Mencken: The American Iconoclast
By Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
Oxford University Press, 662 pages, $35
Three years ago, H.L. Mencken’s last biographer, Terry Teachout, called him “The Skeptic.” Marion Rodgers, in her thorough-going new life of Mencken, calls him “The American Iconoclast.” Skeptic or iconoclast, if you don’t know who H.L. Mencken was, friend, you may be numbered among those he called the “booboisie.”
We could let Mencken himself settle the matter: “A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own,” he wrote in 1920 in the magazine The Smart Set, “I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.” He took it as his mission to ” `attack error wherever he saw it and to proclaim truth wherever he found it,’ ” believing, ” `It is only by such iconoclasm and proselytizing that humanity can be helped.’ “
Or we could let some of his famous peers clue us in. Mencken was ” `the ultimate firework,’ ” humorist S.J. Perelman wrote. ” `He loosened up journalism. . . . [H]e brought adrenalin into the gray and pulpy style of the day.’ ” In the last half of the Roaring ’20s, columnist Walter Lippmann termed him ” `the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people,’ ” and said, ” `He calls you a swine, and an imbecile, and he increases your will to live.’ ” A quarter-century later, critic Edmund Wilson called Mencken ” `without question, since Poe, our greatest practicing literary journalist.’ “
He was known variously as “That Man in Baltimore,” “The Sage of Baltimore” and “The Bad Boy of Baltimore,” having worked for the Sun for years in incarnations as a reporter, editor and columnist. He was gimlet-eyed and vituperative, as well as side-splittingly funny. At the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in 1924, he said, ” `Coolidge can’t arouse any more enthusiasm than a spittoon.’ ” Scratch him one decade, you’d find a liberal, but in another a conservative, a hater of the New Deal whose columns newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst read aloud to friends. He was, as Teachout suggested, “often wrong but never in doubt.”
One of Rodgers’ problems is that this is a tale that has been told before, by Mencken in some 40 books and voluminous writing for periodicals, and in several biographies. Nonetheless, Rodgers has consulted his original manuscripts rather than the edited published texts; discovered unknown Mencken correspondence (she reports tripping over a box of love letters between Mencken and his wife, Sara Haardt, while doing research at Goucher College in Baltimore); sought out pertinent FBI case files; and relied to a great extent on primary sources that include upward of 80 personal interviews and reams of unpublished work, as well as the published record.
If the strong point of “Mencken: The American Iconoclast” is its authority with detail, a weakness is the spottiness of its author in an analytic sense. Rodgers does a wonderful job of deploying quotations and utilizing her research, giving us the feel of the times and the individuals involved. And she’s not prone to speculation on Mencken’s interior life, helpfully letting the source material speak for itself.
But where the hard questions of Mencken arise–one need not search far to find anti-Semitic or racist statements in his oeuvre, and class-based bigotry as well–she tends to soft-pedal by levying her direct criticism in brief where longer exposition would be more fruitful, and offering copious behavioral explanations on Mencken’s behalf as well.
In part Rodgers, or any biographer, is trapped by the paradox of this man: Mencken did much good in the world, and his actions often stand in stark opposition to his stated beliefs. He was a strange tincture of anti-authoritarian and demotic impulses that mixed with anti-democratic biases. He was a believer in social Darwinism with a chip on his shoulder when it came to the masses. Read from his notebooks, material that Mencken collected and published as the book “Minority Report,” and you’ll find gems like this:
“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. . . . The theory that inferior stocks also produce superior individuals is not supported by any known scientific facts. They all run the other way.”
Bluster like that ran deep in Mencken, and Rodgers offers up many examples, conceding that “Mencken’s stubbornness in relinquishing nineteenth-century views inevitably made his opinions racist.” And yet, in his time, he was one of the earliest and most vocal public voices attacking lynching. He championed civil rights for blacks, and, as a founding editor of American Mercury magazine, he published writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. In fact, Rodgers tells us, “Mencken was the first white editor to dispense with stereotypes and try to depict the complexity of black life.”
The pattern of disdainful commentary coupled with admirable personal acts emerges again and again, as if Mencken were at war with himself, lifelong. He was a virulent critic of aspects of Judaism, putting down the great early anthropologist Franz Boas as someone who ” ‘yielded to his native Jewishness in his old age.’ ” (Whatever that means; for Mencken, it was a rebuttal to Boas’ ideas of cultural influence versus the sort of genetic predisposition in which Mencken believed.)
To what degree Mencken’s anti-Semitism related to his anti-religious beliefs in general is an open question. Likewise, his lack of alarm over Adolf Hitler early in World War II can be laid to many factors: his strong sense of his own German-American heritage; his dislike of Franklin Roosevelt and belief that the president’s plan was to drag the country into the war; and, perhaps, anti-Semitism.
This American iconoclast was more sympathetic toward Germany than were his journalistic peers–that much is obvious, and this Rodgers follows in great detail. He was in charge of the Evening Sun editorial page when Hitler annexed Austria; a single editorial was devoted to the Anschluss, remarking that at least the Austrians were taken over by their own, and not a single mention was made of the straits in which Jewish refugees found themselves. This in a period when nationwide some 1,400 editorials ran, half of them expressing concern over the Jews.
And so we have a problematic character, for Mencken is also deservedly lionized, particularly in journalistic circles, for his 1st Amendment stands, his reporting acumen, his literary critical faculties and his magazine editing. He was author for and co-editor of the magazines The Smart Set and American Mercury, introduced Americans to George Bernard Shaw, recognized the greatness of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, gave Eugene O’Neill his first play publication and helped discover Willa Cather, Ben Hecht, Edgar Lee Masters and even F. Scott Fitzgerald, who at the time was supporting himself writing streetcar ads.
Reading “Mencken: The American Iconoclast” is also to read a parallel cultural history of the U.S. in the first half of the 20th Century. Because of his various media pulpits, and because he was a hound dog of a reporter, Mencken was at least tangentially connected with, and sometimes central to, critical events in public life. So we witness government persecution of suspected radicals following World War I (the Palmer Raids era), the Prohibition years, the famous Scopes trial over the teaching of evolution, the political conventions from the ’20s to the ’40s, the Roosevelt era and its immediate aftermath. And through all of this we have Mencken railing, a literary descendant of Mark Twain but one who foregrounded chagrin, although in person Mencken could be exceedingly warm and generous. (Rodgers’ book deals extensively with his private life, his familial relations and romantic entanglements, as well as the public man.)
Mencken was above all a crusader, and among the great ones of the century so recently closed. Describing the aim of a regular column he wrote, he seemed to sum up his life’s work as well: ” ‘to combat, chiefly by ridicule, American piety, stupidity, tin-pot morality, cheap chauvinism.’ ” Rodgers provides ample evidence of his success in this, and traces his libertarianism as an underlying principle worked out in varied political times. He was an aphoristic writer who left behind scores of quotables–“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under,” for example (this and a good selection of others can be found in “A Mencken Chrestomathy,” published near the end of his life).
Rodgers tells us that after Mencken began his professional life, at the Baltimore Herald in 1899, Managing Editor Robert Carter told him:
” ‘Knock somebody in the head everyday. . . . You must give a good show to get a crowd, and a good show means one with slaughter in it.’ ” Mencken, bless his soul, took it to heart.
