dies out in the country towns, with no competent successor willing to take over his dismal business, he is followed by some hearty blacksmith or ice-wagon driver, turned into a chiropractor in six months, often by correspondence. In Los Angeles the Damned, there are probably more chiropractors than actual physicians, and they are far more generally esteemed. Proceeding from the Ambassador Hotel to the heart of the town, along Wilshire boulevard, one passes scores of their gaudy signs; there are even chiropractic “hospitals.” The Mormons who pour in from the prairies and deserts, most of them ailing, patronize these “hospitals” copiously, and give to the chiropractic pathology the same high respect that they accord to the theology of the town sorcerers. That pathology is grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are caused by pressure of misplaced vertebrae upon the nerves which come out of the spinal cord — in other words, that every disease is the result of a pinch. This, plainly enough, is buncombe. The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover. This, obviously, is buncombe doubly damned.

Both doctrines were launched upon the world by an old quack named Andrew T. Still, the father of osteopathy. For years the osteopaths merchanted them, and made money at the trade. But as they grew opulent they grew ambitious, i.e., they began to study anatomy and physiology. The result was a gradual abandonment of Papa Still’s ideas. The high-toned osteopath of today is a sort of eclectic. He tries anything that promises to work, from tonsillectomy to the x-rays. With four years’ training behind him, he probably knows more anatomy than the average graduate of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, or at all events, more osteology. Thus enlightened, he seldom has much to say about pinched nerves in the back. But as he abandoned the Still revelation it was seized by the chiropractors, led by another quack, one Palmer. This Palmer grabbed the pinched nerve nonsense and began teaching it to ambitious farm-hands and out-at-elbow Baptist preachers in a few easy lessons. Today the backwoods swarm with chiropractors, and in most States they have been able to exert enough pressure on the rural politicians to get themselves licensed. (It is not altogether a matter of pressure. Large numbers of rustic legislators are themselves believers in chiropractic. So are many members of Congress.) Any lout with strong hands and arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor. No education beyond the elements is necessary. The takings are often high, and so the profession has attracted thousands of recruits — retired baseball players, work-weary plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen, bogus dentists, dubious preachers, cashiered school superintendents. Now and then a quack of some other school — say homeopathy — plunges into it. Hundreds of promising students come from the intellectual ranks of hospital orderlies.

Such quackeries suck in the botched, and help them on to bliss eternal. When these botched fall into the hands of competent medical men they are very likely to be patched up and turned loose upon the world, to beget their kind. But massaged along the backbone to cure their lues (syphylis), they quickly pass into the last stages, and so their pathogenic heritage perishes with them. What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers. That the labors of quacks tend to propagate epidemics and so menace the lives of all of us, as is alleged by their medical opponents — this I doubt. The fact is that most infectious diseases of any seriousness throw out such alarming symptoms and so quickly that no sane chiropractor is likely to monkey with them. Seeing his patient breaking out in pustules, or choking, or falling into a stupor, he takes to the woods at once, and leaves the business to the nearest medical man. His trade is mainly with ambulant patients; they must come to his studio for treatment. Most of them have lingering diseases; they tour all the neighborhood doctors before they reach him. His treatment, being nonsensical, is in accord with the divine plan. It is seldom, perhaps, that he actually kills a patient, but at all events he keeps many a worthy soul from getting well.

The osteopaths, I fear, are finding this new competition serious and unpleasant. As I have said, it was their Hippocrates, the late Dr. Still, who invented all of the thrusts, lunges, yanks, hooks and bounces that the lowly chiropractors now employ with such vast effect, and for years the osteopaths had a monopoly of them. But when they began to grow scientific and ambitious their course of training was lengthened until it took in all sorts of tricks and dodges borrowed from the regular doctors, or resurrection men, including the plucking of tonsils, adenoids, and appendices, the use of the stomach-pump, and even some of the legerdemain of psychiatry. They now harry their students furiously, and turn them out ready for anything from growing hair on a bald head to frying a patient with the x-rays. All this new striving, of course, quickly brought its inevitable penalties. The osteopathic graduate, having sweated so long, was no longer willing to take a case of delirium tremens for $2, and in consequence he lost patients. Worse, very few aspirants could make the long grade. The essence of osteopathy itself could be grasped by any lively farmhand or night watchman in a few weeks, but the borrowed magic baffled him. Confronted by the phenomenon of gastrulation, or by the curious behavior of heart muscles, or by any of the current theories of immunity, he commonly took refuge, like his brother of the orthodox faculty, in a gulp of laboratory alcohol, or fled the premises altogether. Thus he was lost to osteopathic science, and the chiropractors took him in; nay, they welcomed him. He was their meat. Borrowing that primitive part of osteopathy which was comprehensible to the meanest understanding, they threw the rest overboard, at the same time denouncing it as a sorcery invented by the Medical Trust. Thus they gathered in the garage mechanics, ash-men, and decayed welterweights, and the land began to fill with their graduates. Now there is a chiropractor at every crossroads.

I repeat that it eases and soothes me to see them so prosperous, for they counteract the evil work of the so-called science of public hygiene, which now seeks to make imbeciles immortal. If a man, being ill of a pus appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of, and submits willingly to a treatment involving balancing him on McBurney’s spot and playing on his vertebrae as on a concertina, then I am willing, for one, to believe that he is badly wanted in Heaven. And if that same man, having achieved lawfully a lovely babe, hires a blacksmith to cure its diphtheria by pulling its neck, then I do not resist the divine will that there shall be one less radio fan later on. In such matters, I am convinced, the laws of nature are far better guides than the fiats and machinations of medical busybodies. If the latter gentlemen had their way, death, save at the hands of hangmen, policemen, and other such legalized assassins, would be abolished altogether, and the present differential in favor of the enlightened would disappear. I can’t convince myself that would work any good to the world. On the contrary, it seems to me that the current coddling of the half-witted should be stopped before it goes too far if, indeed, it has not gone too far already. To that end nothing operates more cheaply and effectively than the prosperity of quacks. Every time a bottle of cancer oil goes through the mails Homo americanus is improved to that extent. And every time a chiropractor spits on his hands and proceeds to treat a gastric ulcer by stretching the backbone the same high end is achieved.

But chiropractic, of course, is not perfect. It has superb potentialities, but only too often they are not converted into concrete cadavers. The hygienists rescue many of its foreordained customers, and, turning them over to agents of the Medical Trust, maintained at the public expense, get them cured. Moreover, chiropractic itself is not certainly fatal: even an Iowan with diabetes may survive its embraces. Yet worse, I have a suspicion that it sometimes actually cures. For all I know (or any orthodox pathologist seems to know) it may be true that certain malaises are caused by the pressure of vagrant vertebra upon the spinal nerves. And it may be true that a hearty ex-boilermaker, by a vigorous yanking and kneading, may be able to relieve that pressure. What is needed is a scientific inquiry into the matter, under rigid test conditions, by a committee of men learned in the architecture and plumbing of the body, and of a high and incorruptible sagacity. Let a thousand patients be selected, let a gang of selected chiropractors examine their backbones and determine what is the matter with them, and then let these diagnoses be checked up by the exact methods of scientific medicine. Then let the same chiropractors essay to cure the patients whose maladies have been determined. My guess is that the chiropractors’ errors in diagnosis will run to at least 95% and that their failures in treatment will push 99%. But I am willing to be convinced.

Where is there is such a committee to be found? I undertake to nominate it at ten minutes’ notice. The land swarms with men competent in anatomy and pathology, and yet not engaged as doctors. There are thousands of hospitals, with endless clinical material. I offer to supply the committee with cigars and music during the test. I offer, further, to supply both the committee and the chiropractors with sound wet goods. I offer, finally, to give a bawdy banquet to the whole Medical Trust at the conclusion of the proceedings.

* * *

Source: Author

by Richard Spencer (pictured)

The following address was given to the H.L. Mencken Club‘s Annual Meeting; November 21-23, 2008.

IF THIS biography is a shade partial the fact is surely not surprising, for Miss Blackwell is not only Lucy Stone’s daughter but also a firm believer in all of the reforms that she advocated, excluding, I believe, Prohibition. Indeed, it would be natural for any biographer who knew Lucy Stone [pictured] to be her advocate, for despite the touch of acid that always goes with the passion to serve, she must have been a very piquant and charming woman, and so it is no wonder that the handsome Henry B. Blackwell fell violently in love with her, and pursued her all over the nation with amatory epistles in the best Victorian manner, and then married her triumphantly and spent the next thirty-eight years squiring her about, and admiring her vastly, and unearthing new evils for her to put down. Henry was himself a reformer of no mean technique, but his main business in life was acting as herald and manager for his wife. When, in his old age, she left him a widower, “he had,” as his daughter naively puts it, “more leisure than in former years.” In her heyday he must have been busy indeed, for she had a hand in every reform that engaged the country between 1835 and 1890, and of most of them she was a leader, always on the go. She began her melodramatic tours in stage-coaches and canal boats, and if she had lived a few years longer she would have ended them in automobiles and airships.

When she first set up her booth reform was a dismal business. The gentlemen who pursued it all arrayed themselves in the contemporary garb of ministers of the Gospel, with white neckclothes, plug hats and long-tailed coats. Two-thirds of them shaved their upper lips and wore their beards in the manner of Dunkard elders. They avoided alcohol save to counteract snake bites and the night air, and pronounced their anathema upon smoking, though some of them stealthily chewed. As for the ladies of the movement, they wore black bombazine over crinolines, and spoke of themselves, very delicately, as females. Their virtue was of a granitic, almost a basaltic character. Traveling alone, as they sometimes had to do to save the world, they wrapped themselves in ten or fifteen petticoats, and offered silent prayers to God. When one of them, united in holy marriage to one of the chin-bearded brethren, honored him with offspring, the event became a national indecorum; just how it was achieved remains unknown, indeed, to this day. Life in that age was real and earnest, and sensuous indulgence was not its goal. The ideal was a world devoted exclusively to moral indignation.

Upon such scenes the saucy Lucy Stone burst with paralyzing effect. She was a pink-cheeked little country girl with a turned-up nose, and it is impossible to believe, as her daughter heroically hints, that she was not pretty. A daguerreotype of the 40’s gives the lie to that judgment. It shows a young woman who was pretty indeed– not in the florid, Hollywoodian fashion of today, but in the sedater but just as dangerous manner of those times. Beaux began to lurk about the home farm at West Brookfield, Mass., before she was well into her teens, and by the time she set off for Oberlin to wolf the whole corpus of human wisdom she was the belle of the countryside. The Oberlin professors, though all of them were dour reformers, at once discovered another charm: Lucy had a low-pitched and very agreeable voice. So they made an orator of her, and presently she was on the stump, whooping for Abolition and woman’s rights. No greater knock-out, as the vaudevillians used to say, has ever been recorded in the annals of the uplift. Mobs that fell upon the male reformers with horrible yells, pulling off their coattails and uprooting their chinners, received lovely Lucy with loud huzzahs, and listened to her politely to the end. Often she would make a speech against slavery, and then launch straightway into another for temperance, female emancipation, or some other such fantastic novelty of the day. But no matter what she denounced or advocated, the gallery was with her, and when she finished one harangue it was always ready for another.

Miss Blackwell tells her story in a clear and interesting manner, and incidentally throws some new light upon the history of the woman’s suffrage movement in the United States. As everyone knows, it split into two halves in 1869 and for more than a generation thereafter it was represented by two distinct national associations and published two national organs. The schism was due in part to Susan B. Anthony’s weakness for such clownish allies as Victoria C. Woodhull and Citizen George Francis Train, and in part to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s tolerance of the extremer sort of radicals, including even Stephen Pearl Andrews, who believed that marriage ought to be abolished, and that a few superior men in every community should be told off to become the fathers of all its children. Such doctrines greatly outraged Lucy Stone, who, despite her refusal to use her husband’s name and her three years’ experiment with bloomers, remained a high-toned Christian woman at heart, and she was also opposed to the monkey-shines of Train and La Woodhull. So the movement divided, and for years the suffragettes belabored one another almost as fiercely as they belabored the antis. But all the while Jahveh Himself was watching over them, and they triumphed everywhere in the end, and brought in the millennium that we now enjoy. Lucy herself lived to see it, though most of her old allies, by that time, were dead. She reigned in her last years as the mother superior and cherished museum piece of all the suffragettes, and was greatly honored and respected.

It is marvellous to observe the success of all the reforms that she advocated. Slavery has been abolished in the South, and the meanest Afroamerican in Arkansas or South Carolina now basks in the sunlight of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, to say nothing of the Bill of Rights. In his choice between working hard and saying nothing or pressing his views and getting lynched he is as free as the King of England. Even the whites down there are now liberated: a citizen of Jackson, Miss., may choose freely between believing in Genesis and having his house burned down, and the lowest linthead in a Georgia cotton-mill may quit whenever he pleases, and starve at his will. Meanwhile, Prohibition is everywhere in force, North, East, South and West, and all the evils of rum have been obliterated. So also, international peace has come into effect, and the nations no longer suspect one another and prepare for battle. Finally, the human female has been emancipated and her vote has purged our politics of evil; nay, she has promoted herself from voter to stateswoman, and in the person of such idealistic sisters as Ma Ferguson and Ma McCormick she has shown the male some varieties of Service that he never thought of. All these great reforms Lucy Stone advocated in her day, tramping up and down the highways of the land. Other females derided her, but she hoped on. Where is her monument, reaching upward to the stars? For one, I believe that it is too long delayed.

— The American Mercury magazine, December 1930

RECENTLY I’ve been thinking about someone whose name is attached to an organization I’m currently president of, H.L. Mencken (1880-1956). For years I’ve tried to understand why the Baltimore Sage has been branded, mostly recently in The Weekly Standard (see here and here) and in a voluminous biography by Terry Teachout, as anti-Semitic and anti-Black. The closest I could come to documenting these charges is that Mencken joked in his diary about the bad table manners of an obviously Jewish diner in a club that he frequented. He also said in a moment of levity that “an anti-Semite is someone who dislikes Jews more than is absolutely necessary.” This, as everybody who knew him was aware of, was a quip that Murray Rothbard was fond of repeating.

As for Mencken’s supposed revulsion for Blacks, I can’t find any evidence of it, although he may not have used “African-American,” or whatever is the now fashionable PC term in referring to the minority in question. We know that Mencken criticized segregation in his native city of Baltimore. He also never tired of attacking lower class White Southerners of the kind who wanted to keep Blacks segregated. Indeed if I were going after Mencken for his intolerance, I would have to notice his invectives against Southern Fundamentalists rather than his scattered, insignificant jokes about Jews and Blacks. That said, however, White Southerners don’t count as victims in their own eyes or in anyone else’s. In fact their politicians and journalists seem quite happy to view them as onetime racial victimizers, who were redeemed by civil rights legislation.

In any case, it seems to me that the recent attacks on Mencken have nothing to do with his prejudices. Liberals and neocons hate him for taking stands that don’t have much to do with the accusations made against him. One, Mencken opposed America’s entry into both World Wars, and during the First World War, he was expressly pro-German. (He was after all a German-American.) His predilection for the Central Powers in 1914 elicited a bitter tirade from Fred Siegel in (where else?) The Weekly Standard (January 30, 2006), a screed that charges the “horrid” Mencken with being a lifelong enemy of democracy and decency. Supposedly Mencken’s fondness for Nietzsche (about whom he produced a not very useful or scholarly biography) shows for all to see that he worshipped the “will to power” and saw this incarnated in the Teutonic enemy of Anglo-American democratic civilization. Someone who took such reprehensible positions in foreign affairs, we have to infer from Siegel’s remarks, must also have been against Jews, who represent all that is good and radiant in the West and (lest we forget) Israel.

translated by H.L. Mencken

THIS BOOK BELONGS to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who understand my “Zarathustra”: how could I confound myself with those who are now sprouting ears? – First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously.

The conditions under which anyone understands me, and necessarily understands me – I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops – and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him… He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner – to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm… Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self….

Very well, then! Of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account are the rest? – The rest are merely humanity. – One must make one’s self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul, – in contempt.

FRIEDRICH W. NIETZSCHE.

(from the Preface)

download PDF of The Antichrist

DURING THE FIRST HALF of the twentieth century, H.L. Mencken (pictured) was the most outspoken defender of liberty in America. He spent thousands of dollars challenging restrictions on freedom of the press. He boldly denounced President Woodrow Wilson for whipping up patriotic fervor to enter World War I, which cost his job as a newspaper columnist. Mencken denounced Franklin Delano Roosevelt for amassing dangerous political power and for maneuvering to enter World War II, and he again lost his newspaper job. Moreover, the President ridiculed him by name.

“The government I live under has been my enemy all my active life,” Mencken declared. “When it has not been engaged in silencing me it has been engaged in robbing me. So far as I can recall I have never had any contact with it that was not an outrage on my dignity and an attack on my security.”

Though intensely controversial, Mencken earned respect as America’s foremost newspaperman and literary critic. He produced an estimated ten million words: some 30 books, contributions to 20 more books and thousands of newspaper columns. He wrote some 100,000 letters, or between 60 and 125 per working day. He hunted-and-pecked every word with his two forefingers–for years, he used a little Corona typewriter about the size of a cigar box.

Mencken had interesting things to say about politics, literature, food, health, religion, sports, and much more. No one knew more about our American language. Influential pundits of the past like Walter Lippmann are long forgotten, but people still read Mencken’s work. During the past decade, publishers have issued almost a dozen books about him or by him. Biographer William Nolte reports that Mencken ranks among the most frequently quoted American authors.

Certainly Mencken was among the wittiest. For example: “Puritanism–the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy. . . . Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. . . . The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flophouses and disturbing the peace.”

Mencken stood about five feet, eight inches tall and weighed around 175 pounds. He parted his slick brown hair in the middle. He liked to chew on a cigar. He dressed with a pair of suspenders and a rumpled suit. According to one chronicler, Mencken at his best looked “like a plumber got up for church.”

Publisher Alfred Knopf had this to say about Mencken, a close friend for more than 40 years: “His public side was visible to everyone: tough, cynical, amusing, and exasperating by turns. The private man was something else again: sentimental, generous, and unwavering–sometimes almost blind–in his devotion to people of whom he felt fond . . . the most charming manners conceivable, manners I was to discover he always displayed in talking with women . . . he spent a fantastic amount of his time getting friends to and from doctors’ waiting rooms and hospitals, comforting them and keeping them company there.”

Mencken inspired friends of freedom. He helped cheer up stylish individualist author Albert Jay Nock, a frequent contributor to Mencken’s magazine the American Mercury, during Nock’s declining years. Mencken’s stalwart individualism awed young Ayn Rand who, in 1934, called him “one whom I admire as the greatest representative of a philosophy to which I want to dedicate my whole life.”

Henry Louis Mencken was born September 12, 1880, in Baltimore. His father, August Mencken, owned a cigar factory. His mother, Anna Abhau Mencken, like her husband, was a child of German immigrants. In 1883, the family moved to a three-story, red brick row house at 1524 Hollins Street. Here, except during his five-year marriage, Mencken lived for the rest of his life.

Mencken was a voracious reader from the get-go. At age nine, he discovered Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, which opened his eyes to rugged individualism and literary pleasures. This was, as he put it, “probably the most stupendous event in my whole life.” He was thrilled: “what a man that Mark Twain was! How he stood above and apart from the world, like Rabelais come to life again, observing the human comedy, chuckling over the eternal fraudulence of man! What a sharp eye he had for the bogus, in religion, politics, art, literature, patriotism, virtue. . . . And seeing all this, he laughed at them, but not often with malice.”

Mencken finished high school when he was 15 and went right to work in his father’s cigar factory, but he hated it. Within a few days after his father died of kidney failure in January 1899, Mencken tried his hand as a newspaperman. The first story he ever sold, to the Baltimore Herald, was about a stolen horse. By June that year, he was a full-time reporter earning $7 a week. Mencken proved to be unusually resourceful and industrious. He rose to become drama critic, editor of the Sunday paper, and city editor of the morning paper.

Early on, Mencken displayed a tremendous zest for life. In 1904, for example, he began a little musical group which became known as the “Saturday Night Club.” Almost every week for 46 years, as many as a dozen friends got together around 8:00 PM. Mencken played the piano with great enthusiasm. Other participants played the violin, cello, flute, oboe, drums, French horn, and piano. They most often played for a couple hours in a violin-maker’s shop and afterwards went to the Hotel Rennert for beer. During the 13 years of Prohibition, they took turns hosting festivities in their homes. They enjoyed chamber music, marches, waltzes, and operatic melodies. Mencken loved German romantics, Beethoven above all.

The Baltimore Sun

The Baltimore Herald went out of business in 1906, and Mencken landed at the newspaper where he would write for more than 40 years. One observer remarked: “The staid old Baltimore Sun has got itself a real Whangdoodle.” The Baltimore Evening Sun was launched in 1910, and Mencken served as editor. From 1911 to 1915, he wrote a daily “Free Lance” column which covered politics, education, music, whatever interested him. He edited the adjacent letters-to-the editor columns, and whenever a nasty letter came in attacking one of his columns, he made sure it was printed–he recognized that people enjoyed reading abuse.

There was abuse aplenty as people reacted to his bombastic writing style. He ridiculed hypocritical politicians, clergymen, and social reformers. For example, Mencken called Fundamentalist do-gooder William Jennings Bryan “the most sedulous flycatcher in American history . . . a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without shame or dignity.” He was accused of anti-Semitism because he gratuitously referred to so many people as “Jews.” Yet he didn’t criticize Jews as much as others. He described Anglo-Saxons as “a wretchedly dirty, shiftless, stupid and rascally people . . . anthropoids.”

Mencken lashed out at President Woodrow Wilson for maneuvering America into World War I. He insisted that the British government shared responsibility for the horrifying conflict, and he attacked the moral pretensions of British officials who pursued a naval blockade punishing innocent people as well as combatants in Germany. Mencken discontinued his column because of wartime hysteria.

Meanwhile, he had established himself as a literary critic. Since 1908, he had reviewed books for Smart Set, a monthly literary magazine. He and drama critic George Jean Nathan were named editors in 1914. Mencken relentlessly attacked puritanical standards and hailed authors like Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Mencken turned increasingly to writing books–he had written eight on music, literature, and philosophy by 1919. That year marked the debut of his most enduring work. It arose from his passion for American speech which evolved spontaneously into something more dynamic than the English of England. No government planned it: the American language became more expressive as ordinary people went about their daily business, now and then contributing new words. The first edition of The American Language soon sold out, and Mencken began work on the second of four editions. “All I ask,” he wrote his publisher Alfred Knopf, “is that you make The American Language good and thick. It is my secret ambition to be the author of a book weighing at least five pounds.”

In 1920, with World War I a bad memory, the Baltimore Sun asked Mencken to resume writing a column for $50 a week. Thus began his memorable “Monday” articles which appeared weekly for the next 18 years. About two-thirds of them dealt with politics.

The American Mercury

By 1923, Mencken decided he wanted a national forum for his political views. He resigned from the Smart Set, and with backing from Knopf he and Nathan launched the monthly American Mercury. The first issue, bearing a distinctive pea-green cover, appeared in January 1924. Nathan soon disagreed about which direction the magazine should go, and he resigned. Mencken offered feisty commentary plus writing by many of America’s most distinguished authors. There were articles by philosophical anarchist Emma Goldman and birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger. Also, such black authors as W.E.B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and George Schuyler. Circulation grew for four years, peaking around 84,000 in 1928.

Although Mencken wasn’t known as a political philosopher, he made clear his commitment to individual liberty. “Every government,” he wrote, “is a scoundrel. In its relations with other governments it resorts to frauds and barbarities that were prohibited to private men by the Common Law of civilization so long ago as the reign of Hammurabi, and in its dealings with its own people it not only steals and wastes their property and plays a brutal and witness game with their natural rights, but regularly gambles with their very lives. Wars are seldom caused by spontaneous hatreds between people, for peoples in general are too ignorant of one another to have grievances and too indifferent to what goes on beyond their borders to plan conquests. They must be urged to the slaughter by politicians who know how to alarm them.”

Mencken expressed outrage at violence against blacks and as Hitler menaced Europe, Mencken attacked President Roosevelt for refusing to admit Jewish refugees into the United States: “There is only one way to help the fugitives, and that is to find places for them in a country in which they can really live. Why shouldn’t the United States take in a couple hundred thousand of them, or even all of them?”

Mencken was adamant that the United States not become entangled in another European war. He believed it would mean further expansion of government power, oppression, debt, and killings without ridding the world of tyranny. Better to keep America as a peaceful sanctuary for liberty:

“I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented,” he wrote, “at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air–that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.” Mencken added: “In any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is my instinct to side with the citizen . . . I am against all efforts to make men virtuous by law.”…

Sara

For a brief period, Mencken faced his ideological battles with a romantic partner. In May 1923, he delivered a talk called “how to catch a husband” at Baltimore’s Goucher College and there met a 26-year-old, Alabama-born English teacher named Sara Haardt. He was taken by her good looks, radiant intelligence and passion for literature. She saw a decent, joyous, civilized man. A lifelong bachelor who had lived with his mother until she died in 1925, when he was 45, Mencken was wary of marriage. Apparently Sara’s worsening tuberculosis brought him to the altar. After her death on May 31, 1935, Mencken wrote a friend: “When I married Sara, the doctors said she could not live more than three years. Actually, she lived five, so I had two more years of happiness than I had any right to expect.”

Sara’s death hit him especially hard, because he was already down. With the Great Depression everywhere blamed on capitalism, individualist Mencken seemed like a relic. He had seldom analyzed economic policy, so he wasn’t intellectually equipped to explain how the federal government itself had triggered and prolonged the Great Depression–powerful evidence for that case became available only in the 1960s.

Circulation of the American Mercury plunged. Mencken resigned as editor by December 1933. He was succeeded by economic journalist Henry Hazlitt. Three years after Sara died, Mencken’s attacks on President Roosevelt’s foreign policy cost him his Baltimore Sun column. It didn’t help that Mencken’s devotion to traditional German culture apparently led him to discount ominous news coming out of Hitler’s Germany. He was an outcast.

Mencken did much to redeem himself as far as the public was concerned by affirming the joys of private life. He added two massive supplements to The American Language, acclaimed as a learned and entertaining masterwork about popular speech. He wrote his charming memoirs which began as a series of New Yorker articles, then expanded into a trilogy, Happy Days (1940), Newspaper Days (1941), and Heathen Days (1943). They display a tolerant, enthusiastic view of life. He edited a generous collection of his newspaper articles into a book, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1948)–it’s still in print.

On November 28, 1948, Mencken went to pick up a manuscript from his secretary’s apartment and suffered a stroke. While he regained his physical capabilities, he lost the ability to read, and he had difficulty speaking. Most people forgot about him.

Mencken died in his sleep on Sunday, January 29, 1956. His ashes were buried near his parents and his wife at Loudon Park Cemetery. Mencken’s former American Mercury compatriot, Newsweek columnist Henry Hazlitt, called Mencken “a great liberating force. . . . In his political and economic opinions Mencken was from the beginning, to repeat, neither `radical’ nor `conservative,’ but libertarian. He championed the freedom and dignity of the individual.”

Though Mencken was gone, controversy soon swirled about him again. New collections of his work proved popular. Previously unpublished manuscripts appeared. He was accused of anti-Semitism, and these charges gained a wider hearing with the 1989 publication of his candid diary. Long-time Jewish friends defended him. A succession of biographies focused on different aspects of his life.

Nearly all of Mencken’s chroniclers opposed his political views–in particular, his hostility to the New Deal–but they have found him irresistibly appealing. They were drawn to his prodigious enterprise, vast learning, steadfast courage, good cheer, and free spirit. Someday, hopefully more people will appreciate Mencken’s vital role in nourishing a love for liberty during some of America’s darkest decades.

read the full article at The Freeman

IN THE IMMORAL monarchies of the continent of Europe, now happily abolished by God’s will, there was, in the old days of sin, an intelligent and effective way of dealing with delinquent officials. Not only were they subject, when taken in downright corruption, to the ordinary processes of the criminal laws; in addition they were liable to prosecution in special courts for such offenses as were peculiar to their offices. In this business the abominable Prussian state, though founded by Satan, took the lead. It maintained a tribunal in Berlin that devoted itself wholly to the trial of officials accused of malfeasance, corruption, tyranny and incompetence, and any citizen was free to lodge a complaint with the learned judges. The trial was public and in accord with rules fixed by law. An official found guilty could be punished summarily and in a dozen different ways. He could be reprimanded, reduced in rank, suspended from office for a definite period, transferred to a less desirable job, removed from the rolls altogether, fined, or sent to jail. If he was removed from office he could be deprived of his right to a pension in addition, or fined or jailed in addition. He could be made to pay damages to any citizen he had injured, or to apologize publicly.

All this, remember, was in addition to his liability under the ordinary law, and the statutes specifically provided that he could be punished twice for the same offence, once in the ordinary courts and once in the administrative court. Thus, a Prussian official who assaulted a citizen, invaded his house without a warrant, or seized his property without process of law, could be deprived of his office and fined heavily by the administrative court, sent to jail by an ordinary court, and forced to pay damages to his victim by either or both. Had a Prussian judge in those far-off days of despotism, overcome by a brain-storm of kaiserliche passion, done any of the high-handed and irrational things that our own judges, Federal and State, do almost every day, an aggrieved citizen might have haled him before the administrative court and recovered heavy damages from him, besides enjoying the felicity of seeing him transferred to some distant swap in East Prussia, to listen all day to the unintelligible perjury of anthropoid Poles. The law specifically provided that responsible officials should be punished, not more leniently than subordinate or ordinary offenders, but more severely. If a corrupt policeman got six months a corrupt chief of police got two years. More, these statutes were enforced with Prussian barbarity, and the jails were constantly full of errant officials.

I do not propose, of course, that such medieval laws be set up in the United States. We have, indeed, gone far enough in imitating the Prussians already; if we go much further the moral and enlightened nations of the world will have to unite in a crusade to put us down. As a matter of fact, the Prussian scheme would probably prove ineffective in the Republic, if only because it involved setting up one gang of jobholders to judge and punish another gang. It worked well in Prussia before the country was civilized by force of arms because, as everyone knows, a Prussian official was trained in ferocity from infancy, and regarded every man arraigned before him, whether a fellow official or not, guilty ipso facto; in fact, any thought of a prisoners’ possible innocence was abhorrent to him as a reflection upon the Polizei, and by inference, upon the Throne, the whole monarchical idea, and God. But in America, even if they had no other sentiment in common, which would be rarely, judge and prisoner would often be fellow Democrats or fellow Republicans, and hence jointly interested in protecting their party against scandal and its members against the loss of their jobs. Moreover, the Prussian system had another plain defect: the punishments it provided were, in the main, platitudinous and banal. They lacked dramatic quality, and they lacked ingenuity and appropriateness. To punish a judge taken in judicial crim. con. by fining him or sending him to jail is a bit too facile and obvious. What is needed is a system (a) that does not depend for its execution upon the good-will of fellow jobholders, and (b) that provides swift, certain and unpedantic punishments, each fitted neatly to its crime.

I announce without further ado that such a system, after due prayer, I have devised. It is simple, it is unhackneyed, and I believe that it would work. It is divided into two halves. The first half takes the detection and punishment of the crimes of jobholders away from courts of impeachment, congressional smelling committees, and all the other existing agencies–i.e., away from other jobholders–and vests it in the whole body of free citizens, male and female. The second half provides that any member of that body, having looked into the acts of a jobholder and found him delinquent, may punish him instantly and on the spot, and in any manner that seems appropriate and convenient–and that, in case this punishment involves physical damage to the jobholder, the ensuing inquiry by a grand jury or coroner shall confine itself strictly to the question of whether the jobholder deserved what he got. In other words, I propose that it shall be no longer malum in se for a citizen to pummel, cowhide, kick, gouge, cut, wound, bruise, maim, burn, club, bastinado, flay, or even lynch a jobholder, and that it shall be malum prohibitum only to the extent that the punishment exceeds the jobholder’s deserts. The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined. The flogged judge, or Congressman, or other jobholder, on being discharged from hospital–or his chief heir, in case he has perished–goes before a grand jury and makes a complaint, and, if a true bill is found, a petit jury is empaneled and all the evidence is put before it. If it decides that the jobholder deserves the punishment inflicted upon him, the citizen who inflicted it is acquitted with honor. If, on the contrary, it decides that this punishment was excessive, then the citizen is adjudged guilty of assault, mayhem, murder, or whatever it is, in a degree apportioned to the difference between what the jobholder deserved and what he got, and punishment for that excess follows in the usual course.

The advantages of this plan, I believe, are too patent to need argument. At one stroke it removes all the legal impediments which now make the punishment of a recreant jobholder so hopeless a process, and enormously widens the range of possible penalties. They are now stiff and, in large measure, illogical; under the system I propose they could be made to fit the crime precisely. Say a citizen today becomes convinced that a certain judge is a jackass–that his legal learning is defective, his sense of justice atrophied, and his conduct of cases before him tyrannical and against decency. As things stand, it is impossible to do anything about it. A judge cannot be impeached on the mere ground that he is a jackass; the process is far too costly and cumbersome, and there are too many judges liable to the charge. Nor is anything to be gained from denouncing him publicly and urging all good citizens to vote against him when he comes up for re-election, for his term may run for ten or fifteen years, and even if it expires tomorrow and he is defeated the chances are good that his successor will be quite as bad, and maybe even worse. Moreover, if he is a Federal judge he never comes up for re-election at all, for once he has been appointed by the President of the United States, on the advice of his more influential clients and with the consent of their agents in the Senate, he is safe until he is so far gone in senility that he has to be propped up on the bench with pillows.

But now imagine any citizen free to approach him in open court and pull his nose. Or even, in aggravated cases, to cut off his ears, throw him out of the window, or knock him in the head with an axe. How vastly more attentive he would be to his duties! How diligently he would apply himself to the study of the law! How careful he would be about the rights of litigants before him! How polite and suave he would become! For judges, like all the rest of us, are vain fellows: they do not enjoy having their noses pulled. The ignominy resident in the operation would not be abated by the subsequent trial of the puller, even if he should be convicted and jailed. The fact would still be brilliantly remembered that at least one citizen had deemed the judge sufficiently a malefactor to punish him publicly, and to risk going to jail for it. A dozen such episodes, and the career of any judge would be ruined and his heart broken, even though the jails bulged with his critics. He could not maintain his air of aloof dignity on the bench; even his catchpolls would snicker at him behind their hands, especially if he showed a cauliflower ear, a black eye or a scar over his bald head. Moreover, soon or late some citizen who had at him would be acquitted by a petit jury, and then, obviously, he would have to retire. It might be provided by law, indeed, that he should be compelled to retire in that case–that an acquittal would automatically vacate the office of the offending jobholder.

[The American Mercury, June 1924]

H.L. MENCKEN cut his satirical teeth on drama and theatre, as the excellent new anthology, The Collected Drama of H.L. Mencken: Plays and Criticism, edited by S.T. Joshi and published by Scarecrow Press, attests. Joshi has collected all of Mencken’s plays (many of which first appeared in the 1916 A Book of Burlesques) and a selection of his drama criticism (dating from 1905 to 1917 and collected here for the first time). After 1917 Mencken bid farewell to theatre reviewing, leaving it to his far more enthusiastic colleague George Jean Nathan – but oh, had he gone on …

Theatre historians will need to turn to this volume to study the early reception of modern dramatists like Ibsen and Strindberg on the American stage. Mencken championed both, as he championed George Bernard Shaw in his first book in 1905, though by 1916 the shine was off Shaw, at least for Mencken. By then he was calling Shaw the “Ulster Polonius”; in a review of Androcles and the Lion, he confesses that Shaw “indulges himself in a veritable debauch of platitudes, and the sickly music of them fills the air … he gets into his statement of all this trite stuff so violent an appearance of radicalism that it will undoubtedly heat up the women’s clubs and the newspaper reviewers, and inspire them to hail him once more as a Great Thinker.” (239) Strong stuff, even now, and far more scathing than anything that Charles Isherwood might say about Adam Rapp.

But it is not all virile ridicule, and not all of the same quality. The main body of the book is taken up with Mencken’s own “dramatic” work (though, like Ring Lardner’s nonsense plays, they were meant more to be read than presented in a theatre) – the satires of A Book of Burlesques mentioned before, but also his sole work written specifically with an eye to the stage, Heliogabalus (1920), co-authored with Nathan and a burlesque of both religion and drama itself, set in ancient Rome; not long after its completion he gave it up as a bad job and turned down requests for production rights, even when they came from William Gillette and John Barrymore. Today the satire is heavy-handed, though the play itself remains stageworthy and even amusing in spots. Cut with a sensitive hand, it could certainly find a home today at someplace like the Mint Theatre Company, and it’s something more than a mere museum piece or curiosity.

The genuine value of this book however remains in the drama criticism of the second part. And it’s clear that Mencken is a drama critic, not a theatre reviewer – he doesn’t seem to have liked the theatre much. “Playgoing in our fair land is often a trying adventure,” he wrote in 1911, and he had the audience far more than the plays in mind:

Upon the depressing stupidity and vulgarity of New York first nighters my colleague, Mr. Nathan, has lately discoursed with great eloquence. … Not only do [audiences] make it necessary for our managers to give us far more bad “shows” than good ones, but they also have a habit of spoiling the “show” wherever it happens, by any chance, to be good. In the presence of such a drama as Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler or Shaw’s Man and Superman … their one thought seems to be to smell out indecencies. Compared to their covert snickering, their incessant shuffling, their asinine whispering, the frank booing of the English gallery god is soothing as a sound and intelligent as a criticism. The less boorish theatergoer, trying to get himself into the mood for receiving and enjoying a work of art, is constantly annoyed and exasperated by the proximity of these killjoys. … (199)

And this was long before cellphones, beepers, and the Tweeters so many people inside and outside the theatre want to attract today.

No, Mencken was at his best as an armchair critic, and several of the essays here display his enthusiasm for the reading, rather than the seeing, of a good play. In “The Revival of the Printed Play,” he is delighted to report that, “On my desk at the moment stand a round dozen new playbooks by dramatists of no less than six nationalities, and half a dozen new and excellent volumes of dramatic criticism and stage history,” he writes. “Certainly the drama is coming into its own once more!” (192) And later, he gives us a cogent reason for his study-bound cogitations:

When the theater itself becomes unbearable [the partisan of the drama] may flee to his own home, and there, in peace and quiet, read the plays which the vileness of man makes it painful, if not downright impossible, for him to see. … I have, in a collection by no means exhaustive, more than four hundred modern plays, and fully two hundred of them, I believe, are good plays. Of good plays the theatre of my town [Baltimore], taken together, offer about ten a year. It would thus take me twenty years to see two hundred there. But stretched at ease in the old homestead, a pillow under my head, I may read two hundred on two hundred nights, and then begin all over again and enjoy a hundred and sixty-five a second time before the year runs out. (200)

Mencken’s enthusiasm runs across the full range of American and European modern drama. There are essays here about Ibsen, Strindberg, Synge, Hauptmann, Shaw, and many others; he’s particularly good on Galsworthy’s Justice, and even sensitively notes its dramaturgical innovations: “A grim and poignant play! Like Strife, it departs in more than one way from the customary forms of the theater. There is nothing ‘well made’ about it, in the technical sense. It gives the impression, not of a series of carefully painted pictures, but of a series of untouched photographs. All the same, let us beware of underestimating Galsworthy as a dramatic artist. As Strife proved to us, his method makes for a considerable effectiveness on the stage. The tricks of Sardou are not in him, but Sardou, for all his tricks, never achieved so nearly perfect an illusion. In brief, the plays of Galsworthy act well. But they read still better.” (193) The knowledgable grace of Mencken’s assessment, a delight to read and wearing its expertise like a comfortable light sweater, is hard enough to find today, and was hard to find then as well.

Mencken and Nathan of course championed the early Eugene O’Neill and other dramatists in the pages of The Smart Set and The American Mercury, but it is in these periodical essays that Mencken’s sure and deft critical touch shines even more. And his legendary sense of the ridiculous is at full power – his essay on a bad translation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is a masterpiece of lampoon, and all he need do is quote excerpts from it.

To echo what hundreds have said before in slightly different contexts, would that we had a Mencken sitting in an aisle seat today. What would he have made of today’s Sarah Ruhls, Tony Kushners, and Adam Rapps, not to mention their audiences? How would they emerge under his skeptical examination, an eye jaundiced by his expertise in his very own field (as expertise will certainly jaundice the critical eye turned upon the products of the day)? The Collected Drama of H.L. Mencken provides proof if any were needed that even back then, Mencken was demonstrating the ability to “inform, excite and entertain,” as the Times culture editor Jonathan Landman had it a few weeks ago in his description of the responsibilities of the newspaper critic. Mencken did all three far more effectively than anyone at the Times theatre desk – or anywhere else – does now. He would be perfect for the job. And he wouldn’t last a week at it.

Read the article as originally published on Superfluities Redux

AFTER POLITICS, JOURNALISM has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater. American exceptions to mediocrity’s leaden mean: From column A, there was Franklin D. Roosevelt. From column B, H.L. Mencken.

Although Henry Louis Mencken was a magazine editor (The Smart Set, The American Mercury), a literary critic, an expositor of Nietzsche, and a school of Samuel Johnson compiler of The American Language, he never ceased to be a journalist for the Sunpapers in his hometown of Baltimore, where he was born in 1880 and where he died in 1956. From 1906 to 1948, he was connected with the Baltimore Sun, as a columnist, feature writer, editor. He was the most influential journalist of his day; he was also the wittiest.

As a working journalist, Mencken took as his lifelong subject nothing less than Freedom’s land and Bravery’s home, the (not so very) United States, where flourished such gorgeous clowns as Calvin Coolidge; “The Great Croon of Croons,” Franklin D. Roosevelt; the not-so-great Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan; and many, many others. But if only God could have invented such a cast, it was Mencken who proved to be God’s most attentive and appreciative drama critic. It was Mencken who described the show. He reveled in absurdity; found no bonnet entirely bee-less. He loved the national bores for their own sweet sake.

As he contemplated the meager lives of our dull presidents, he wrote: “There comes a day of public ceremonial, and a chance to make a speech…. A million voters with IQs below 60 have their ears glued to the radio. It takes four days’ hard work to concoct a speech without a sensible word in it. Next a dam must be opened somewhere. Four dry Senators get drunk and make a painful scene. The Presidential automobile runs over a dog. It rains.”

American journalism’s golden (a kinder adjective than “yellow”) age coincided with Mencken’s career; that is, from century’s turn to mid-century’s television. During this period, there was still a public educational system and although Mencken often laughs at the boobs out there, the average person could probably get through a newspaper without numb lips. Today, half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.

For Mencken, the old-time journalist, or “newsie,” was a combination of François Villon and Shane. He was “wild-cattish.” He was free-lance, a knight for hire. In 1927, Mencken was already looking back nostalgically to the time when a journalist “used to make as much as a bartender or a police sergeant”; now “he makes as much as the average doctor or lawyer, and his wife, if he has one, maybe has social ambitions.” Today, of course, the “journalist” is often paid movie-star prices for movie-star appearances on television or along the lecture circuit, and he needs no wife to inspire him to a cozy lunch à deux with Nancy Reagan or Barbara Bush.

Mencken did acknowledge that, even then, some journalists liked to mingle with the wealthy and the powerful but, for him, there was always a greater fascination in those lower depths where dwell bartenders and police sergeants.

Mencken’s ideal popular paper for that vast public which “gets all its news by listening” (today one would change “listening” to “staring” – at television) would be “printed throughout, as First Readers are printed, in words of one syllable. It should avoid every idea beyond the understanding of a boy of ten” on the ground that “all ideas are beyond them. They can grasp only events.” But they will heed only those events that are presented as drama in “the form of combat, and it must be a very simple combat with one side clearly right and the other clearly wrong. They can no more imagine neutrality than they can imagine the fourth dimension.” Thus, Mencken anticipated not only the television news program but the television political campaign with its combative thirty-second spot commercials and sound-bites. Movies were already showing the way, and Mencken acknowledged the wisdom of the early movie magnates whose simpleminded screened agons had made them rich. Unfortunately, once rich, they pined for culture, against which Mencken sternly warns with his famous injunction: “No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

Today, Mencken’s boisterous style and deadpan hyperboles are very difficult even for “educated” Americans to deal with, and Sanskrit to the generality. Although every American has a sense of humor – it is his birthright and encoded somewhere in the Constitution – few Americans have ever been able to cope with wit or irony, and even the simplest jokes often cause unease, especially today, when every phrase must be examined for covert sexism, racism, ageism.

American character (which does and does not exist) fascinated Mencken, who observed, in 1918, that the universal image of Uncle Sam the money-grubber was mistaken. “The character that actually marks off the American is not money-hunger at all; it is what might be called, at the risk of misunderstanding, social aspiration.” For the American, money plays only a part in moving upward “to break down some barrier of caste, to secure the acceptance of his betters.” Unlike Europe, “no one has a station” (so far as he knows, of course: class is a national dirty secret) “unless he makes it for himself.” Of course Mencken lived in simpler times. For the American of 1918, “there is always something just behind him and tantalizing him, menacing him and causing him to sweat.”

Mencken quotes Wendell Phillips. “More than any other people, we Americans are afraid of one another.” Mencken acknowledges this truth, and he puts it down to the desire to conform, which means howling with the rest of the mindless pack as it careens from nowhere to nowhere in pursuit of such instant enemies of the week as Qaddafi, Noriega, Saddam, put in place by our packmeisters, successively, like that mechanical rabbit used to keep racing dogs on course. For this sense of collective security, the individual must sacrifice himself in order “to belong to something larger and safer than he is,” and he can “work off his steam within prudent limits. Beyond lie the national taboos. Beyond lie true independence and the heavy penalties that go therewith.”

A century earlier, that shrewd passerby Tocqueville also noted the force of the majority on the individual to conform. But Mencken was obliged to live a lifetime in such a society and so, unlike the French penologist, he could present data from inside the stammer: “The taboos that I have mentioned are extraordinarily harsh and numerous. They stand around nearly every subject that is genuinely important to man: they hedge in free opinion and experimentation on all sides. Consider, for example, the matter of religion. It is debated freely and furiously in almost every country in the world save the United States,” but here the critic is silenced. “The result is that all religions are equally safeguarded against criticism, and that all of them lose vitality. We protect the status quo, and so make steady war upon revision and improvement.”

In August 1925, Mencken meditated on how Europeans view Americans, and how they noted “our growing impatience with the free play of ideas, our increasing tendency to reduce all virtues to the single one of conformity, our relentless and all pervading standardization…. Europe doesn’t fear our military or economic prowess, rather it is Henry Ford that gives them the shivers…. By Americanization it means Fordization – and not only in industry but also in politics, art and even religion.” Nor is this simply the spontaneous power of public opinion; it is the deliberate power of the state brought into play. “No other nation of today is so rigorously policed. The lust to standardize and regulate extends to the most trivial minutia of private life.”

At the time that Mencken wrote this, alcohol had been prohibited by law to the American people, as well as almost every form of sex, disturbing reading matter, and so on. Mencken also adverted to the Scopes Trial of that year, whose verdict forbade the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in the schools of Christian Tennessee. This trial convinced thoughtful Europeans that Americanism was “a conspiracy of dull and unimaginative men, fortuitously made powerful, against all the ideas and ideals that seem sound to their betters,” leading the Europeans to suspect “that a nation cherishing such notions and feelings, and with the money and the men to enforce them, deserved to be watched very carefully.”

* * *

As a first-generation American, Mencken liked playing the vaudeville German, with a passion for beer, Brahms, German culture. “My grandfather made a mistake when he came to America, and I have always lived in the wrong country.” Like so many echt Americans, Mencken deeply resented the British. Not only did he share in the tribal dislike of Teuton for Anglo but he resented the ease with which the Brits manipulated American politics in their favor at the time of the two World Wars. During the First World War, Mencken’s pro-Germanism got him banned from the Sun. But despite Mencken’s somewhat stagy dislike of Brits, socialism, radicals, the “Anglo-maniacal” Woodrow Wilson, and the reformers Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, he tended to make very good patriotic sense of American politics.

Mencken notes that from the start of the republic, “setting aside religion, [politics] was literally the only concern of the people. All men of ability and ambition turned to it for self-expression.” This is wondrously wise and an echo of Pericles’ comment that the man who thinks politics not his business has no business. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, politics drew “the best literary talent into its service – Franklin, Jefferson and Lincoln may well stand as examples – it left the cultivation of belles lettres to women and second-rate men.” Now, of course, the second-raters have taken over politics. As for beautiful letters …

Mencken’s alarm at our system’s degradation was in no way based upon a starry-eyed notion of the revered but always circumvented Constitution. Although that long-ignored primer says that only Congress may declare war, President Bush has only recently confided to us that “we have fought 204 wars of which only five were declared,” so put that in your peace pipe and smoke it! Mencken would not have been startled. For him, “all government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.” This must have got a good chuckle from the Baltimore burgher over his breakfast of chipped beef and scrapple.

Mencken continues. Government “invades his liberty and collars his money in order to protect him, but in actuality, it always makes a stiff profit on the exchange. This profit represents the income of the professional politicians, nine-tenths of whom are professional rogues.” That was then. The rogues are smoother now and often endearing on television. They are also no longer paid for by such chicken feed as kickbacks on city contracts. Rather, they are the proud employees of the bankers and the military industrial procurers who have bought them their offices, both square and oval. But though we are worse off than in Mencken’s day, he was at least able to give one cheer for the Constitution, or at least for the idea of such a document, as a kind of stoplight: “So far you may go, but no further. No matter what excuse or provocation, you may not invade certain rights, or pass certain kinds of laws.”

Inevitably, Mencken’s journalism is filled with stories of how our enumerated rights are constantly being evaded or struck down because it is the reflexive tactic of the politicians “to invade the Constitution stealthily, and then wait to see what happens. If nothing happens they go on more boldly; if there is a protest they reply hotly that the Constitution is worn out and absurd, and that progress is impossible under the dead hand. This is the time to watch them especially.”

Mencken also notes that in the first decade of this century there was “a sudden change…. Holes began to be punched in the Bill of Rights, and new laws of strange and often fantastic shape began to slip through them. The hysteria of the late war completed the process. The espionage act enlarged the holes to great fissures. Citizens began to be pursued into their houses, arrested without warrants, and jailed without any form of trial. The ancient writ of habeas corpus was suspended: the Bill of Rights was boldly thrown overboard.”

Although the extent of the decadence of the democratic process at our end of the century was unknown if not unsuspected, to Mencken, he knew enough of history and its engine, entropy, to declare that “no government, of its own motion, will increase its own weakness, for that would mean to acquiesce in its own destruction … governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down…. Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.” As a self-styled “Presbyterian Tory” (with Manichean tendencies), Mencken regarded attempts at reform as doomed, while the thought of any Utopian system bettering things caused him deep distress because to create Utopia you would have to enslave more and more people in order to better – while worsening – their lot.

Curiously enough, of all those good and bad Americans who shuddered at the sudden sharp wind from the east known as communism, Mencken, as early as 1930, figured that there was no way that communism could ever set up shop within our alabaster cities much less take sickle to our fruited plains. Mencken’s reasoning is exquisitely sound: “That Americans, in the mass, have anything properly describable as keen wits is surely far from self-evident. On the contrary, it seems likely that, if anything, they lie below the civilized norm.” Incidentally, for several decades I have been trying to convince Europeans that Americans are not innately stupid but merely ignorant and that with a proper educational system, etcetera. But the more one reads Mencken, the more one eyes suspiciously the knuckles of his countrymen, looking to see callouses from too constant a contact with the greensward.

Mencken believes Americans to be more gullible than most people, dwelling as we do in “the home of freak economic schemes” (often, alas, contagious) and “the happy hunting ground of the most blatant and absurd sort of charlatans in politics.” From this intimate knowledge of the American “mind,” Mencken thinks that Americans, as lovers of “the bizarre and the irrational would embrace communism with joy, just as multitudes of them, in a previous age, embraced free silver. But, as everyone knows, they will have none of it.” Mencken concedes the attraction of Utopias to the foreign-born and educated Americans, but “two-thirds of the native-born Communists that I have encountered are so plainly mashuggah that it would be flattery to call them stupid.”

Mencken gives two reasons for the failure of communism/socialism to take root in the United States. The first is that Americans had long since been vaccinated by the likes of Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt against this sort of virus: In effect, the folks had been there before and they were aware of so “gross” a social and economic solution. Mencken’s second reason strikes me as not only true but inspired. Americans were more sensitive to “the concrete debacle in Russia” because “they probably felt themselves, in a subtle and unconscious way, to be nearer to the Russians than any Europeans. Russia was not like Europe, but it was strangely like America. In the same way the Russians were like Americans. They, too, were naturally religious and confiding; they, too, were below the civilized average in intelligence; and they, too, believed in democracy, and were trying to give it a trial.”

For Mencken, communist literature was “as childish as the literature of Christian Science,” while communism itself “will probably disappear altogether when the Russian experiment comes to a climax, and Bolshevism either converts itself into a sickly imitation of capitalism or blows up with a bang. The former issue seems more likely.” This is not bad for 1930.

As Mencken thought all government bad, it follows that he was a Jeffersonian who believed that the least we had of a bad thing the better. As “an incurable Tory in politics,” he was congenitally antiliberal, though “I always give heed to them politely, for they are at least free men.” Surprisingly, he has respectful words for Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, victims of federal persecution (it is not taught in our schools that once upon a time, at the behest of the Secretary of Labor, foreign-born Americans could be deported, without due process). Mencken finds the two radicals “extremely intelligent – [and] once their aberrant political ideals are set aside they are seen to be very sharp wits. They think clearly, unsentimentally and even a bit brilliantly. They write simple, glowing and excellent English.” Mencken confesses that he cannot understand how they can believe so childishly in the proletariat, but “the fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret. All of us, in our several ways, are illogical, irrational, almost insane.” Mencken’s tolerance for the bees aswarm in the bonnets of others was very great if the swarm be honest and its honey pure.

The state as hostile tropism is Mencken’s central philosophic notion as a journalist. Whether the state is used to deport or imprison people for their ideas or the color of their skin (as in the case of the Nisei) or simply to harass citizens who drink whisky, he was that malevolent state’s hard critic. He illuminates our marvelous Bill of Rights, no sooner promulgated than struck with the first of those sets of alien and sedition acts that continue, in one form or another, to this day. He is very funny about the Noble Experiment to prohibit alcohol (1913-33), which made the United States the world’s joke-nation, a title still unceded.

As for America’s once triumphant mass-production of the automobile, he notes that this achievement promptly became a pretext for the persecution of the citizenry by creating “a body of laws which fills two courtrooms to suffocation every day (in Baltimore), and keeps three judges leaping and tugging like fire-engine horses. The situation is made more intoxicating by the fact that nine-tenths of the criminals are persons who would not otherwise fall into their toils – that the traffic regulations tap whole new categories of victims…. The ideal of the Polizei, at all times and everywhere, is to get their hands upon every citizen at least once a day.” Today the tobacco smoker is at risk. Tomorrow, who knows who will fall victim to the state’s endless sense of fun.

* * *

Like all good writers, Mencken is a dramatist, at his best when he shows us the ship of state in motion on high seas while his character studies of the crew of this ship of fools still give delight, though every last one now lies full fathom five. Ding dong dell.

As a reporter, Mencken covered many political conventions from 1904 to 1948. As a Baltimore Sun columnist, he wrote about national politics whenever the spirit moved or, indeed, shoved him. In 1925 he was amused, as always, by the collapse yet again of the Liberals and their journals: “The Nation gradually abandons Liberalism for libertarianism. The New Republic hangs on, but is obviously not as vigorous and confident as it used to be.” Mencken delighted in “Dr. Coolidge,” Liberalism’s natural enemy. But then “a politician has no actual principles. He is in favor of whatever seems to him to be popular at the moment.” Even so, Coolidge “believes naturally in Law Enforcement – by lawful means if possible: if not, by any means at hand, lawful or lawless … he actually got his first considerable office … by posturing as a fascist of the most advanced type.” This was in 1919 when Governor Coolidge of Massachusetts broke the Boston police strike and became famous.

But Coolidge is only an engaging character actor in a drama whose star throughout is William Jennings Bryan (Democratic candidate for President 1896, 1900, 1908 – spokesman or -person for free silver and the common person – or man). Bryan had become famous and popular and dangerous to the status quo when he put together a huge coalition of poor farmers and poorer laborers and, in their interest, spoke against the rich and their gold standard. Bryan gave the country’s ownership its first big scare since the rebellion of Daniel Shays. Alas, Mencken was not at the convention in ’96, when with a single speech (“You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”) Bryan got the nomination at the age of thirty-six. As his friend and ally, my grandfather, used to say, “He never learned anything else ever again in his life.”

As much as Mencken despised Bryan, the demagogue, he is moderately touched by Bryan’s appearance at the 1904 convention “in his familiar alpaca coat and his old white string tie,” looking “weak and haggard” (he was suffering from pneumonia) until he started to speak and brought down the house, yet again. Four years later he would be the doomed nominee: four years after that, Wilson made him his Secretary of State, a post he resigned when he saw that the Administration was moving toward war, an act of principle that Mencken rather meanly does not credit in a man he calls “the magnificent job-seeker.”

At the end, Mencken was present in Dayton, Tennessee for the Scopes Trial, where the old man seemed “maleficent” to Mencken when he spoke for superstition and the literal interpretation of the Bible. Bryan and the Bible won the day, but Bryan himself was dead a few weeks later, killed, my grandmother always said, by an ungovernable passion for “chicken and rice and gravy.”

For Mencken, Bryan is the id – to use Freudian jargon – of American politics: the ignorant, religious, underclass leader whose fateful and dramatic climax came in the trial to determine whether or not we are descended from monkeys. Herbert Hoover is the ego; he also represents the British interest, forever trying to draw the great stupid republic into their wars and combinations. Calvin Coolidge is a near-fascist clown whose career is “as appalling and as fascinating as a two-headed boy.” Warren G. Harding is the master of a glorious near-English in which “the relations between word and meaning have long since escaped him.” Harding’s style “reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.” Mencken’s descriptions of these wondrous clowns are still a delight because, though the originals are long since erased from the collective “memory” of the United States of Amnesia, the types persist. “I am not,” Mencken observes demurely at one point, when blood is on the walls, “a constructive critic.”

For Mencken, “the best of [politicians] seem to be almost as bad as the worst. As private citizens they are often highly intelligent and realistic men, and admirable in every way.” But because of the superstitious mass, they are not allowed to make sense. “When they accomplish anything, it is usually by accident.” Even of his sometime hero, Al Smith, he deplored his speeches but then, “like all habitual orators, he plainly likes to make speeches, no matter how dull the subject or hot the hall.”

Mencken is quite aware that behind the diverting spectacle of our politics stands the ownership of the country, Business. He understands the general preference of the Business-boss for the Lawyer-employee in politics. Partly it is because “a lawyer practising his craft under Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence becomes a pedant almost inevitably. The system he follows is expressly designed to shut out common sense,” which is just as well because “Big Business in America, is almost wholly devoid of anything even poetically describable as public spirit. It is frankly on the make…. Big Business was in favor of Prohibition, believing that a sober workman would made a better slave than one with a few drinks in him. It was in favor of all the gross robberies and extortions that went on in the [First] war,” and profited by the curtailment of civil liberties and so on. Coolidge was their man; so was Herbert Hoover, “the perfect self-seeker…. His principles are so vague that even his intimates seem unable to put them into words…. He knows who his masters are, and he will serve them.”

Mencken is also aware that there is a small but constant resistance to the “masters,” but he gives the resistance little aid or comfort. Essentially, he is on the side of Business if not Businessmen because “business is the natural art of the American people.” He pities those with “believing minds” who would follow this or that demagogue, and he lived long enough to attend the 1948 convention of the Progressive Party, where Henry Wallace picked up the banner marked Nay; but Mencken was put off not so much by the poignant, plaintive “nay” as he was by the coloring of the letters, red.

Even so, the Tory Mencken understands the roots of radicalism. Although “it is assumed that men become radicals because they are naturally criminal, or because they have been bribed by Russian gold,” what actually moves them “is simply the conviction that the Government they suffer under is unbearably and incurably corrupt…. The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.” But Mencken himself is no radical because “I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. But that is certainly not the common American view…. When they see an evil they try to remedy it – by peaceful means if possible, and if not, then by force.” Yet, paradoxically, Mencken can also write that “history … is the upward struggle of man, out of darkness and into light,” presumably a struggle with ooze alone.

Eventually, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would appear to be the answer to the radicals’ dream and Mencken regarded him, at the beginning, with a cold but not disapproving eye as FDR metamorphosed from a John the Baptist for Al Smith to the Christ himself, or the national super-ego. With some pleasure, Mencken described the Democratic convention that nominated FDR for Vice President, largely because he bore the name of a famous Republican President. Also, he was chosen to “perfume the ticket.” As “leader of the anti-Tammany Democrats in New York,” he could be counted on “to exorcise the Tammany split from the party.” Finally, “he is a civilized man and safely wet.”

When FDR’s turn came at Chicago in 1932, Mencken wrote, “I can recall no candidate of like importance who ever had so few fanatics whooping for him.” But Mencken allowed that FDR was good on radio, and he smiled a lot. By the 1940 convention, Mencken was hostile not only to the New Deal but to the approaching war. To Mencken, 1940 looked like a rerun of 1916, when Wilson had campaigned as “the man who kept us out of war.” Politics being nothing if not imitative of what has worked before, he glumly observed that “Roosevelt himself has promised categorically, on at least a dozen occasions, to keep out of the war, and with the most pious and eye-rolling solemnity” even though “his foreign policy … has been unbrokenly devious, dishonest and dishonorable. Claiming all the immunities of a neutral, he has misled the country into countless acts of war, and there is scarcely an article of international law that he has not violated.” But Roosevelt won the election. And the war came.

Roosevelt’s opponent in the election of 1940 was Wendell Willkie, an eloquent “barefoot boy,” as they called him, “from Wall Street,” with a Hoosier accent and considerable demagogic skills. Just before he was nominated, I shook his limp hand, and he glared at me with blind eyes in a white sweating face and croaked, “Ah’d be a lah-er if ah said ah diduhn wanna be Prez Nigh Stays.” The only occasion where I gazed as Mencken gazed upon the same political spectacle was the Republican convention at Philadelphia where Willkie was nominated. This was in June 1940 and I was guide to my blind grandfather, former Senator T. P. Gore. A Democrat, TPG was not about to miss any convention that might be fun. On a hot evening, we rode to the convention hall in a streetcar with former Vice President Charles G. Dawes, a bright, crickety little man, wearing a white straw hat. At the hall, the heat was dreadful. Young women gave out palmetto fans with “Fan for Van” written on them; thus, the great moose of Michigan, Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, majestically hurled himself into the ring. Senator Robert A. Taft was also a candidate. He was, even then, known as “Mr. Conservative.” Twelve years later, when he was denied the nomination in favor of D.D. Eisenhower, he let slip a terrible truth that no Republican can be nominated for President without the permission of the Chase Manhattan Bank.

We sat in the bleachers to stage left of the podium, where stood the former President, Herbert Hoover, face like a rosy marshmallow. Carefully, I described the scene for my blind grandfather; he had entered political history not only as the first senator from the new state of Oklahoma but as the orator who had started the longest demonstration ever recorded at any convention (for Bryan, at Denver, 1908). TPG was one of the few speakers that Mencken could endure, noting that in 1928, when he “rose to second the nomination of his old friend, Senator Reed, there was humor in his brief speech, and also a very impressive earnestness. He won the crowd instantly and got a great round of applause. No other rhetorician came near his mark.”

Hoover “stood before the mike like a schoolboy reciting a piece, and seldom varied his intonation or made a gesture.” Mencken brings it all alive to me a half-century later, though he finds Hoover paler than I did but then I had never seen the President before – or since. I was deeply impressed by Hoover’s rigid gravitas. But my grandfather, whose wit and politics were not unlike Mencken’s, after listening to the ovation for the ex-President, said, “Hoover’s the only man here who doesn’t know that he’s finished.”

As the galleries chanted, “We want Willkie,” I became addicted to the convention as then practiced and it is ironic that in 1968, thanks to some television “debates” with a right-wing publicist, I should have helped preside over the transformation of the party conventions from the comings-together of the nation’s tribes to a series of low-rated TV specials. No one can now say, with Mencken, “Me, I like [conventions] because they amuse me. I never get tired of the show … so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour.”

Currently, any use of the word “race” in the United States is considered an a priori proof of the user’s racism. Abstract nouns are now subject to close scrutiny to make sure that the noun’s deployer is not a racist or sexist or ageist or bigot. Meanwhile, any word or phrase that might cause distress must undergo erasure while euphemism (the E- – or is it U- or Eu- – word?) is the order of the day, as “body bag” suddenly becomes, in Pentagonese, “human remains pouch” since “pouch” is a resolutely cheery word, suggesting cute marsupials Down Under, while “bag” is a downer, as in “bag lady,” Munich, appeasement, Hitler. A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren’t they?

Mencken is a nice antidote. Politically, he is often right but seldom correct by today’s stern standards. In a cheery way, he dislikes most minorities and if he ever had a good word to say about the majority of his countrymen, I have yet to come across it. Recently, when his letters were published, it was discovered that He Did Not Like the Jews, and that he had said unpleasant things about them not only as individuals but In General, plainly the sign of a Hitler-Holocaust enthusiast. So shocked was everyone that even the New York Review of Books‘ unofficial de-anti-Semitiser, Garry Wills (he salvaged Dickens, barely), has yet to come to his aid with An Explanation. But in Mencken’s private correspondence, he also snarls at black Americans, Orientals, Britons, women, and WASPs, particularly the clay-eating Appalachians, whom he regarded as subhuman. But private irritability is of no consequence when compared to what really matters, public action.

Far from being an anti-Semite, Mencken was one of the first journalists to denounce the persecution of the Jews in Germany at a time when the New York Times, say, was notoriously reticent. On November 27, 1938, Mencken writes (Baltimore Sun), “It is to be hoped that the poor Jews now being robbed and mauled in Germany will not take too seriously the plans of various politicians to rescue them.” He then reviews the various schemes to “rescue” the Jews from the Nazis, who had not yet announced their own final solution.

To the British proposal that the Jews be admitted to British Guiana, Teutonophile Mencken thinks that the Ostjuden might hack it in British Guiana but not the German Jews, as “they constitute an undoubtedly superior group…. Try to imagine a German-Jewish lawyer or insurance man, or merchant, or schoolmaster [in] a place where the climate is that of a Turkish bath. Tanganyika he thought marginally better but still pretty bad, at least “as good as the worst parts of Mexico.” He then suggests that Canada could “absorb 100,000 or even 200,000 with ease, and they would be useful acquisitions, especially in the western prairie populations, which are dominated today by a low-grade of farmers, without any adequate counterbalance of a competent middle class.” Today Mencken could not write this because the Farmers Anti-Defamation League of Saskatchewan would be offended, and his column banned in Canada. “Australia, now almost as exclusive as Sing Sing, which it somewhat resembles in population, could use quite as many [Jews] as Canada and New Zealand.” The Australian Government would, today, file a protest; and Mencken’s column would be banned.

Then Mencken gets down to business: “The American plan for helping the refugees is less openly brutal than the British plan, but almost as insulting to them, and even more futile.” After many official and unofficial condemnations of Germany, including “the Hon. Mr. Roosevelt’s” declaration that “he could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a Twentieth Century civilization,” the President is still not willing to relax the immigration laws or do anything “that might cause him political inconvenience.” Mencken finds such “pecksniffery … gross and disgusting … and I hope that American Jews will not be fetched by it.” Mencken also notes how the “Aframerican press” found amazing Roosevelt’s solicitousness for German Jews, so unlike his complaisance to the ongoing crimes against black Americans.

Mencken concludes: “There is only one way to help the refugees, and that is to find places for them in a country in which they can really live. Why shouldn’t the United States take in a couple of hundred thousand of them, or even all of them?” He notes two popular objections. One, there is already a lot of unemployment in the United States, to which he responds that it is unlikely the Jewish immigrants will either loaf or be incompetent. Two, there is anti-Semitism of the sort then being fanned by the Ku Klux Klan but, as he observes, “not many Jews are likely to go to Mississippi or Arkansas.”

I am certain that those who wish to will be able to find anti-Semitism in Mencken’s proposal to admit all Jewish refugees. Certainly he generalizes about Jews. (How does he know that they don’t all want to go to Mississippi?) But then perhaps the whole message is code; certainly the remark about Jewish “efficiency” is a classic blood libel.

As of 1934, Mencken was moderately impressed by Eretz Israel and agreeably condescending to the Arabs, who “breed like flies but die in the same way.” Mencken was generally approving of the European Jewish settlers, though he predictably cast a cold eye on the collectivist farms and kibbutzim. Of one of them, he wrote, presciently, “It was founded in 1921, and is still in the first flush of its success. Will it last? Probably not. As soon as its present kindergarteners grow up they will begin to marry outside, and then there will be quarrels over shares, and it will no doubt go the way of Brook Farm, Amana and all the other predecessors.” Mencken thought that there was only a fifty-fifty chance of the Jewish plantation in Palestine enduring. “On the one hand (Ere[t]z Israel) is being planted intelligently and shows every sign of developing in a healthy manner. But on the other hand there are the Arabs – and across the Jordan there is a vast reservoir of them, all hungry, all full of enlightened self-interest. Let some catastrophe in world politics take the British cops away, and the Jews who now fatten on so many lovely farms will have to fight desperately for their property and their lives.” The catastrophe came right on schedule in the form of Hitler and of such professional Jewish terrorists as Begin and Shamir.

One of the few groups that Americans are fairly free to denounce, after the Arabs, are the Japanese. Mencken was most alert to “the yellow peril.” (I used quotes to forestall the usual letters accusing me of hating all Orientals along with Mencken, when neither did nor does.) In 1939, Mencken was thinking seriously about Japan. As there is no public memory in the United States, let me remind the reader that since the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905, the United States had been preparing for a war with Japan in order to establish who would be numero uno not only in the Pacific but in Asia.

By 1939, Japan was busy conquering China, having acquired Korea and Manchuria, and the Nipponese imperial eye was set on the Southeast Asian oil fields, at that time in the hands of two local Asiatic powers, the British and the Dutch.

As a “racist,” Mencken blithely generalized about race, a real no-no in today’s world, where each and every one of the five billion people on our common crowded planet is a treasured and unique creation, sharing nothing at all with anyone else except, maybe, the Big Fella in the Sky. But generalize he did, something no longer allowed in freedom’s land. Mencken wrote: “The Japanese, judged by Western eyes, are an extremely homely people, and no doubt the fact has a good deal to do with their general unpopularity.” Mencken thought that they look both “sinister and ludicrous,” not an encouraging or likable combination. “They look, talking one with another, like Boy Scouts with buck teeth, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles…. I have never met a Caucasian who professed any affection for the Japs, though there are not a few white fans for the scenery,” etc. Already guilty of Racist Generalizing, Mencken proceeded, sickeningly, to grade all Japanese: “They are a people of very considerable talents, and will have to be reckoned with in the future history of the human race. They have long since got past the stage of sitting respectfully at the feet of the West…. In all the fields of human endeavor save theology, politics and swine justice they are showing the way to their ofay mentors. They have made important and durable contributions to knowledge in each and every one of the exact sciences, and they have taken such a lead in trade and industry that the only way left to beat them is to murder them.” But even this solution, particularly favored by England, won’t be easy because they have “a considerable knack for war.”

As “nearly all white men dislike the Japs and like the Chinese,” Mencken tried to give an accurate impression of our soon-to-be great adversary and, as I gaze out over the Hollywood Hills toward Japanese Universal Pictures, our eventual conquerors. But accuracy in reporting on Pacific matters is always difficult because the American press have always given us a view of the Japanese that “is seldom accurate and not always honest,” to say the least. As of 1939, China and Chiang Kai-shek were, as always, on the brink of victory; but, somehow, Japan always won and, as Mencken remarked, “The Japs, in truth, had as sound a mandate to clean up China as the United States have had to clean up Cuba.” Or Mexico, Nicaragua, Salvador, Panama, Grenada, not to mention Korea, Cambodia, Iran, and Iraq.

Three years later, the Japs, heavily provoked, sank the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and the great race war was on, with Round One (with guns) going to the white race (1945) and Round Two (with computers) going to the yellow race (1990). Mencken was particularly good – that is, prophetic – on American skullduggeries south of the border, where he often visited and duly noted our eerie inability to do anything honest or even intelligent, whether in Cuba or Haiti or in dealing with Nicaragua’s Sandino.

Like Puck, Mencken found most mortals fools. He showed us odd glimpses of the vacuous Duke of Windsor and his Baltimore lady as well as of Rudolph Valentino, whom he once entertained in what must have been an unusually alcoholic session for a young Italian. Mencken commiserated with the assault by the press on the lad’s manhood and he shed a public tear at the beauty’s demise not long after.

In literary matters, Mencken was a shield to the meat and potatoes of naturalism-realism, a sounder diet than one of, shall we say, frozen fish? He was a champion of Dreiser; a foe of censorship. He was good on Conrad but at sea with James and insensitive to Wharton. He knew cooking and provided a sound recipe for “shore soup,” the crab-based glory of the eastern shore of Maryland. He was passionate about music. Disliked jazz but admired “Aframerican” musicians. Interested in architecture, he was appalled by the ugliness of American cities except for San Francisco, where “there is nothing European about the way life is lived; the color is all Asiatic” because it is so happily cut off from “the rest of the dun and dour Republic.” He described the average person’s way of life in New York as that of a “sardine in a can,” while “the grass in the so-called parks looks like embalmed sauerkraut.” He hated chiropractors. He was amazed, as an editor, to find that graduates of West Point wrote the best English. He took a bitter pride in “the love of ugliness [that] is apparently inherent in the American people. They cherish and venerate the unspeakable.”

Matthew Arnold wrote that a “style is the saying in the best way what you have to say. The what you have to say depends on your age.” Mencken certainly said what he had to say about the age that he had been assigned to. When asked why, if he could find nothing to “revere” in the United States, he lived there, he replied, “Why do men go to zoos?”

Religion as generally practiced by the Americans of his day, he saw as a Great Wall of China designed to keep civilization out while barbarism might flourish within the gates. He himself was a resolute breacher of the Great Wall, and to the extent that some civilization has got through, he is one of the few Americans that we can thank. Plainly, so clear and hard a writer would not be allowed in the mainstream press of today, and those who think that they would like him back would be the first to censor and censure him.

As for Mencken himself, he wrote his own epitaph in 1921 for The Smart Set: “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.” I realize that he has, viciously, used the G-word and, even worse, the long-since-banned H-word. But there he is. And there we are, lucky we.

(1991)