“Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.”
— H. L. Mencken
The fabled Baltimore journalist
Henry Louis Mencken was soft on Herr Hitler, loathed Mr. Roosevelt and sneered
at the working poor — in short, he was an a-hole.
Oh, I know he was complex and had
his good points, but his reluctance to criticize German militarism was
palpable, and his indifference to the sufferings of ordinary people in the Depression
was frankly brutal.
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| H.L. Mencken |
The astute biographer Terry
Teachout makes numerous special pleadings for the man. But you can only read so
many sentences like "As fantastic as his point of view now sounds, it was
well within the boundaries of normal political in the mid-thirties” before you
conclude, “Okay, he was an asshole.”
“I knew Mencken's friend
Huntington Cairns, although I was a small child at the time,” my friend Merri
Ferrell recalled. “I remember the general ideology of his circle (my parents
among them) that loathed FDR and their reactionary politics. Among other
things, they embraced some version of Darwin that put them at the top of the
heap, when in fact, they had none of the survival skills of laborers, but
rather were born into privilege.”
I have admired Mencken’s quotes
for decades, and am surprised to find how little taste I have for the smug
little man himself. In his defense, I will say that great artists turning out
to be assholes is not a rare thing.
Christopher Hitchens — who was oddly
like Mencken in several ways — remarked, “In the celebrated confrontation with
William Jennings Bryan, for example, where the superstitious old populist
feared that scientific Darwinism would open the door to social Darwinism,
Mencken shared the same opinion but with more gusto. He truly believed that it
was a waste of time and energy for the fit to succor the unfit.”
Mencken's loathing for FDR went
beyond the political into pure personal enmity, by the way. After Mencken
denounced FDR in a speech before a press club, he was shocked to hear FDR slap
him down handily in a talk before the same group later that same afternoon.
In a perfect riposte to his “friend”
Mencken, FDR launched into an eloquent, high-flown dissertation on what fools
and mountebanks American journalists — and by extension the men in the room — were.
“A hush fell over the room,” Teachout writes. "Only one man knew at once
that FDR's remarks had been lifted verbatim from 'Journalism in America,' the
first chapter of Mencken's Own 'Prejudices: Sixth Series.'"
“Mencken was notoriously wrong in
many of his opinions and judgments,’ noted Robert Schmuhl in the Chicago
Tribune. “As far as he was concerned, the Depression was no big deal, Adolf
Hitler was ignorant rather than evil and Franklin Roosevelt was the embodiment of
American politics at its worst. But in dramatizing his views, Mencken always
injected humor ‘full of slapstick vigor’ and distinctive phrasing that often
made what he thought less compelling than how he presented his myriad
prejudices. He endlessly ridiculed the ‘booboisie’ (a term he coined) and never
missed a chance to expose the ‘buncombe,’ ‘balderdash’ or ‘numskullery’ of this
‘land of abounding quackeries.’”
Yes, Mencken did not suffer fools
gladly. Unfortunately, he not infrequently made one of himself. Yes, Mencken
could write beguiling memoirs about his childhood and young manhood in
Baltimore, but the “Sage of Baltimore” spent most of his time as a political
writer who was wrong in just about every political prediction he made (he
claimed that FDR was a dictator who was worse than Hitler, and would terminate
U.S. elections).
In other words, Mencken would have
fit right into today’s American corporate media, where a pundit who is
consistently wrong remains gainfully employed and is in fact handsomely
rewarded as long as his erroneous copy kisses up to capital and backhands
labor. Mencken could have fit snugly into that snotty Club of Davids (Brooks,
Gregory and Broder). Of course, unlike those three, Mencken actually had to
bear the burden of some talent.
“All men are frauds,” Mencken
said. “The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny
it.”
Source: “The Skeptic: A Life of
H.L. Mencken” by Terry Teachout
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