Garrison Keillor’s “The Writers’ Almanac” notes the birthday of journalist-humorist-cynic H. L. Mencken. I always think of his reference to the “booboisee.” I would love to see him and Molly Ivins writing today, as our national politics have hit a nadir.
It’s the birthday of German-American satirist, cultural critic, and journalist H.L. Mencken (1880) (books by this author), born Henry Louis Mencken in Baltimore, Maryland, where he lived his entire life. Mencken was sometimes called the “Sage of Baltimore” or the “Bard of Baltimore” for his acerbic, pungent critiques of American life and politics.
Mencken’s father owned a cigar factory, and the family lived in an attractive row house in Union Square. Except for five years of married life, Mencken lived in that house until the day he died. When he was seven, his father gave him a printing press, which Mencken later said was one of the things that inspired him to become a journalist. His other inspiration was Mark Twain. He discovered Huckleberry Finn at nine and called it “the most stupendous event in my life.” After high school, his father gave him two choices: he could go to college or he could work in the cigar factory. Mencken chose the factory, which he hated, but he also took one of the very first correspondence courses ever offered: a class in writing from Cosmopolitan University. He later joked it was his sole journalism training.
After his father died of a stroke, Mencken began hounding the offices of the Morning Herald, finally talking himself into a job. Within two years, he was the drama critic. Within three years, he was the city editor. A year later, he was the managing editor. Mencken once said, “I believe that a young journalist, turned loose in a large city, had more fun than any other man.”
Mencken’s column, “The Free Lance,” which ran in the Baltimore Sun for 18 years, was nationally syndicated and made him quite famous for his caustic views on politics, culture, and science. In 1931, he referred to the state of Arkansas as “an apex of moronia,” and the legislature there passed a motion to pray for his soul. About Isaac Newton, he said: “[Isaac Newton] was a mathematician, which is mostly hogwash, too. Imagine measuring infinity! That’s a laugh.”
In 1925, Mencken traveled all the way to Tennessee to cover the famous trial of John Thomas Scopes, a high school teacher who’d been arrested for daring to teach evolutionary theory. It was Mencken who gave the trial its infamous name: the “Monkey Trial,” and who convinced famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow to offer his services to John Scopes. In the play Inherit the Wind (1955), which was based on the Scopes trial, the character of E.K. Hornbeck, a blustering, cynical atheist, was based on Mencken. Mencken was also an editor of The Smart Set, a witty literary magazine that published many up-and-coming authors, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Mencken was a prolific letter writer, often penning more than 60 letters a day, which turned out to be more than 100,000 letters during his lifetime. In between writing his columns, he published more than 30 books, including the memoir trilogy Happy Days (1940), Newspaper Days (1941), and Heathen Days (1943). He also wrote The American Language, a multivolume study of how English language is spoken in the United States, which is now considered a classic. Until he was 50 years old, Mencken was called “America’s Best Known Bachelor,” having published numerous screeds against marriage in his columns. But he’d fallen in love, and he got married, and one newspaper quipped, “Bachelors of the nation are aghast, and sore afraid, like a sheep without a leader.” Mencken responded: “The Holy Spirit informed and inspired me. Like all other infidels, I am superstitious and always follow hunches: this one seemed to be a superb one.”
Mencken’s wife died five years after they married. He was heartbroken. He criticized President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and didn’t support the New Deal, and his popularity waned. He never fully recovered from a stroke (1948) and died in 1956.
H.L. Mencken said, “The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.”
My favorite line from Inherit the Wind:
REPORTER: What’s the matter, Mr. Drummond, don’t you believe in the Bible?
DRUMMOND: Believe in it? Hell, I’ve seen thousands of them.
If my memory serves me well.
Another great star of the Baltimore Sun was Don Marquis, author of Archy and Mehitabel. The story goes that Marquis accidentally left a piece of paper in a typewriter in the newsroom one evening, and when he returned, a cockroach named Archy had jumped around on the keys and written a poem in all lowercase letters. The subsequent poems of Archy the cockroach are just wonderful and tell about the lives of Archy and his pals, including Mehitabel, a “cat of ill repute” who practices her trade in the alley. At one point, an old theatre cat turns to Mehitabel and says of the young theatre cats coming up:
they haven t got it nowadays
they haven t got it
here
mehitabel he says
both our professions
are being ruined
by amateurs
T.S. Eliot stole shamelessly from Archy and Mehitabel to create the poems that became his beautiful and hilarious Uncle Tom’s Book of Practical Cats, which he wrote, I believe, for his young niece. That book, including Eliot’s Gus the Theatre Cat, became the musical Cats.
“He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It 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 kind of grandeur creeps into it.”
H.L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding
We need Mencken now more than ever–or Molly Ivins, or Paul Fussell…you get the picture.
Oh yes yes yes. This is awesome. And yes, we could use him now more than ever! The nabobs Mencken wrote of are still very much with us, and one of them is President. This comment from Mencken reminds me of H.G. Wells, who wrote in his A Short History of the World about learning ancient Greek, which sounded, he said, “like plumbing.”
Trump is, indeed, the Michelangelo of verbal caca-phony.
I had a literature course of Paul Fussell’s at Rutgers. Very brilliant man.
Harding gave, in 1921, in Birmingham, a speech that was remarkably forward-thinking of its time, calling for a renaissance in U.S. race relations. He hedged his comments a bit in saying that he was not calling for “equality,” but the racist nation was stunned by the rest of his speech, which sounded precisely like such a call. It’s well worth reading.
https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/warren-g-harding-address-at-birmingham-speech-text/
Fascinating, Bob, and thanks for digging it up. It’s a decent piece of rhetoric, and simply amazing that once upon a time presidents of the United States understood the outlines of history. Four years of Trump has simply exhausted my imagination, and I find myself thinking that all presidents must have been morons. Thanks for reminding me that they weren’t.
I wish when people write about historical figures they would give the whole story.
I know he would have fun with Trump but I doubt he would have much sympathy for Black Live Matter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1989/12/05/menckens-dark-side/e0eb19d6-f09d-4d97-9afa-9d8d3acf0f60/
Yup. And for this side of him, the man is lionized by intellectuals on the extreme right. So, we can love him for his war on the idiocy of Christian fundamentalists and detest him for these other opinions and aspects of his character.
I followed this pretty closely (I had at the time just begun reading Mencken), so I am aware of it. I won’t defend Mencken’s private rantings other than to say the were at relatively sharp variance with his public persona—a foe of frauds, hypocrites, and bunkum.
Yikes, thanks, Stuart. I knew there was a dark side to Mencken but I didn’t realize it was black hole looking into the abyss dark.
From that article: “Even as late as 1944, Mencken was still privately berating the Sun for supporting the Allied cause.” Geezus, in 1944 he’s not supporting the Allied cause!?!!!! What planet was Mencken living on?
This is one of those problems that are probably too complex for my pea brain, and your point, Stuart Crocker, is well taken. On the other hand, what a person says in private and does in public are often at odds with each other. Mencken is the exemplar of that par excellence. While he was carrying on in his private diaries, Mencken was using his caustic ridicule and his prestige to promote Black writers, inveigh against lynching, and ridicule the State of Maryland for its segregation laws:
https://www.baltimoresun.com/citypaper/bcp-was-mencken-a-racist-or-a-civil-rights-hero-professor-larry-gibson-offers-an-answeror-at-least-promi-20140909-story.html.
The essential question here is, I think, whether or not a person’s art could or should be divorced from their private or even public disgraces. I know for my part, I have been unable to do that with, say, Richard Wagner (it also happens I don’t like his music, for, as Mark said, it “is better than it sounds) or Louis-Ferdinand Celine, whose “Journey to the End of the Night” comes highly recommended by a number of friends whose opinions on literature I respect, but who was fundamentally a Nazi. Hell, after reading Kate Millett’s essay on him, I now find it hard to read my formerly beloved Henry Miller.
Mencken’s public persona was one of resistance to ignorance, bourgeois morality, small-mindedness, and, ironically, given what we know about his journals, bigotry. And I don’t mention the sheer pleasure of his verbal pyrotechnics in taking American to task for all of the above.
So, I hear you, Stuart Crocker. But I’ll keep Mencken, even as a guilty pleasure if I must.
Errata: “as Mark Twain said….”
Mencken’s harsh criticism of rural Tennessee gave rise to a reaction of anti-intellectual fervor that has been played out again and again as young, innocent tennesseans went from the farm to the university where they encountered professors who had Mencken’s feel for disdain and sarcasm, but not any understanding of how it feels to have your foundations shaken.
I have often blamed Mencken for Tennessee’s strong support of trump.
Keillor had me at German-American! 😂
HA!