MENCKEN, HENRY LOUIS
Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880–January 29,
1956), journalism’s lead provocateur in America’s Jazz
Age, was an icon for a generation of skeptics who deplored
hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and self-serving men in politics. His newspaper career began at the Baltimore Morning
Herald in 1899, and he moved up quickly to become Sunday editor of the Herald in 1901, and city editor in 1903.
When the Herald closed in 1906, Mencken moved to the
Baltimore Sun, and for the rest of his life was on the staff of
the Sun or Evening Sun.
Mencken’s magazine career started at the Smart Set,
where he began reviewing books in 1908. He and George Jean Nathan were co-editors of the literary magazine
from 1914 to 1923, bringing it from obscurity to center
stage in American letters. Noted for satire and promoting
unknown writers, the magazine’s discoveries included F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Aldous Huxley. Mencken and Nathan
founded the American Mercury in 1924, and Mencken was
sole editor from1924 to 1933. As a critic of American culture, Mencken may have attained his highest pique in this
period. The editors dedicated the American Mercury to
exploring American life, their goal being “a realistic presentation of the whole gaudy, gorgeous American scene.”
Mencken’s first book, George Bernard Shaw: His Plays
(1905), gained little notice. More substantial material
soon followed with The Philosophy of Frederick Nietzche
(1907); the Prejudices series, a collection of essays, in a
series of six volumes (1919–1927); and Treatise of the Gods
(1930). The scholarly American Language (1918) was both
a critical and a commercial success, and remains in print.
Mencken published revised editions in 1921 and 1923, an
expanded volume in 1936, and supplements in 1945 and
1948. He published memoirs in a series of three volumes:
Happy Days, 1880–1982 (1940); Newspaper Days, 1899–
1906 (1941); Heathen Days, 1890–1936 (1943).
The farcical Scopes Trial in July 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, was a national embarrassment, which meant it was
a moment of glory for Mencken. Putting a teacher on trial
for teaching evolution gave Mencken the chance to enhance
his reputation for South-baiting, a sport he relished. His
nationally syndicated commentaries regularly skewered the
South as a bastion of religiously inspired ignorance where
yokels guarded the gates of stupidity. The trial brought to
life his stereotypes of the South and rural America—a culturally barren, bigoted landscape, populated by hillbillies
and led by hucksters. He appointed himself chief antagonist to the prosecution, which included William Jennings
Bryan, despised by Mencken and a prominent figure among
Christian fundamentalists. Mencken left Dayton before the
trial ended, missing the dramatic moment when Clarence
Darrow called Bryan to the stand to testify as an expert on
the Bible. Mencken had a hand in staging the drama, having
talked Darrow into defending John Scopes and having the
Baltimore Sun post Scopes’ bail.
For Menken, Dayton and the trial were emblematic of
larger ills in American culture. His attack on the South was
an assault on what he saw as a Puritanism that infected
American culture with its suffocating moralism that was
hostile to art and ideas. He linked the Puritanism with a
Christian fundamentalism that thrived on illiteracy and
ignorance. Mencken’s antipathy to Bryan illustrated a
larger criticism of American democracy’s essential foible:
that because “all men are created equal” their thoughts
and abilities must be equal. With more than a little implied
elitism, Mencken saw in Bryan’s radical egalitarianism
an unchecked democracy that would devolve to mob rule,
reined by ignorance and impulse.
Mencken’s fondness for German culture resulted in more
serious collisions with public sentiment. Prior to World
War I, he praised German idealism and ambition while
condemning British Puritanism. His byline disappeared
from Sun newspapers during the war. A minor controversy
erupted in the early 1930s over anti-Semitic passages in
Treatise on the Gods. Like many Americans, he did not
foresee the true menace of the Nazis and dismissed them
as counterparts to American Klansmen, ignorant but not
necessarily evil. In the late 1930s, Mencken’s hold slipped
on the skeptical imagination, as liberal intellectuals, a substantial part of his audience, found themselves at odds with
his isolationist, anti-Franklin D. Roosevelt positions, which
opposed both Nazism and any action against it. His earlier
German sympathies accelerated his decline in influence
after World War II.
As a critic and writer, Menken had an extraordinary
influence on American literature during his era, but still
considered himself primarily a journalist. His impact on
journalism endured, leaving the gold-standard and stereotype of the profession—the verbally raucous cynic, deft
with language, and sharp with criticism.
Further Reading
William Manchester. Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H.L.
Mencken, 2nd ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1986.
Terry Teachout. The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken. New York:
Harper Collines, 2002.
Fred C. Hobson. Mencken: A Life. New York: Random House,
1994.
Fred C. Hobson. Serpent in Eden: H.L. Mencken and the South.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974.
Ed Caudill