H.L. Mencken, America's Wittiest Defender of Liberty; J. Powell

THEFREEMAN IDEASON LIBERTY H.L. Mencken,America's Wittiest Defenderof Liberty by Jim Powell D uring the first half of the twentieth century, H. L. Mencken was the most outspoken defender of liberty in America. He spent thousands of dollars challenging restrictions on freedom of the press. He boldly denounced President Woodrow Wil son for whipping up patriotic fervor to enter World War I, which cost his job as a newspaper columnist. Mencken denounced Franklin Delano Roosevelt for amassing dangerous political power and for maneu vering to enter World War II, and he again lost his newspaper job. Moreover, the Pres ident ridiculed him by name. "The government I live under has been my enemy all my active life," Mencken declared. "When it has not been engaged in silencing me it has been engaged in robbing me. So far as I can recall I have never had any contact with it that was not an outrage on my dignity and an attack on my security. "

Though intensely controversial, Mencken earned respect as America's foremost news paperman and literary critic. He produced an estimated ten million words: some 30 books, contributions to 20 more books and thousands of newspaper columns. He wrote some 100,000letters, or between 60 and 125 Mr. Powell is editor ofLaissez-Faire Books and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. He has writtenforThe New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, American Heritage, and more than three dozen other publications. Copyright © by Jim Powell. per working day. He hunted-and-pecked every word with his two forefingers-for years, he used a little Corona typewriter about the size of a cigar box. Mencken had interesting things to say about politics, literature, food, health, reli gion, sports, and much more. No one knew more about our American language. Influ ential pundits of the past like Walter Lipp mann are long forgotten, but people still read Mencken's work. During the past de cade, publishers-have issued almost a dozen books about him or by him. Biographer William Nolte reports that Mencken ranks among the most frequently quoted Ameri can authors.

Certainly Mencken was among the witti est. For example: "Puritanism-the haunt ing fear that someone, somewhere may be happy. . . . Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.... The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flophouses and disturbing the peace. " Mencken stood about five feet, eight inches tall and weighed around 175 pounds. He parted his slick brown hair in the middle. He liked to chew on a cigar. He dressed with a pair of suspenders and a rumpled suit. According to one chronicler, Mencken at his best looked "like a plumber got up for church. " Publisher Alfred Knopf had this to say 594 about Mencken, a close friend for more than 40 years: "His public side was visible to everyone: tough, cynical, amusing, and ex asperating by turns. The private man was something else again: sentimental, gener ous, and unwavering-sometimes almost blindin his devotion to people of whom he felt fond . . . the most charming manners conceivable, manners I was to discover he always displayed in talking with women. . .

he spent a fantastic amount of his time getting friends to and from doctors' waiting rooms and hospitals, comforting them and keeping them company there." Mencken inspired friends of freedom. He helped cheer up stylish individualist author Albert Jay Nock, a frequent contributor to Mencken's magazine the American Mer cury, during Nock's declining years. Mencken's stalwart individualism awed young Ayn Rand who, in 1934, called him "one whom I admire as the greatest repre sentative of a philosophy to which I want to dedicate my whole life." Henry Louis Mencken was born Septem ber 12, 1880, in Baltimore. His father, Au gust Mencken, owned a cigar factory. His mother Anna Abhau Mencken, like her husband, was a child of German immigrants. In 1883, the family moved to a three-story, red brick row house at 1524 Hollins Street. Here, except during his five-year marriage, Mencken lived for the rest of his life.

Mencken was a voracious reader from the get-go. At age nine, he discovered Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which opened his eyes to rugged individualism and literary pleasures. This was, as he put it, "probably the most stupendous event in my whole life." He was thrilled: "what a man that Mark Twain was! How he stood above and apart from the world, like Rabelais come to life again, observing the human comedy, chuckling over the eternal fraudulence of man! What a sharp eye he had for the bogus, in religion, politics, art, literature, patrio tism, virtue. . . . And seeing all this, he laughed at them, but not often with malice." Mencken finished high school when he was 15 and went right to work in his father's cigar factory, but he hated it. Within a few 595 H. L. Mencken days after his father died of kidney failure in January 1899, Mencken tried his hand as a newspaperman. The first story he ever sold, to the Baltimore Herald, was about a stolen horse. By June that year, he was a full-time reporter earning $7 a week.

Mencken proved to be unusually resource ful and industrious. He rose to become drama critic, editor of the Sunday paper, and·city editor of the morning paper. Early on, Mencken displayed a tremen dous zest for life. In 1904, for example, he began a little musical group which became known as the "Saturday Night Club." Al most every week for 46 years, as many as a dozen friends got together around 8:00 PM. Mencken played the piano with great enthu siasm. Other participants played the violin, cello, flute, oboe, drums, French horn, and piano. They most often played for a couple hours in a violin-maker's shop and after wards went to the Hotel Rennert for beer. During the 13 years of Prohibition, they took turns hosting festivities in their homes. They enjoyed chamber music, marches, waltzes, 596 THE FREEMAN • SEPTEMBER 1995 and operatic melodies. Mencken loved Ger man romantics, Beethoven above all.

The Baltimore Sun The Baltimore Herald went out of busi ness in 1906, and Mencken landed at the newspaper where he would write for more than 40 years. One observer remarked: "The staid old Baltimore Sun has got itself a real Whangdoodle." The Baltimore Evening Sun was launched in 1910, and Mencken served as editor. From 1911 to 1915, he wrote a daily "Free Lance" col umn which covered politics, education, mu sic, whatever interested him. He edited the adjacent letters-to-the editor columns, and whenever a nasty letter came in attacking one of his columns, he made sure it was printed-he recognized that people enjoyed reading abuse. There was abuse aplenty as people re acted to his bombastic writing style. He ridiculed hypocritical politicians, clergy men, and social reformers. For example, Mencken called Fundamentalist do-gooder WilliamJennings Bryan "the most sedulous flycatcher in American history . . . a char latan, a mountebank, a zany without shame or dignity." He was accused of anti Semitism because he gratuitously referred to so many people as "Jews." Yet he didn't criticize Jews as much as others. He de scribed Anglo-Saxons as "a wretchedly dirty, shiftless, stupid and rascally people . . . anthropoids."

Mencken lashed out at President Wood row Wilson for maneuvering America into World War I. He insisted that the British government shared responsibility for the horrifying conflict, and he attacked the moral pretensions of British officials who pursued a naval blockade punishing inno cent people as well as combatants in Ger many. Mencken discontinued his column because of wartime hysteria. Meanwhile, he had established himself as a literary critic. Since 1908, he had reviewed books for Smart Set, a monthly literary magazine. He and drama critic George Jean Nathan were named editors in 1914. Mencken relentlessly attacked puritanical standards and hailed authors like Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mencken turned increasingly to writing books-he had written eight on music, lit erature, and philosophy by 1919. That year marked the debut of his most enduring work. It arose from his passion for Ameri can speech which evolved spontaneously into something more dynamic than the En glish of England. No government planned it: the American language became more ex pressive as ordinary people went about their daily business, now and then contributing new words. The first edition of The Ameri can Language soon sold out, and Mencken began work on the second of four editions.

"All I ask," he wrote his publisher Alfred Knopf, "is that you make The American Language good and thick. It is my secret ambition to be the author of a book weighing at least five pounds." In 1920, with World War I a bad memory, the Baltimore Sun asked Mencken to re sume writing a column for $50 a week. Thus began his memorable "Monday" articles which appeared weekly for the next 18 years. About two-thirds of them dealt with politics. The American Mercury By 1923, Mencken decided he wanted a national forum for his political views. He resigned from the Smart Set, and .with backing from Knopf he and Nathan launched the monthly American Mercury. The first issue, bearing a distinctive pea green cover, appeared in January 1924. Nathan soon disagreed about which direc tion the magazine should go, and he re signed. Mencken offered feisty commentary plus writing by many of America's most distinguished authors. There were articles by philosophical anarchist Emma Goldman and birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger. Also, such black authors as W.E.B.

Dubois, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and George Schuyler. Circulation grew for four years, peaking around 84,000 in 1928.

H.L. MENCKEN, AMERICA'S WITTIEST DEFENDER OF LIBERTY 597 Although Mencken wasn't known as a political philosopher, he made clear his commitment to individual liberty. "Every government," he wrote, "is a scoundrel. In its relations with other governments it re sorts to frauds and barbarities that were prohibited to private men by the Common Law of civilization so long ago as the reign of Hammurabi, and in its dealings with its own people it not only steals and wastes their property and plays a brutal and witness game with their natural rights, but regularly gambles with their very lives. Wars are seldom caused by spontaneous hatreds be tween people, for peoples in general are too ignorant of one another to have grievances and too indifferent to what goes on beyond their borders to plan conquests. They must be urged to the slaughter by politicians who know how to alarm them." Mencken expressed outrage at violence against blacks and as Hitler menaced Eu rope, Mencken attacked President Roose velt for refusing to admit Jewish refugees into the United States: "There is only one way to help the fugitives, and that is to find places for them in a country in which they can really live. Why shouldn't the United States take in a couple hundred thousand of them, or even all of them?"

Mencken was adamant that the United States not become entangled in another European war. He believed it would mean further expansion of government power, oppression, debt, and killings without rid ding the world of tyranny. Better to keep America as a peaceful sanctuary for liberty: "I believe that liberty is the only genu inely valuable thing that men have invent ed, " he wrote, ' 'at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free airthat progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave." Mencken added: "In any dispute between a citizen and the govern ment, it is my instinct to side with the citizen . . . I am against all efforts to make men virtuous by law."

As for capitalism, Mencken declared that "We owe to it almost everything that passes under the general name of civilization to day. The extraordinary progress of the world since the Middle Ages has not been due to the mere expenditure of human energy, nor even to the flights of human genius, for men had worked hard since the remotest times, and some of them had been of surpassing intellect. No, it has been due to the accumulation of capital. That accumulation permitted labor to be orga nized economically and on a large scale, and thus greatly enhanced its productive ness. It provided the machinery that grad ually diminished human drudgery, and lib erated the spirit of the worker, who had formerly been almost indistinguishable from a mule. Most of all, it made possible a longer and better preparation for work, so that every art and handicraft greatly wid ened its scope and range, and multitudes of new and highly complicated crafts came in."

Sara For a brief period, Mencken faced his ideological battles with a romantic partner. In May 1923,he delivered a talk called "how to catch a husband" at Baltimore's Goucher College and there met a 26-year-old, Ala bama-born English teacher named Sara Haardt. He was taken by her good looks, radiant intelligence and passion for litera ture. She saw a decent, joyous, civilized man. A lifelong bachelor who had lived with his mother until she died in 1925, when he was 45, Mencken was wary of marriage. ApparentlySara's worsening tuberculosis brought him to the altar. After her death on May 31, 1935, Mencken wrote a friend: "When I married Sara, the doctors said she could not live more than three years. Actu ally, she lived five, so I had two more years of happiness than I had any right to expect. "

598 THE FREEMAN • SEPTEMBER 1995 Sara's death hit him especially hard, be cause he was already down. With the Great Depression everywhere blamed on capital ism, individualist Mencken seemed like a relic. He had seldom analyzed economic policy, so he wasn't intellectually equipped to explain how the federal government itself had triggered and prolonged the Great De pression-powerful evidence for that case became available only in the 1960s. Circulation of the American Mercury plunged. Mencken resigned as editor by December 1933. He was succeeded by eco nomicjournalist Henry Hazlitt. Three years after Sara died, Mencken's attacks on Pres ident Roosevelt's foreign policy cost him his Baltimore Sun column. It didn't help that Mencken's devotion to traditional German culture apparently led him to discount om inous news coming out of Hitler's Germany. He was an outcast. Mencken did much to redeem himself as far as the public was concerned by affirming the joys of private life. He added two massive supplements to The American Lan guage, acclaimed as a learned and enter taining masterwork about popular speech.

He wrote his charming memoirs which be gan as a series of New Yorker articles, then expanded into a trilogy, Happy Days (1940), Newspaper Days (1941),and Heathen Days (1943).They display a tolerant, enthusiastic view of life. He edited a generous collec tion of his newspaper articles into a book, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1948)-it's still in print. On November 28, 1948,Mencken went to pick up a manuscript from his secretary's apartment and suffered a stroke. While he regained his physical capabilities, he lost the ability to read, and he had difficulty speak ing. Most people forgot about him. Mencken died in his sleep on Sunday, January 29, 1956. His ashes were buried near his parents and his wife at Loudon Park Cemetery. Mencken' s former American Mercury compatriot, Newsweek columnist Henry Hazlitt, called Mencken "a great liberating force. . . . In his political and economic opinions Mencken was from the beginning, to repeat, neither 'radical' nor 'conservative,' but libertarian. He champi oned the freedom and dignity of the individ ual."

Though Mencken was gone, controversy soon swirled about him again. New collec tions of his work proved popular. Previously unpublished manuscripts appeared. He was accused of anti-Semitism, and these charges gained a wider hearing with the 1989 publi cation of his candid diary. Longtime Jewish friends defended him. A succession of bi ographies focused on different aspects of his life. Nearly all of Mencken' s chroniclers op posed his political views-in particular, his hostility to the New Deal-but they have found him irresistibly appealing. They were drawn to his prodigious enterprise, vast learning, steadfast courage, good cheer, and free spirit. Someday, hopefully more people willappreciate Mencken' s vital role in nour ishing a love for liberty during some of America's darkest decades. D BOOKS Criminal Justice? The Legal System vs. Individual Responsibility Edited by Robert James Bidinotto Foundation for Economic Education. 1995 • 304 pages. $24.95 Reviewed by Joseph Sobran P rogressives used to talk confidently about "building a new society." Well, here it is.