On this day in 1956, the American journalist H. L. Mencken died. He had composed his own epitaph: “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.”
Henry Louis Mencken was born on Sept. 12, 1880, the eldest of four children. His father, named August, owned a Baltimore cigar factory. When he was eight, Henry read Huckleberry Finn and reached two conclusions: One, that Mark Twain was the greatest American writer; and, two, that he would be a writer like Twain.
When he was 10, Mencken’s father gave him the Christmas gift he most coveted — a miniature printing press. If ever a man was born with printer’s ink coursing through his veins, it was H. L. Mencken.
When he finished high school, his father persuaded him for a brief unhappy time to work in the cigar business. But when August died in 1899, Mencken immediately began hanging about the newsroom of the Baltimore Morning Herald. Eventually, the city editor agreed to hire Mencken as a cub reporter, “the maddest, gladdest, damndest existence ever enjoyed by mortal youth.” Three years later, Mencken was the city editor.
In 1906, the Morning Herald went bankrupt, and Mencken switched to the Baltimore Sun, which remained his journalistic home for the next half century. For a time, he wrote a daily column (“The Free Lance”). But he also relished political reporting. “A good politician,” he concluded, “is as unthinkable as an honest burglar, and the fundamental miscalculation of the electorate lies in making the assumption that some politicians are better than others.”
In the 1920s, he was a vocal opponent of prohibition, which ran against his libertarian principles. Government fiat was something that he considered useless when it went up against human nature.
By the time of the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925, Mencken’s byline was the most celebrated in America. Alistair Cooke, himself a giant among 20th-century journalists and a friend of Mencken’s, compared the man’s reputation in America to George Bernard Shaw’s in Britain.
It was Mencken’s reporting on the Scopes trial — and particularly the savagery of his attack on the aging and inept prosecutor, William Jennings Bryan — that made him a national terror. Bryan collapsed and died just as the trial ended; in his obituary, Mencken wrote:
“There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, and that death found him there. The man felt at home in such scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main Street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range, his coat laid aside, his bare arms and hairy chest shining damply, his bald head sprinkled with dust — so accoutred and on display he was obviously happy. He liked getting up early in the morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill. He liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked country lawyers, country pastors, all country people. I believe that this liking was sincere — perhaps the only sincere thing in the man.”
Mencken wrote 30 books — poetry, fiction, essays, even a play. His most serious was the monumental 1921 work, The American Language. But it is his witty, stylish essays — for example, The Smart Set (1912) — that display Mencken at his epigrammatic best. “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.” “Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” “Judge: a law student who marks his own examinations.”
A long time bachelor, Mencken shocked even his close friends by marrying at age 50 in 1930. Alas, his wife, Sara, died just five years later.
In 1948, Mencken suffered a severe stroke. He could no longer read or write. Worse, he was conscious of his limitations. Near the end, he told a visitor: “You know, I had a superb time while it lasted.” He died in his bed 57 years