We Deserve to Get It, Good and Hard

H.L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, wouldn’t stand a chance against “cancel culture” in our idiotic Current Year.

"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."
—H. L. Mencken, “Epitaph,” The Smart Set (1921)

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
―The same guy, A Little Book In C Major (1916)

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Henry Louis Mencken’s birthday was yesterday.¹ He was born 142 years ago in Baltimore, “under a lucky star,” he often liked to say, on a date once proudly celebrated as Defenders’ Day—the day Baltimoreans repelled the British at the Battle of North Point in the War of 1812. Most Americans no longer know the significance of the event, but everyone knows the little ditty that came out of it.

Mencken, who died in 1956, shaped a whole generation of professional writers. Just not my generation.

Most GenXers glommed on to Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe or Greil Marcus or Lester Bangs or Joan Didion or James Baldwin or . . . I really don’t know who else. I’m excluding dozens, I’m sure, for want of imagination and memory. John Hughes, maybe?

For a subset of self-styled conservatives, certainly, it would have been William F. Buckley, Jr., or R. Emmett Tyrrell, or possibly even—dear God!—George Will. And for a subset of that subset, it was Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan and possibly Russell Kirk.

I read all of those writers, and a great many others, and liked many of them. I even met a few. But from the time I was 18 years old, I was, first and foremost, a Mencken man. And a man out of my time.

Mencken’s output was immense—“well beyond 5,000,000 words” by his own estimation, the bulk of which, in his exaggerated appraisal, was “irrelevant before the ink dried on the newsprint.”

Yet for nearly 40 years in the early 20th century, Mencken was a towering figure on the American scene. He wrote thousands of newspaper columns and hundreds of editorials. He wrote or edited more than 30 books, including three fat volumes on the American language. I exclude his numerous prefaces (or do I?). He also edited not one but two highly influential magazines and introduced Nietzsche to English-speaking readers. His New Dictionary of Quotations beats Bartlett’s by a mile. And he happened to launch or advance the careers of innumerable writers, including Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Willa Cather, George S. Schuyler, and John Fante.

He was the scourge of boobus Americanus and the nemesis of "bureaucrats, policemen, wowsers, snouters, smellers, uplifters, lawyers, bishops, and all other sworn enemies of the free man." Nearly a half-century after his death, I noted in a 2003 piece for the Claremont Review of Books, he still had “a devoted, if diminished, following.”

Now? It’s hard to say.

Probably not so much. Apart from the Library of America’s handsome editions of Mencken’s “Days Trilogy” and his six volumes of Prejudices, practically nothing of note has been republished or published about him in the past decade. Now that many of his early books have entered the public domain, the market has been polluted with cheap and poorly designed editions of his work.   

Which is a terrible shame.

I discovered Mencken my freshman year in college, in a thin textbook on editorial writing, now long out of print. I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do when I got to the University of California at San Diego in the fall of 1989, but I was certain of this: I wanted more than anything to write for the campus newspaper.

I met the opinion editor at the UCSD Guardian a few weeks after I arrived on campus. He gave me a once over and said, “You have a funny nose, like mine.” (Fact check: True.) Then: “Come back next Tuesday.” So I came back the next Tuesday and he put me to work sorting through letters to the editor and weeding out mostly dreary student commentary submissions. Before long, I was assistant opinion editor. Then, after a while, I was opinion editor. And I was opinion editor again. Then, incredibly, I was elected editor-in-chief. Then . . . classifieds manager? Er, yes. But that’s a mostly dull story, punctuated by an outrageous act of property destruction.

Anyway, though I had written for my high school newspaper, I had practically no experience writing real editorials. An editorial is not just another opinion column. It expresses the consensus view of the editorial board—ostensibly the voice of the paper, as opposed to the opinion of any one writer. So my editor recommended I go to the university bookstore and find a book explaining the ins-and-outs of editorial writing.

The book was Writing Opinion: Editorials, by William L. Rivers, Bryce McIntyre, and Alison Work, published in 1988 by the Iowa University Press. I still have the battered blue, hardbound volume on my reference shelf. Their instruction was sound and their examples were diverse. But one recurring example stood out and the authors are in no way to blame for my career choices.

It was Mencken, loud and clear.

As I read, I kept thinking, Who is this Mencken guy? Who writes like this? Very soon, that was followed by, This is astounding! I must read more!

In due course, I laid my hands on The Vintage Mencken, edited by Alistair Cooke. Then I picked up a severely condensed edition of Mencken’s six-volume Prejudices. Not too long after that, I splurged on A Mencken Chrestomathy, assembled by the man himself.

Have you ever been seduced by a writer? I was smitten. I was entirely in his thrall.

Alas, H. L. Mencken, without a doubt the greatest American journalist of the 20th century, would have no career to speak of today. He was too white, too male, too heterosexual, and entirely too privileged.

As it happens, he was also among the earliest victims of “cancel culture,” at the very moment I was discovering him.

Upon the publication of Mencken’s diary more than 30 years after his death in 1989, the word went forth that the Sage of Baltimore was, in fact, a racist. A bigot. An anti-Semite with Nazi sympathies. Reporters who barely knew Mencken’s work, and who didn’t read too far past editor Charles A. Fecher’s preface, were unforgiving. A few headlines provide the gist:   

“Mencken Was Pro-Nazi, His Diary Shows” (Los Angeles Times)

“Diary Shows Mencken Was Anti-Semitic, Racist” (Associated Press)

“Mencken’s Diary Reveals Anti-Semitism, Bigotry” (South Florida Sun Sentinel)

Lies. All lies. Mencken was not pro-Nazi. He was not an anti-Semite or a racist, though he used vile language about Jews and blacks and . . . well, just about everybody else. Mencken possessed full command of the language, and if he wanted to criticize or disparage a friend in his private papers, he did so to the maximum. He may have used anti-Semitic and bigoted words; his deeds, however, were anything but.

This was a man who worked closely with George Jean Nathan and Alfred A. Knopf for decades. His friendship with Knopf lasted a lifetime. He was an intimate companion of theatrical producer Philip Goodman. At least two members of his Saturday Night Club—a weekly gathering of professional drinkers who also happened to be amateur musicians—were Jewish. He could refer to a friend as a “kike” and still happily buy him a beer.

The Nazi slur is particularly outrageous. Mencken was pro-Germany during World War I and surely underestimated the danger Hitler posed. He thought of the German dictator as just another demagogue. But Mencken had no affection or sympathy whatsoever for the doctrines of national socialism. More importantly, biographer Fred Hobson documents in Mencken: A Life the extent to which Mencken helped dozens of Jews escape Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1939.

“One might ask,” Hobson writes,

what manner of a man was this: one who both excoriated “dreadful kikes” in letters to friends and also spent countless hours and assumed great financial risk in helping Jews to flee that country, Germany, that he professed to admire above all others; one who charged that “hysterical” Jews were responsible for many of their own woes but who nonetheless became, as [friend and early American Mercury contributor] Leon Kellner’s daughter wrote him, the “embodiment of hope” for members of the “Disinherited and Exiled”? The answer lay, as always with Mencken, in the fact that in helping members of Leon Kellner’s family he was simply helping friends. He had long liked and respected Kellner, and their friendship, even though Kellner was now dead, demanded no less.

The charge of racism is also overblown, if not malicious. Again, latter-day critics confuse words with deeds. This was an editor who launched the career of George S. Schuyler, championed the Harlem Renaissance in the pages of the American Mercury, and inspired Richard Wright to be a novelist and activist. He published and touted black writers such as Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Walter F. White, who went on to lead the NAACP. In fact, Mencken encouraged White to write a novel on race relations in the South.

“The result was The Fire in the Flint, a work about lynching that reinforced Mencken’s own picture of a benighted South, and he spoke with Knopf about the manuscript,” Hobson writes. “When Knopf published the novel, White gave Mencken the ‘credit and thanks’ for his book.”

But, it’s true, Mencken also referred to blacks as “darkies,” “blackamoors,” and occasionally even “coons.” Every educated person nowadays, of course, knows that “words are violence.” So his actual deeds and advocacy count for nothing, right?

As Terry Teachout wrote in an essay about Mencken’s diary and the ensuing controversy for The New Criterion:

No one familiar with H. L. Mencken’s writings could possibly have been surprised by the presence of ethnic and racial slurs in his diary. Mencken’s complex and ambivalent feelings towards Jews are perfectly obvious to anyone who has read Treatise on the Gods, Treatise on Right and Wrong, the six volumes of Prejudices, and the published correspondence; in addition, his three volumes of autobiographical essays, Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days . . . are full of the condescending racial attitudes to be expected of anyone born in Baltimore a mere fifteen years after the end of the Civil War.

Nevertheless, Teachout argued:

However perverse or excessive (or, in the case of his various racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices, occasionally ugly) his underlying ideas may be, they continue to retain much of their impelling force. Though he is, by his own confession, “far more an artist than a metaphysician,” one cannot help but be impressed by the stubborn way in which Mencken the self-taught philosopher grapples, in his simplistic, take-no-prisoners way, with the permanent things: the limits of art, the rule of law, the meaning of life.

Fair. But nobody understands or cares or wants to understand or care anymore. Understanding a figure as he understood himself in the context of his era is for saps—or racists, sexists, and other such primitives.

Mencken’s own newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, managed to defend him in the wake of the diary controversy some 30 years ago. But after the “summer of love” in 2020 and the deification of George Floyd, Mencken was simply beyond defending. Certainly not in a city with a 60 percent black population.

And so, in February, the Sun published an editorial headlined, “We are deeply and profoundly sorry: For decades, The Baltimore Sun promoted policies that oppressed Black Marylanders; we are working to make amends.”

The editorial board could not have been more obsequious:

We have made efforts before to bolster diversity and inclusion, but the evolution has been slow. The death of Freddie Gray while in Baltimore police custody in 2015, and the national light it shone on the persistent disparities in the city, shook us out of our complacency. And, as a movement grew across the country, as more Black Americans died at the hands of police — Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Anton Black, George Floyd — so did our obligation to scrutinize The Sun’s past.

But by “looking at our history through a modern-day lens”—as the editorial puts it—rather than confronting and understanding the past in its complex and sometimes disturbing context, the editors had no choice but to exhume and desecrate Mencken’s corpus.

In the 1930s . . . it appeared as if The Sun had a moral awakening. It gave front-page news coverage to two horrific lynchings on the Eastern Shore, and took strong positions against them in editorials. Sun columnist H.L. Mencken wrote so derisively of Salisbury’s white population and town leaders, he was threatened with death should he show his face there.

Ah, but appearances can be deceiving.

[T]he coverage, as our editorial page later noted in 2018, “deplored the inhumanity of the perpetrators without ever really acknowledging the humanity of the victims” or the community terrorized by their brutal deaths. The ire was directed at the “poor, white trash” killers, as Mencken put it; there was no empathy for — or even real interest in — the Black victims.

See, it wasn’t enough to denounce the barbarity of the lynchings—something Mencken did many times over his long career. He even testified before a U.S. Senate committee in support of a federal anti-lynching law in 1935. No, no . . . not good enough at all. He needed to articulate, in 1931, a properly enlightened, certifiably woke, wholistic 21st-century understanding of the crime and all of its intersectional implications. In this case, Mencken’s silence was the violence.

Some days, I try to imagine what Mencken would make of the present-day American political scene, this exceptionally stupid time that is at once alarming and banal. He would not fit comfortably into our lame, two-dimensional ideological schema. Over the years, he described himself variously as "an extreme libertarian," "a civilized tory," a "reactionary," and an "extreme radical." He probably got to the bottom of it when he declared: "I belong to no party. I am my own party." (He was, in fact, a lifelong Democrat when Democrats were not insane. FDR’s overreach changed his mind.)

If Mencken was an awkward political fit in America 90 or 100 years ago, he would be entirely marginalized today. In the almost unimaginable event that he would have a Twitter account—just read what he thought of the telephone—he would have been permanently banned ages ago. His rejection of modern pieties—on race, sex, class, Our Democracy™—would and could never be forgiven.

Yet look at the people who presume to rule us. Look at the people who presume to explain the people who presume to rule us. What could be more tedious—more preposterous—than taking seriously the likes of Max Boot or Bill Kristol or Anne Applebaum or Kamala Harris or Joe Biden and other, far lesser lights who lecture us day after day about the supposed looming threats to democracy? It’s as if they don’t even hear themselves.

I don’t think Mencken would have thought much of Donald Trump, either, by the way. I’m fairly certain he would have made mincemeat of Trump’s administration. But these people? These self-styled Paladins of Democracy? These puffers and fluffers and pompous, self-aggrandizing twonks?

They wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Mencken in 1926 published Notes on Democracy. It’s far from his best book. Even some of his friendlier critics describe it as a bit of a “clip job.” Nevertheless, his second-rate work is vastly better than any of his modern detractors’ best efforts. The concluding pages are a tour de force, an elegant middle finger to Our Democracy’s boosters:

I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of almost fabulous ferocity.

Does this sound in any way familiar? Does this ring any bells at all?

Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic. It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon the mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world. Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining the divine right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a believer for arguing the Jesus Christ was the Son of God! . . .

But under democracy the remotest and most fantastic possibility is a commonplace of every day. All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob is competent to rule the rest of us—but it must be rigorously policed itself. There is a government, not of men, but of laws—but men are set upon benches to decide finally what the law is and may be. The highest function of the citizen is to serve the state—but the first assumption that meets him, when he essays to discharge it, is an assumption of his disingenuousness and dishonour. Is the assumption commonly sound? Then the farce only grows more glorious.

As much as Mencken distrusted government “by the people,” he understood that the progressive notion of government “by the experts”—which is what contemporary pundits mean by “Our Democracy”—was little better.   

And, so, the coup de grâce:

I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself—that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating.

But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can’t make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?

What would Mencken think of the present circus? Of Biden and “insurrection” and “unity” and “the Soul of America” and the most alarming of polls? It doesn’t really matter what he would think. I know what I think. I am, without a doubt, under the circumstances, a supremely malicious man, and my sympathies aren’t coy at all. To hell with every one of these illegitimate people.

Homely girls excepted, of course.

1. “Why didn’t you send this out yesterday, then?” Because I was too busy celebrating, that’s why! Hush and just read, already.