Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) was an American journalist and author. In the 1920s the New York Times dubbed him "the most powerful private citizen in the United States,"[1] while Walter Lippmann (regarded as “the most influential journalist in American history”)[2] called him “the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people.”[3] Historians observe that H.L. Mencken was extremely bigoted, and he was an agnostic.
Mencken's reporting on the Scopes Trial was so bigoted against religion (as he was personally) that millions misunderstood what transpired. His liberal reporting bias about that trial and his mockery of Republican Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover made Mencken a liberal icon, until he later mocked FDR when he was present and when Mencken was ultimately unmasked as virulently anti-Semitic.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Mencken left school at the age of 15. When his father died, he went into newspaper work at the age of 18, rising to become one of the most famous journalists of the Jazz Age. He became editor of The Smart Set and The American Mercury, quintessential iconoclastic American magazines of the roaring twenties. His most successful book was The American Language.
As a child, Mencken was sent to Methodist Sunday School (which he defined as “a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents”)[4] to allow his father, an unbeliever, free time for a nap.[5] “It left me an infidel," he wrote, “as [my father] was, and his father had been before him.”[6] Mencken described himself as “absolutely devoid of what is called religious feeling.”[7] In his view: “Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration—courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth. In brief, it is a fraud.”[8] Mencken singled out Christianity for ridicule:
“ | The notion that [Christianity] differs from the rest [of the world's religions], and is somehow superior to them, is one that seems to me to be very dubious.... What the faithful Christian professes to believe, if put into the form of an affidavit, would be such shocking nonsense that even bishops and archbishops would start laughing.[9] | ” |
Mencken was a Darwinist; it was he who convinced the American Civil Liberties Union and Clarence Darrow, the greatest trial lawyer of his day, to take the Scopes trial,[10] writing that “the sacrifice of Scopes would be a small thing.”[11] Mencken then covered the trial, his mocking coverage earning him his greatest fame.
Mencken was not merely a Darwinist, but a “confirmed Social Darwinist”[12] and Nietzschean.[13] Mencken called Nietzsche's book Thus Spake Zarathustra:
“ | a magnificent statement, lucid, plausible, overwhelming, of the ideas that had been groping for utterance within [Germans]. Here was the sufficient excuse and justification for their racial aspiration.... It had all the essential qualities of a great race-document. It was dramatic, eloquent, persuasive, vigorous, romantic—a mixture of challenge and testament, of code and saga.[14] | ” |
Both Nietzsche and Mencken were “confirmed rationalists and materialists... deeply opposed to Christianity,” as well as “firm believers in a 'natural' caste system.... In Nietzsche's case, his belief in a caste system was based on the concept that some individuals are naturally superior to others, and should therefore be in the upper caste. Mencken's idealized caste system was cruder; it was simple Social Darwinism.”[15]
Underlying both men's advocacy of a caste system was an “incomprehension of, and a near-total lack of respect for, the lower economic classes.”[16]
Mencken was not fond of his fellow Americans. He wrote:
“ | Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy.[17] | ” |
Nor was he fond of the United States itself. He wrote: “My grandfather, I believe, made a mistake when he came to this country [from Germany].... I have spent all of my 62 years here, but I still find it impossible to fit myself into the accepted patterns of American life and thought. After all these years, I remain a foreigner.”[18] He preferred the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm, which he said had a “superbly efficient ruling caste.”[19]
Mencken's vicious attacks on Republican Presidents Calvin Coolidge (“Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored”),[20] Warren Harding (“he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered”)[21] and Herbert Hoover (“a dud”)[22] made him a favorite of the literati, lionized throughout the publishing world. But when Mencken similarly lampooned the Democrat Franklin Roosevelt (“a fraud from snout to tail”),[23] whom he had supported in 1932,[24] he suddenly found himself a pariah, shunned by the establishment.[25] “[T]he New Deal might appear to offer just the sort of target [Mencken] loved,” wrote Alistair Cooke, but “the New Deal was Mencken's Waterloo, and Roosevelt his Wellington.” According to Cooke, “Mencken had a clear eye for the realities that conceived the Roosevelt period,” yet “it was the Roosevelt era that brought him to the mat." Cooke added that "The decline of his prestige was very swift,” so that by “the middle 1930's he all but abandoned the preoccupation of his palmy days, his self-chosen trade as 'a critic of ideas.'”[26]
Since the publication of Mencken's diaries in 1991, he has been lambasted as anti-Semitic, racist and "pro-Nazi."[27] He wrote:
“ | The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered, they lack many 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.[28] | ” |
In his diary, Mencken referred to “the Jews and whores who hang about the theatres and nightclubs”;[29] his publisher Alfred Knopf, wrote Mencken, “showed a certain amount of the obnoxious tactlessness of his race”;[30] George Jean Nathan, his former co-editor at The American Mercury, he wrote, had “a typically Jewish inferiority complex.”[31] Nathan commented, "I guess it would be right to say that [Mencken] never wholly liked Jews. He respected them, he was amused by them, he was even afraid of them, but he didn't like them. Maybe he even disliked them. I suppose that's anti-Semitism."[32]
Mencken was a rabidly anti-Christian newspaper critic and journalist who savaged evangelicals, William Jennings Bryan and, more privately, blacks and Jews.
Mencken was obsessed with social status. He broke off a relationship to his lover, Marion Bloom, because she had not been wealthy or sophisticated enough, as well as his disdain towards her conversion to Christianity Science.
Twenty-five years after Mencken's death, the publication of his diary revealed him to be a complete bigot towards almost anyone other than his own German ethnicity, including his remark that "There is no other Jew in Baltimore who seems suitable" to belong to a private club in Baltimore, after its only Jewish member passed away. Of blacks Mencken said in 1943, "it is impossible to talk anything resembling discretion or judgment to a colored woman."[33] But during his life, Mencken was lionized by his fellow liberal journalists as the "Sage of Baltimore,"[34] and to this day evolutionists are grateful to him for how he ridiculed (and misrepresented) the facts that transpired at the Scopes Trial.
Mencken had contempt for religion and faith, such as:[35]
H.L. Mencken had this to say about moral victories: "In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished."[36]
H.L.Mencken's extraordinarily bigoted obituary of Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential nominee and Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson, concluded with the following:[37]
H.L. Mencken had many colorful quotations, some of which reflected his bigotry. Here is a sampling:[38]
“ | The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone. | ” |
“ | There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.[39] | ” |
“ | Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. | ” |
“ | How does so much [false news] get into the American newspapers, even the good ones? Is it because journalists, as a class, are habitual liars, and prefer what is not true to what is true? I don't think it is. Rather, it is because journalists are, in the main, extremely stupid, sentimental and credulous fellows -- because nothing is easier than to fool them -- because the majority of them lack the sharp intelligence that the proper discharge of their duties demands. | ” |
Categories: [American Authors] [Journalists] [Liberal Authors]