H. L. Mencken

Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956), better known as H. L. Mencken was a twentieth century journalist and social critic, a cynic and a freethinker, known as the "Sage of Baltimore" and the "American Nietzsche". He is often regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the early 20th century.

Style

Perhaps Mencken's most important contribution to American letters is his satirical style. Mencken, influenced heavily by Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift, believed the lampoon was more powerful than the lament; his hilariously overwrought indictments of nearly every subject (and more than a couple that were unmentionable at the time) are certainly worth reading as examples of fine craftsmanship, even if their content is uneven and their views highly dated.

Related Topics:
Mark Twain - Jonathan Swift

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The Mencken style influenced many writers; American author Richard Wright described the power of Mencken's technique (his exposure to Mencken would inspire him to become a writer himself). In his autobiographical Black Boy, Wright recalls his reaction to A Book of Prefaces and one of the volumes of the Prejudices series:

Related Topics:
Richard Wright - Black Boy

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:I was jarred and shocked by the clear, clean, sweeping sentences ... Why did he write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen ... denouncing everything American ... laughing ... mocking God, authority ... This man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club ... I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it. (Quoted from Scruggs, pg. 1)

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Mencken was at the top of his game in the 1920s, when a backlash against WWI-era superpatriotism and government expansion (exemplified in the Palmer Raids) produced many overtly anti-American protests by literati, among whom Mencken was arguably the most pugnacious. The "anti-American" label is an epithet today (and to a lesser degree in Mencken's time); the term is not used here to defame HLM. He would have delighted in being called "anti-American"; his contrarian spirit and envy of more cultured states (Germany especially) compelled him to mount unapologetically scathing attacks on nearly all aspects of American culture.

Related Topics:
1920s - Palmer Raids - Germany

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In his classic essay "On Being an American" (published in his Prejudices: Third Series), Mencken fires a salvo at American myths. The following choice quote displays his amusing take on why the United States is the "Land of Opportunity", and segues into a laundry-list of national pathologies as he sees them:

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:Here the business of getting a living ... is enormously easier than it is in any other Christian land—so easy, in fact, that an educated and forehanded man who fails at it must actually make deliberate efforts to that end. Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy. And here, more than anywhere else I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows.

Related Topics:
Wart - Aristocracy - Amperage

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Whether the reader agrees with Mencken or finds him infuriatingly coarse and incorrect, all can observe his technique with profit; it is rare in contemporary discourse. The criticisms he poses are nearly the same as those of famous literary expatriates including Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; the injustices (or at least incongruities) are the same ones fought by period Muckraker journalists such as Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. However, instead of decrying the "daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly" and calling for reform or improvement, Mencken says he is "entertained" by them. On its face, this approach displays a crass indifference and total lack of compassion; Mencken admitted as much, as it was part of his personal philosophy: a kind of fierce libertarianism inspired by a Nietzschean contempt for the "improvers of mankind", a social darwinist outlook derived from Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, and a "Tory" elitism.

Related Topics:
Richard Wright - Ernest Hemingway - F. Scott Fitzgerald - Muckraker - Lincoln Steffens - Ida Tarbell - Nietzsche - Social darwinist - Herbert Spencer - William Graham Sumner

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The power of satire comes from the transformation of enemies and villains into a source of entertainment; they are reduced from powerful people to be contended with into farcical creatures deserving of mockery. Black journalist and Mencken contemporary James Weldon Johnson celebrated this technique as a way of fighting racism without stooping to the level of Jim Crow enforcers and the Ku Klux Klan:

Related Topics:
James Weldon Johnson - Jim Crow - Ku Klux Klan

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:Mr. Mencken's favorite method of showing people the truth is to attack falsehood with ridicule. He shatters the walls of foolish pride and prejudice and hypocrisy merely by laughing at them; and he is more effective against them than most writers who hurl heavily loaded shells of protest and imprecation.

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:What could be more disconcerting and overwhelming to a man posing as everybody's superior than to find that everybody was laughing at his pretensions? Protest would only swell up his self-importance. (quoted from Scruggs, pg. 57)

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Mencken, in "On Being an American" called the United States "... incomparably the best show on Earth..."; he clearly took joy in covering religious controversies, political conventions, and unearthing new "quackeries" (among his favorite targets are the Baptist and Methodist churches, Christian Science, Chiropractics, and most of all, Puritanism).

Related Topics:
Baptist - Methodist - Christian Science - Chiropractics - Puritanism

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It is no coincidence he regarded Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be the finest work of American literature; much of that book details episodes of gullible and ignorant people being swindled by Confidence Men like the (deliberately) pathetic "Duke" and "Dauphin" roustabouts with whom Huck and Jim travel down the Mississippi River. These scam-artists swindle country "boobs" (as Mencken referred to them); by posing as enlighened speakers on temperance (to obtain the funds to get roaring drunk), pious "saved" men seeking funds for far off evangelistic missions (to pirates on the high seas, no less), and learned doctors of phrenology (who can barely spell). The book can be read as a story of America's hilarious dark side, a place where democracy, as defined by Mencken, is "... the worship of Jackals by Jackasses."

Related Topics:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - American literature - Confidence Men - Mississippi River - Temperance - Phrenology

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One of the disadvantages of slashing satire is that it does only that: slash. Alfred Kazin called Mencken's criticisms impotent since "Every Babbitt read him gleefully and pronounced his neighbor a Babbitt" -- they permitted a circular firing squad of self-righteous viciousness. (A Babbitt is a now-rare epithet derived from the Sinclair Lewis book of the same name; it can be loosely defined as an uncultured, "square", typically middle-aged and middle-class businessman characterized by timidity and ignorance of their philistinism.) Critics must walk a thin line between declaring "The Emperor has no clothes" (a fine service to all), and going too far by furiously tearing the clothes off of undeserving bystanders.

Related Topics:
Alfred Kazin - Babbitt - Sinclair Lewis - Philistinism

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Mencken tended to go too far as matter-of-course; consequently he was the first to say what needed to be said in his criticisms of lynching, World War I-era civil liberties abuses, and especially the dismally moral and philistine American arts. On the other hand, this extremism left him with a body of work filled with unsubtle reviews of the subtle and scores of openly vicious statements about all ethnicities.

Related Topics:
Lynching - World War I

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This viciousness was summed up in the play Inherit the Wind, a fictionalized version of the Scopes Monkey Trial. As the story ends, the protaganist tells Hornbeck (the character representing Mencken):

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::You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

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In a 26 July 1920 article in the Baltimore Evening Sun, Mencken wrote about the difficulties of good men reaching national office when such campaigns must necessarily be conducted remotely:

Related Topics:
26 July - 1920

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:The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre ? the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

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:The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

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The final sentence of this article was used often by detractors of President George W. Bush during the 2004 US Presidential Election as a justification for their animosity against him.

Related Topics:
George W. Bush - 2004 US Presidential Election

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