H.L. Mencken, Avuncular A-hole

 “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.

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