H. L. Mencken

Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. 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.
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 German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of organized religion, theism, and representative democracy, the last of which he viewed as a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors. 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 both World War I and World War II. Some of the terminology in his private diary entries has been described by some researchers as racist and anti-Semitic, although this characterization has been disputed. His attitude to African-Americans reflected the conservative paternalism of his era and "the kind of anti-Semitism that appears in Mencken's private diary may be found elsewhere: for example, in the early letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson." He seemed to show a genuine enthusiasm for militarism but never in its American form. "War is a good thing," he once 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."
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.
Early life.
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. 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 of married life, Mencken was to live in that house for the rest of his life.
In his bestselling memoir "Happy Days", he described his childhood in Baltimore as "placid, secure, uneventful and happy."
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." 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.
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. This was to be the entirety of Mencken's formal 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.
Career.
Mencken served as a reporter at the "Herald" for six years. Less 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.
Personal life.
Marriage.
In 1930, Mencken married Sara Haardt, a German-American professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore and an author eighteen years his junior. Haardt had led an unsuccessful effort in Alabama to ratify the 19th Amendment. 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." 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. He had always championed her writing and, after her death, had a collection of her short stories published under the title "Southern Album".
Great Depression, war, and afterward.
During the Great Depression, Mencken did not support the New Deal, which cost him popularity, as did his strong reservations regarding U.S. participation in World War II, and his overt contempt for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. 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 Republican Thomas 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".
Last days.
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.
Death.
Mencken died in his sleep on January 29, 1956. He was interred in Baltimore's Loudon Park Cemetery.
Though it does not appear on his tombstone, Mencken, during his "Smart Set" days, wrote a joking epitaph for himself:
A very small, short, and private service was held, in accordance with Mencken's wishes.
Mencken was preoccupied with his legacy and kept his papers, letters, newspaper clippings, columns, and even grade school report cards. After his death, those materials were made available to scholars in stages in 1971, 1981, and 1991 and include hundreds of thousands of letters sent and received. The only omissions were strictly personal letters received from women.
Beliefs.
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. 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 a gullible man. Mencken also 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 he 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."
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.
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. The hucksters pose now as earnest fundraisers for temperance, who get drunk on the proceeds; as pious "saved" men collecting money for a far off evangelistic mission; to pirates on the high seas; and as learned doctors of phrenology although they can barely spell. In the end, the townspeople wise up, and the scoundrels are ridden out on a rail. For Mencken, the episode epitomizes the hilarious dark side of America, where democracy, as defined by Mencken, is "the worship of jackals by jackasses."
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, democratic in subjects attacked, Mencken savaged politics, 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."
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 but was 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."
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. Like Nietzsche, he also lambasted religious belief and the very concept of God, as Mencken was an unflinching atheist, particularly Christian fundamentalism, Christian Science and creationism, and against the "Booboisie," his word for the ignorant middle classes. In the summer of 1925, he attended the famous Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, and wrote scathing columns for the Baltimore "Sun" (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. 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. 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."
In 1931, the Arkansas legislature passed a motion to pray for Mencken's soul after he had called the state the "apex of moronia."
In the mid-1930s, Mencken feared Roosevelt and his New Deal liberalism as a powerful force. Mencken, says Charles A. Fecher, 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."
Views.
Race and elitism.
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 A. Fecher of Baltimore. There is a club in Baltimore called the Maryland Club which had one Jewish member, and that member died. Mencken said, "There is no other Jew in Baltimore who seems suitable," according to the article. 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. For example, he had this to say about a Maryland incident:
Mencken also wrote:
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 he distrusted in others." Hitchens also criticized Mencken for writing a scathing critique of Franklin Roosevelt but nothing equally negative of Adolf Hitler.
Anglo-Saxons.
Mencken countered the arguments for Anglo-Saxon superiority prevalent in his time in a 1923 essay entitled "The Anglo-Saxon," which argued that if there was such a thing as a pure "Anglo-Saxon" race, it was defined by its inferiority and cowardice. "The normal American of the 'pure-blooded' majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed and he gets up every morning with a sickening fear that his underwear has been stolen."
Jews.
In the 1930 edition of "Treatise on the Gods", Mencken wrote:
That passage was removed from subsequent editions at his express direction.
Chaz Bufe, an admirer of Mencken, wrote that Mencken's various anti-Semitic statements should be understood in the context that Mencken made bombastic and over-the-top denunciations of almost any national, religious, and ethnic group. That said, Bufe still wrote that some of Mencken's statements were "odious", such as his claim in his 1918 introduction to Nietzsche's "The Anti-Christ" that "The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world."
Author Gore Vidal later deflected claims of anti-Semitism against Mencken:
As Germany gradually conquered Europe, Mencken attacked Roosevelt for refusing to admit Jewish refugees into the United States and called for their wholesale admission:
Democracy.
This sentiment is fairly consistent with Mencken's distaste for common notions and the philosophical outlook he unabashedly set down throughout his life as a writer (drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer, among others).
Mencken wrote as follows about the difficulties of good men reaching national office when such campaigns must necessarily be conducted remotely:The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
Science and mathematics.
Mencken defended the evolutionary views of Charles Darwin, but spoke unfavorably of many prominent physicists and had little regard for pure mathematics. Regarding theoretical physics, he said to longtime editor Charles Angoff, "Imagine measuring infinity! That's a laugh."
In response, Angoff said: "Well, without mathematics there wouldn't be any engineering, no chemistry, no physics." Mencken responded: "That's true, but it's reasonable mathematics. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, fractions, division, that's what real mathematics is. The rest is baloney. Astrology. Religion. All of our sciences still suffer from their former attachment to religion, and that is why there is so much metaphysics and astrology, the two are the same, in science."
Elsewhere, he dismissed higher mathematics and probability theory as "nonsense", after he read Angoff's article for Charles S. Peirce in the "American Mercury". "So you believe in that garbage, too—theories of knowledge, infinity, laws of probability. I can make no sense of it, and I don't believe you can either, and I don't think your god Peirce knew what he was talking about."
Mencken also repeated these opinions multiple times in articles for the "American Mercury". He said mathematics is a fiction, compared with individual facts that make up science. In a review for Hans Vaihinger's "The Philosophy of "As If"," he said:
Mencken repeatedly identified mathematics with metaphysics and theology. According to Mencken, mathematics is necessarily infected with metaphysics because of the tendency of many mathematical people to engage in metaphysical speculation. In a review of Alfred North Whitehead's "The Aims of Education", Mencken remarked that, while he agreed with Whitehead's thesis and admired his writing style, "now and then he falls into mathematical jargon and pollutes his discourse with equations," and "[t]here are moments when he seems to be following some of his mathematical colleagues into the gaudy metaphysics which now entertains them." For Mencken, theology is characterized by the fact that it uses correct reasoning from false premises. Mencken also uses the term "theology" more generally, to refer to the use of logic in science or any other field of knowledge. In a review for both Arthur Eddington's "The Nature of the Physical World" and Joseph Needham's "Man a Machine", Mencken ridiculed the use of reasoning to establish any fact in science, because theologians happen to be masters of "logic" and yet are mental defectives:
Mencken also wrote a review for Sir James Jeans's book, "The Mysterious Universe", in which he said that mathematics is not necessary for physics. Instead of mathematical "speculation" (such as quantum theory), Mencken believed physicists should just directly look at individual facts in the laboratory like chemists:
In the same article which he later re-printed in the "Mencken Chrestomathy", Mencken primarily contrasts what real scientists do, which is to simply directly look at the existence of "shapes and forces" confronting them instead of (such as in statistics) attempting to speculate and use mathematical models. Physicists and especially astronomers are consequently not real scientists, because when looking at shapes or forces, they do not simply "patiently wait for further light," but resort to mathematical theory. There is no need for statistics in scientific physics, since one should simply look at the facts while statistics attempts to construct mathematical models. On the other hand, the really competent physicists do not bother with the "theology" or reasoning of mathematical theories (such as in quantum mechanics):
Mencken ridiculed Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, believing that "in the long run his curved space may be classed with the psychosomatic bumps of [Franz Josef] Gall and [Johann] Spurzheim." In his private letters, he said:
Memorials.
Home.
Mencken's home at 1524 Hollins Street in Baltimore's Union Square neighborhood, where he lived for 67 years before his death in 1956, was bequeathed to the University of Maryland, Baltimore on the death of his younger brother, August, in 1967. The City of Baltimore acquired the property in 1983, and the H. L. Mencken House became part of the City Life Museums. It has been closed to general admission since 1997, but is opened for special events and group visits by arrangement.
Papers.
Shortly after World War II, Mencken expressed his intention of bequeathing his books and papers to Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library. At his death, it was in possession of most of the present large collection. As a result, his papers as well as much of his personal library, which includes many books inscribed by major authors, are held in the Library's Central Branch on Cathedral Street in Baltimore. The original third floor "H. L. Mencken Room and Collection" housing this collection was dedicated on April 17, 1956. The new Mencken Room, on the first floor of the Library's Annex, was opened in November 2003.
The collection contains Mencken's typescripts, newspaper and magazine contributions, published books, family documents and memorabilia, clipping books, large collection of presentation volumes, file of correspondence with prominent Marylanders, and the extensive material he collected while he was preparing "The American Language".
Other Mencken related collections of note are at Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University, and Yale University. In 2007, Johns Hopkins acquired "nearly 6,000 books, photographs and letters by and about Mencken" from "the estate of an Ohio accountant."
The Sara Haardt Mencken collection at Goucher College includes letters exchanged between Haardt and Mencken and condolences written after her death. Some of Mencken's vast literary correspondence is held at the New York Public Library. "Gift of HL Mencken 1929" is stamped on "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", Luce 1906 edition of William Blake, which shows up from the Library of Congress online version for reading. Mencken's letters to Louise (Lou) Wylie, a reporter and feature writer for New Orleans's "The Times-Picayune" newspaper, are archived at Loyola University New Orleans.
Works.
Books.
Posthumous collections