American journalist and writer (1880–1956)
"Mencken" redirects here. For other people named Mencken, see Mencken (surname).
Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English.[1] He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes Trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also gained him attention. The term Menckenian has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, including his combative rhetorical and prose style.
As a scholar, Mencken is known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States. As an admirer of the GermanphilosopherFriedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of organized religion, theism, censorship, populism, and representative democracy, the last of which he viewed as a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors.[2] Mencken was a supporter of scientific progress and was critical of osteopathy and chiropractic. He was also an open critic of economics.
Mencken opposed the American entry into World War I and World War II. Some of the opinions in his private diary entries have been described by some researchers as racist and antisemitic,[3] although this characterization has been disputed. Larry S. Gibson argued that Mencken's views on race changed significantly between his early and later private writings which started when he was 50, and that it was more accurate to describe Mencken as elitist rather than racist.[4] He seemed to show a genuine enthusiasm for militarism but never in its American form. "War is a good thing," he wrote, "because it is honest; it admits the central fact of human nature... A nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid."[5]
His longtime home in the Union Square neighborhood of West Baltimore was turned into a city museum, the H. L. Mencken House. His papers were distributed among various city and university libraries, with the largest collection held in the Mencken Room at the central branch of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library.[6]
Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 12, 1880. He was the son of Anna Margaret (Abhau) and August Mencken Sr., a cigar factory owner. He was of German ancestry and spoke German in his childhood.[7] When Henry was three, his family moved into a new home at 1524 Hollins Street facing Union Square park in the Union Square neighborhood of old West Baltimore. Apart from five years residing elsewhere during the marriage that left him a widower in middle age, Mencken would stay there for the rest of his life.[8]
In his bestselling memoir Happy Days, he described his childhood in Baltimore as "placid, secure, uneventful and happy".[9]
When he was nine years old, he read Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which he later described as "the most stupendous event in my life".[10] He became determined to become a writer and read voraciously. In one winter while in high school he read William Makepeace Thackeray and then "proceeded backward to Addison, Steele, Pope, Swift, Johnson and the other magnificos of the Eighteenth century". He read the entire canon of Shakespeare and became an ardent fan of Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Huxley. As a boy, Mencken also had practical interests, photography and chemistry in particular, and eventually had a home chemistry laboratory in which he performed experiments of his own design, some of them inadvertently dangerous.[12]
He began his primary education in the mid-1880s at Professor Knapp's School on the east side of Holliday Street between East Lexington and Fayette Streets, next to the Holliday Street Theatre and across from the newly constructed Baltimore City Hall. The site today is the War Memorial and City Hall Plaza laid out in 1926 in memory of World War I dead. At 15, in June 1896, he graduated as valedictorian from the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, at the time a males-only mathematics, technical and science-oriented public high school.
He worked for three years in his father's cigar factory. He disliked the work, especially the sales aspect of it, and resolved to leave, with or without his father's blessing. In early 1898 he took a writing class at the Cosmopolitan University, a free correspondence school. This was to be the entirety of Mencken's formal post-secondary education in journalism, or in any other subject. Upon his father's death a few days after Christmas in the same year, the business passed to his uncle, and Mencken was free to pursue his career in journalism. He applied in February 1899 to the Morning Herald newspaper (which became the Baltimore Morning Herald in 1900) and was hired part-time, but still kept his position at the factory for a few months. In June he was hired as a full-time reporter.[citation needed]
Mencken served as a reporter at the Herald for six years. Fewer than two-and-a-half years after the Great Baltimore Fire, the paper was purchased in June 1906 by Charles H. Grasty, the owner and editor of The News since 1892 and competing owner and publisher Gen. Felix Agnus, of the town's oldest (since 1773) and largest daily, The Baltimore American. They proceeded to divide the staff, assets and resources of The Herald between them. Mencken then moved to The Baltimore Sun, where he worked for Charles H. Grasty. He continued to contribute to The Sun,The Evening Sun (founded 1910) and The Sunday Sun full-time until 1948, when he stopped writing after suffering a stroke.
Mencken began writing the editorials and opinion pieces that made his name at The Sun. On the side, he wrote short stories, a novel, and even poetry, which he later revealed. In 1908, he became a literary critic for The Smart Set magazine, and in 1924 he and George Jean Nathan founded and edited The American Mercury, published by Alfred A. Knopf. It soon developed a national circulation and became highly influential on college campuses across America. In 1933, Mencken resigned as editor.
During the Great Depression, Mencken did not support the New Deal, which cost him popularity. In 1931, the Arkansas legislature passed a motion to pray for Mencken's soul after he had called the state the "apex of moronia".[14] In the mid-1930s, Mencken feared President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal liberalism as a powerful force. Mencken was "deeply conservative, resentful of change, looking back upon the 'happy days' of a bygone time, wanted no part of the world that the New Deal promised to bring in" according to Charles A. Fecher, [15] Mencken had strong reservations regarding U.S. participation in World War II. He ceased writing for The Baltimore Sun for several years, focusing on his memoirs and other projects as editor while he served as an adviser for the paper that had been his home for nearly his entire career.
In 1948, he briefly returned to the political scene to cover the presidential election in which President Harry S. Truman faced RepublicanThomas Dewey and Henry A. Wallace of the Progressive Party. His later work consisted of humorous, anecdotal, and nostalgic essays that were first published in The New Yorker and then collected in the books Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days.
On August 27, 1930, Mencken married Sara Haardt, a German American professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore and an author eighteen years his junior.[16] Haardt had led an unsuccessful effort in Alabama to ratify the 19th Amendment.[17][18] The two met in 1923, after Mencken delivered a lecture at Goucher; a seven-year courtship ensued. The marriage made national headlines, and many were surprised that Mencken, who once called marriage "the end of hope" and who was well known for mocking relations between the sexes, had gone to the altar. "The Holy Spirit informed and inspired me," Mencken said. "Like all other infidels, I am superstitious and always follow hunches: this one seemed to be a superb one."[19] Even more startling, he was marrying an Alabama native, despite his having written scathing essays about the American South. Haardt was in poor health from tuberculosis throughout their marriage and died in 1935 of meningitis, leaving Mencken grief-stricken.[20] He had always championed her writing, and after her death, had a collection of her short stories published under the title Southern Album. Haardt's childhood friend, Alabama author Sara Mayfield wrote extensively about Haardt and Mencken in her 1968 book The Constant Circle: H.L. Mencken and His Friends.[21]
On November 23, 1948, Mencken suffered a stroke, which left him aware and fully conscious but nearly unable to read or write and able to speak only with difficulty. After his stroke, Mencken enjoyed listening to classical music, and after some recovery of his ability to speak, talking with friends, but he sometimes referred to himself in the past tense, as if he were already dead. During the last year of his life, his friend and biographer William Manchester read to him daily.[22]
Mencken died in his sleep on January 29, 1956.[23][24] He was interred in Baltimore's Loudon Park Cemetery.[25] A very small, short, and private service was held, in accordance with Mencken's wishes.[26]
Although it does not appear on his tombstone, Mencken, during his Smart Set days, wrote a joking epitaph for himself:
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.[27]
In his capacity as editor, Mencken became close friends with the leading literary figures of his time, including Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Hergesheimer, Anita Loos, Ben Hecht, Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell, and Alfred Knopf, as well as a mentor to several young reporters, including Alistair Cooke. He also championed artists whose works he considered worthy. For example, he asserted that books such as Caught Short! A Saga of Wailing Wall Street (1929), by Eddie Cantor (ghostwritten by David Freedman) did more to pull America out of the Great Depression than all government measures combined. He also mentored John Fante. Thomas Hart Benton illustrated an edition of Mencken's book Europe After 8:15.
Mencken also published many works under various pseudonyms, including Owen Hatteras, John H Brownell, William Drayham, WLD Bell, and Charles Angoff.[28] As a ghostwriter for the physician Leonard K. Hirshberg, he wrote a series of articles, and in 1910, most of a book about the care of babies.
Mencken admired the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (he was the first writer to provide a scholarly analysis in English of Nietzsche's views and writings) and Joseph Conrad. His humor and satire owed much to Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain. He did much to defend Dreiser despite freely admitting his faults, including stating forthrightly that Dreiser often wrote badly and was gullible. Mencken expressed his appreciation for William Graham Sumner in a 1941 collection of Sumner's essays and regretted never having known Sumner personally. In contrast, Mencken was scathing in his criticism of the German philosopher Hans Vaihinger, whom Mencken described as "an extremely dull author" and whose famous book Philosophy of 'As If' he dismissed as an unimportant "foot-note to all existing systems".[29]
Mencken recommended for publication philosopher and author Ayn Rand's first novel, We the Living and called it "a really excellent piece of work". Shortly afterward, Rand addressed him in correspondence as "the greatest representative of a philosophy" to which she wanted to dedicate her life, "individualism", and later listed him as her favorite columnist.[30]
For Mencken, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the finest work of American literature. He particularly relished Mark Twain's depiction of a succession of gullible and ignorant townspeople, "boobs", as Mencken referred to them, who are repeatedly gulled by a pair of colorful con men: the deliberately pathetic "Duke" and "Dauphin", with whom Huck and Jim travel down the Mississippi River. For Mencken, the depiction epitomizes the hilarious dark side of America, where democracy, as defined by Mencken, is "the worship of jackals by jackasses".[31]
Such turns of phrase evoked the erudite cynicism and rapier sharpness of language displayed by Ambrose Bierce in his darkly satiric The Devil's Dictionary. A noted curmudgeon,[32] democratic in subjects attacked, Mencken savaged politics,[33] hypocrisy, and social convention. A master of English, he was given to bombast and once disdained the lowly hot dog bun's descent into "the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, plaster of Paris, flecks of bath sponge and atmospheric air all compact".[34]
Defining Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy", Mencken believed that the U.S. had not cast aside the Puritans' influence.[35] He opined that American culture, unlike its European counterparts, had not attained intellectual freedom, and judged literature by moral orthodoxy and not by artistic merit.[35] His most outspoken essay was "Puritanism as a Literary Force" from his 1917 collection of essays A Book of Prefaces:
The Puritan's utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution – these things have put an almost unbearable burden up on the exchange of ideas in the United States.[36]
As a nationally syndicated columnist and book author, he commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians and contemporary movements, such as the temperance movement. Mencken was a keen cheerleader of scientific progress, skeptical of economic theories and strongly opposed to osteopathic/chiropractic medicine. He also debunked the idea of objective news reporting since "truth is a commodity that the masses of undifferentiated men cannot be induced to buy" and added a humorous description of how "Homo Boobus", like "higher mammalia", is moved by "whatever gratifies his prevailing yearnings".[37]
As a frank admirer of Nietzsche, Mencken was a detractor of representative democracy, which he believed was a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors.[2] Also, like Nietzsche, Mencken lambasted religious belief and the very concept of God, as he was an unflinching atheist. He was particularly hostile to Christian fundamentalism, Christian Science and creationism, and towards the "Booboisie", his word for the ignorant middle classes.[38][39][40] In the summer of 1925 he attended the famous Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, and wrote scathing columns for the Baltimore Sun (these widely syndicated) and American Mercury mocking the anti-evolution fundamentalists (especially William Jennings Bryan). The play Inherit the Wind is a fictionalized version of the trial, and as noted above the cynical reporter E.K. Hornbeck is based on Mencken. In 1926, he deliberately had himself arrested for selling an issue of The American Mercury, which was banned in Boston by the Comstock laws.[41] Mencken heaped scorn not only on the public officials he disliked but also on the state of American elective politics itself.
In the summer of 1926, Mencken followed with great interest the Los Angeles grand jury inquiry into the famous Canadian American evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. She was accused of faking her reported kidnapping and the case attracted national attention. There was every expectation that Mencken would continue his previous pattern of anti-fundamentalist articles, this time with a searing critique of McPherson. Unexpectedly, he came to her defense by identifying various local religious and civic groups that were using the case as an opportunity to pursue their respective ideological agendas against the embattled Pentecostal minister.[42] He spent several weeks in Hollywood, California, and wrote many scathing and satirical columns on the movie industry and Southern California culture. After all charges had been dropped against McPherson, Mencken revisited the case in 1930 with a sarcastic and observant article. He wrote that since many of that town's residents had acquired their ideas "of the true, the good and the beautiful" from the movies and newspapers, "Los Angeles will remember the testimony against her long after it forgets the testimony that cleared her".[43]
In addition to his identification of races with castes, Mencken had views about the superior individual within communities. He believed that every community produced a few people of clear superiority. He considered groupings on a par with hierarchies, which led to a kind of natural elitism and natural aristocracy. "Superior" individuals, in Mencken's view, were those wrongly oppressed and disdained by their own communities but nevertheless distinguished by their will and personal achievement, not by race or birth.
In 1989, per his instructions, Alfred A. Knopf published Mencken's "secret diary" as The Diary of H. L. Mencken. According to an Associated Press story, Mencken's views shocked even the "sympathetic scholar who edited it", Charles Fecher of Baltimore.[3] A club in Baltimore, the Maryland Club, had one Jewish member. When that member died, Mencken said, "There is no other Jew in Baltimore who seems suitable." The diary also quoted him as saying of blacks, in September 1943, that "it is impossible to talk anything resembling discretion or judgment to a colored woman. They are all essentially child-like, and even hard experience does not teach them anything".
Mencken opposed lynching. In 1935, he testified before Congress in support of the Costigan–Wagner Bill. While he had previously written negatively about lynchings during the 1910s and 1920s, the lynchings of Matthew Williams and George Armwood caused him to write in support of the bill and give political advice to Walter White on how to maximize the likelihood of the bill's passing.[44][45] The two lynchings in his home state made the issue directly relevant to him. His arguments against lynching were influenced by his interpretation of civilization, as he believed that a civilized society would not tolerate it.[44]
In a review of The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, by Terry Teachout, journalist Christopher Hitchens described Mencken as a German nationalist, "an antihumanist as much as an atheist", who was "prone to the hyperbole and sensationalism