H. L. Mencken
| H. L. Mencken | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| |||
| Born | 12 September 1880 in Baltimore, Maryland | ||
| Died | 29 January 1956 (aged 75) in Baltimore, Maryland, United States | ||
| Occupation |
| ||
| Spouse | ∞ 1930 Sara Powell Haardt (1898–1935) | ||
| Parents | August Mencken Sr. Anna Margaret, née Abhau | ||
| Relatives | Siblings: Charles Edward Mencken (1882–1956) Anna Gertrude Mencken (1886–1980) August Mencken Jr. (1889–1967) | ||
Henry Louis "Harry" Mencken (12 September 1880 – 29 January 1956) was a satirical German American journalist, author, and satirical critic of American life who influenced United States fiction. He has various less politically correct views, but may also possibly sometimes have made exaggerated dramatic statements simply for the dramatic effect and the controversy, which have caused various politically correct criticisms. He belonged to the most outspoken anti–World War I and World War II activists, opposing American entry, especially against Germany.
As an admirer and translator of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of organized religion, theism, censorship, populism, 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 licentious economics. Aside from Nietzsche, Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain were among Mencken's influences.
Contents
Life
Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1880. According to his mother's wishes, he was originally supposed to be called Heinrich Ludwig, but his assimilated father prevailed. He was the son of German American parents August Mencken Sr., a wealthy cigar factory owner, and his wife (∞ 11 November 1879) Anna Margaret, née Abhau. He was of German ancestry and spoke German in his childhood. Only later, Mencken writes, did his blonde-haired, blue-eyed mother master English to perfection. Thomas Sowell writes (1996):
- "[...] it may be indicative of how long German cultural ties endured [in the United States] that the German language was spoken in childhood by such disparate twentieth-century American figures as famed writer H. L. Mencken, baseball stars Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, and by the Nobel Prize-winning economist George Stigler."
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. German Jewish publishing giant Alfred Abraham Knopf Sr. praised him as a generous, intelligent friend in a personal tribute entitled, "For Henry With Love" (The Atlantic Monthly, May 1959). In his essay, Knopf revealed a little-known hidden side to Mencken the man:
- He [Mencken] had the reputation ... of being a burly, loud, raucous fellow, rough in his speech and lacking refined manners. How mistaken this opinion as I learned a little later, when on a visit to Washington I introduced Blanche Wolf [Knopf's wife] to him. He met her with the most charming manners conceivable, manners I was to discover he always displayed in talking with women [...] I knew Mencken for more than forty years, intimately for well over thirty. Books have been published which describe him as a man I find it difficult to recognize. His public side was visible to everyone: tough, cynical, amusing, and exasperating by turns, but everlastingly consistent. The private man was something else again: sentimental, generous, and unwavering – sometimes almost blind – in his devotion to people he liked.
Mencken's views on the female sex were progressive for a man of his era: he considered women to be more intelligent than men, and he wrote highly of them in his highly acclaimed work In Defense of Women. He hailed the advance of women’s civil rights, with one notable exception: he loathed the suffragettes. Mencken was also outspoken in his defense of the oppressed, even at times when nobody else dared to defend them. Writing for "The Baltimore Sun" in the 1930s, he fearlessly denounced mob lynchings of blacks, and sharply criticized other newspapers for failing to address the issue. He later urged President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to take in all of the Jewish refugees from Europe who wanted to emigrate to America. Sadly, his plea was ignored, but Mencken did not stand idly by: he personally helped some Jews to emigrate to America.
Career
He became a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald in 1899 and moved to The Baltimore Sun in 1906. At this time, he had also begun writing editorial columns that demonstrated the author he would soon become. On the side, he wrote short stories, a novel, and even poetry (which he later reviled). In 1908, he became a literary critic for the magazine The Smart Set. Together with George Jean Nathan, Mencken founded and edited The American Mercury, published by Alfred A. Knopf, in January 1924. It soon had a national circulation and became highly influential on college campuses across America.
Mencken is perhaps best remembered today for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States, and his satirical reporting on the prosecution, judge, jury, and venue of the Scopes trial, which he is credited for naming the "Monkey" trial.
In his capacity as editor and "man of ideas" Mencken became close friends with the leading literary figures of his time, including Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 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 (ghost written by David Freedman) did more to pull America out of depression than all government measures combined. He also mentored John Fante.
As a nationally syndicated columnist and author of numerous books he notably attacked fundamentalist Christianity and the "Booboisie," his word for the ignorant middle classes. In 1926, he was arrested for selling an issue of The American Mercury banned in Boston. Mencken heaped scorn not only upon some public officials but the contemporary state of American democracy itself: in 1931, the Arkansas legislature passed a motion to pray for Mencken's soul after he had called the state the "apex of moronia."
Mencken sometimes took positions in his essays more for shock value than for deep-seated conviction, such as his essay arguing that the Anglo-Saxon race was demonstrably the most cowardly in human history, published at a time when much of his readership considered Anglo-Saxons the noble pinnacle of civilization.
Mencken suffered a cerebral thrombosis in 1948, from which he never fully recovered. The damage to his brain left him aware and fully conscious but unable to read or write. In his later years he enjoyed listening to classical music and talking with friends, but he sometimes referred to himself in the past tense as if already dead.
Mencken was, in fact, preoccupied with how he would be perceived after his death, and he spent this period of time organizing his papers, letters, newspaper clippings and columns. His personal materials were released in 1971, 1981, and 1991 (starting 15 years after his death), and were so thorough they even included grade-school report cards. Hundreds of thousands of letters were included – the only omissions were strictly personal letters received from women.
The Smart Set
On the eve of the First World War, two iconoclastic young journalists, H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, were offered the co-editorship of The Smart Set, a New-York based magazine with literary ambitions. During their nine years as co-editors, from 1914 until 1923, Mencken and Nathan transformed The Smart Set into a must-read of the early jazz era, established themselves as two of America’s foremost critics, and became bona fide celebrities in American popular culture. Indeed, “Mencken and Nathan” were at times as popular collectively as they were separately.
Among their writings in The Smart Set are a jointly authored series of nine “Conversations,” written dialogues between Mencken and Nathan that depict their personal interactions in various circumstances and locales, chronicling a series of events perhaps both real and imagined. Taken together, the “Conversations” offer a plausible if somewhat exaggerated representation of their idiosyncratic relationship as authors and editors. Published here with a new Introduction and Glossary, The Smart Set “Conversations” of H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan are reprinted in the present edition in their entirety.
H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan were controversial figures during their era. They were culture warriors, disruptors, instigators, masters of satire and irony. Their writings were often offensive to readers then and will likely engender only greater offense now. Contemporary readers may find The Smart Set “Conversations” to be a timely reflection upon the history of the American public dialog. This edition of The Smart Set “Conversations” is intended for mature readers interested in the history of arts and literature, as well as the American popular culture of the 1920s.
Death
He died in 1956 at the age of seventy-five, and was interred in the Loudon Park Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland.
Family
Descent
The family, initially called Mencke and later Mencken, came from Oldenburg. An Atanasius Ludwig Mencken worked as a political advisor to Frederick the Great; his daughter Wilhelmine Luise was the mother of the Reichskanzler Otto von Bismarck. There is still a street named Menckestraße in Leipzig today. Henry Louis' grandfather Burkhardt Ludwig Mencken (b. 1828 in Laas) emigrated to America in 1848.
Marriage
Mencken married German American Sara Haardt, an Alabama writer and professor 18 years his junior, in 1930. Haardt was a professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore who wrote short stories and had led efforts in Alabama to ratify the 19th Amendment. The two met in 1923 after Mencken delivered a lecture at the college. Mencken promoted her short stories, and a seven-year courtship ensued. The marriage made national headlines, and many were surprised that Mencken, who once called marriage "the end of hope," 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." Haardt was in poor health throughout their marriage, and died in 1935 of meningitis. Mencken later published Southern Album, a posthumous collection of her short stories.
Quotes
- The Jews could be put down very plausible as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display. – Treatise on the Gods, 1930
- The current revolt against the so-called liberal theology is perfectly sound. That theology is nothing save an excuse and an evasion. It reduces both science and theology to the ridiculous. If a man can't believe that Jesus arose from the dead he should say so frankly and have done. It is not only foolish but also dishonest for him to pretend to accept all the implications of Christianity without admitting the basic postulate. In this field the Catholic Church, as usual, has been enormously more intelligent than the Protestant. It has rejected so-called Modernism in toto and refuses any compromise with it. The Protestants' attempts to compromise have simply made Protestantism ludicrous. No man of any intellectual dignity can accept it, or even discuss it seriously. The only really respectable Protestants are the Fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots, and so Christianity gains nothing by their adherence - in fact, it is gravely injured by their adherence, just as spiritualism would be made preposterous, even if it were not so intrinsically, by the frowsy old imbeciles who believe in it. – Minority Report: H. L. Mencken's Notebooks, 1956
- The true history of World War II, like that of World War I, will probably never be written. The professional historians, as usual, will swallow the official doctrine, which is palpably false. They will take every scrap of official document seriously, and even accept with gravity the reports of the newspapers. It is not hard for a man of reasonable intelligence to get some glimpses of the process by which the United States was hauled into the war, but there are great gaps in the record, and it is not to the interest of anyone concerned to fill them. All that can be established with fair certainty is that no account of the matter by Roosevelt II and his followers will be even so much as half true. – Minority Report: H. L. Mencken's Notebooks, 1956
- The great problem ahead of the United States is that of reducing the high differential birthrate of the inferior orders, for example, the hillbillies of Appalachia, the gimme farmers of the Middle West, the lintheads of the South, and the Negroes. So far no rational effort to grapple with it has been made. On the contrary, the prevailing political mountebanks have sought to put down a discussion of it as immoral: their aim has been to prosper and increase the unfit as much as possible, always at the cost of the fit. But this can't go on forever, else we'll have frank ochlocracy in America, and the progress of civilization will be halted altogether. The theory that inferior stocks often produce superior individuals is not supported by any known scientific facts. All of them run the other way. – Minority Report: H. L. Mencken's Notebooks, 1956
- The belief that man is outfitted with an immortal soul, differing altogether from the engines which operate the lower animals, is ridiculously unjust to them. The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man – say a Tennessee Holy Roller – is really very small, and the difference between the decentest dog and the worst man is all in favor of the dog. – Minority Report: H. L. Mencken's Notebooks, 1956
- Not a single solitary sound reason has yet been advanced for putting the Ku Klux Klan out of business. If the Klan is against the Jews, so are half of the good hotels of the Republic and three-quarters of the good clubs. If the Klan is against the foreign born or the hyphenated citizen, so is the National Institute of Arts and Letters. If the Klan is against the Negro, so are all of the states south of the Mason-Dixon line. If the Klan is for damnation and persecution, so is the Methodist Church. If the Klan is bent upon political control, so are the American Legion and Tammany Hall. If the Klan wears grotesque uniforms, so do the Knights of Pythias and Mystic Shriners. If the Klan holds its meetings in the dead of night, so do the Elks. If the Klan conducts its business in secret, so do all college Greek letter fraternities and the Department of State. If the Klan holds idiotic parades in the public streets, so do the police, the letter-carriers, and firemen. If the Klan's officers bear ridiculous names, so do the officers of the Lambs' Club. If the Klan uses the mails for shaking down suckers, so does the Red Cross. If the Klan constitutes itself a censor of private morals, so does the Congress of the United States. If the Klan lynches a Moor for raping someone's daughter, so would you or I. – The Smart Set, 1923
Works
Books
- George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905)
- The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908)
- The Gist of Nietzsche (1910)
- What You Ought to Know about your Baby (Ghostwriter for Leonard K. Hirshberg; 1910)
- Men versus the Man: a Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist and H. L. Mencken, Individualist (1910)
- Europe After 8:15 (1914)
- A Book of Burlesques (1916)
- A Little Book in C Major (1916)
- A Book of Prefaces (1917)
- In Defense of Women (1918)
- Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918)
- The American Language (1919)
- Prejudices (1919–27)
- First Series (1919)
- Second Series (1920)
- Third Series (1922)
- Fourth Series (1924)
- Fifth Series (1926)
- Sixth Series (1927)
- Selected Prejudices (1927)
- Heliogabalus (A Buffoonery in Three Acts) (1920)
- The American Credo (1920)
- Notes on Democracy (1926)
- Menckeneana: A Schimpflexikon (1928) – Editor
- Treatise on the Gods (1930)
- Making a President (1932)
- Treatise on Right and Wrong (1934)
- Happy Days, 1880–1892 (1940)
- Newspaper Days, 1899–1906 (1941)[1]
- A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1942)
- Heathen Days, 1890–1936 (1943)
- Christmas Story (1944)
- The American Language, Supplement I (1945)
- The American Language, Supplement II (1948)
- A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949) (edited by H.L. Mencken)
Posthumous collections
- Minority Report (1956)
- On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (1956)
- Cairns, Huntington, ed. (1965), The American Scene.
- The Bathtub Hoax and Other Blasts and Bravos from the Chicago Tribune (1958)
- Lippman, Theo Jr, ed. (1975), A Gang of Pecksniffs: And Other Comments on Newspaper Publishers, Editors and Reporters.
- Rodgers, Marion Elizabeth, ed. (1991), The Impossible H.L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories.
- Yardley, Jonathan, ed. (1992), My Life As Author and Editor.
- A Second Mencken Chrestomathy (1994) (edited by Terry Teachout)
- Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work (1996)
- A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial, Melville House Publishing, 2006.
Chapbooks, pamphlets, and notable essays
- Ventures into Verse (1903)
- The Artist: A Drama Without Words (1912)
- The Creed of a Novelist (1916)
- Pistols for Two (1917)
- The Sahara of the Bozart (1920)
- Gamalielese (1921)
- The Hills of Zion (1925)
- The Libido for the Ugly (1927)
- The Penalty of Death[2]
Translations (excerpt)
- Friedrich Nietzsche: The Antichrist – Translated and Introduced by H. L. Mencken, Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1918 (Project Gutenberg EBook of The Antichrist)
