Nice piece. I discovered Mencken when my history teacher in school (in Switzerland) showed an episode of Alistair Cooke's documentary on America. At the next occasion I purchased a book of his columns (I still have it). That was in 1975... I have, like yourself, read pretty much everything, whereby a fair amount of his writing while fun (hyperbole) and acidic, does get tiresome. The broad brush strokes are dull. But overall he nails the USA perfectly, and some of his observations are prescient. The problem of overpaying reporters, for example, and the incredible reports from the Scopes Trial,... he even warns about evangelical hatred of everything modern, suggesting we keep an eye on them because otherwise they will "devour us." The "mountebank" Bryan (who "radiated hate like heat from a stove") was a slightly more sincere Trump figure....
So Mencken and the Jews... well, there's also the discussion of Mencken and racism. The jury is out, whereby I myself wrote once about Mencken saying he is an "equal-opportunity insulter." What he disliked was the kind of moral groupthink that many religious and political communities. His incredible writing was compulsive, he read many things, commented on all sorts of subjects, spotted talent and was a great reporter with an eye for details that others would not see or would not report on out of some false sense of decorum. My criticism: He seems to have stopped mostly at Nietzsche when it came to thinking. With Nietzsche, he found a lane, and hardly every got out of it.
Having said that: When election time rolls around, I always read my Mencken. He spotted Donald Trumps and Copelands and RFK Jrs all over the place. He had the courage to write hilarious lines about Aimée McPherson (one of the earliest scammers of the prosperity gospel), noting discreetly the prurience of her thick auburn hair and her hips... He had no fear of being politically incorrect... he did not give a damn about the "moral gaze" of others, and maybe that is what we need today.
Very well put! And good point about Trump. Many Trump fans seem to think that Nietzsche would have approved of him as some kind of übermensch. The truth is that both Nietszche and Mencken would have found him a buffoon. And that’s despite Mencken’s weakness for all things of German derivation (which Trump also is, despite past efforts to claim the family as “Swedish.)
Thanks, yes... Nietzsche had a great deal to say about authenticity, and being, or becoming, authentic, and Trump, in spite of what many say, is authentic as a pretender (I have a stack on the pretend Fascist). He plays the role of a fascist to the hilt, and I suspect he's taking himself seriously now...
I owe a great deal of my views to a fellow I dare call a friend, professor of philosophy who is quite brilliant in his analysis of the media world.
As for Mencken, he saw through the "buffoons" and the spectacle of American elections. And he also often criticized Americans for their timorousness and their tendency to follow fads... he coined that wonderful term: "The Booboisie."
He was eminently quotable, of course, "Puritanism, the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy." ... Or "Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right."
Interesting to think about this famous (and reclusive) pundit of 90 years ago in comparison to some of the more colorful personalities on Substack, podcasts, or YouTube.
I think “homebody” is more accurate than reclusive. He was happiest in the Baltimore home where he spent almost his entire life, until he married late, at 50.
It's not like Mencken didn't travel. He paled around with Anita Loos & some other Hollywood types...visited the group around the Algonquin Round Table and did visit the continent. At home he had his Saturday Night Club and lunched out regularly and hosted beer bashes at his house. His work as a news reporter and editor took him all over the country too. For example covering the "Monkey Trials." So Mencken got around.
Look, Mencken said bad words about every ethnicity. What he said & did personally were something else. He handed quarters to the black kids playing behind his house; when his black housekeeper took ill he paid her hospital & doctor bills; he published black authors when no other mainstream publication would. He stuck with Knopf as publisher, Nathan as Smart Set partner and fought deportation for Emma Goldman's and paid her medical bills. People are hypocrites and often bounce from one stance to another. Take to heart this Yiddishism: If you look close enough, everything is treif.
I agree with everything you wrote. There’s a great Mencken Memorial Lecture here by Larry Gibson: “Mencken: Racist or Civil Rights Champion?” https://live.prattlibrary.org/494
And yet, speaking of what he “did personally,” one thing he never did was write or say anything of substance about Hitler – even after visiting Germany in 1938 – or anything at all on the Holocaust, ever. As I write in the piece, to me that’s the part that’s unforgivable.
Agreed. Is silence on Hitler & the Holocaust, especially with his a well-respected national platforms is egregious. My take from the biographies, and his writings in the diaries & "My life as author and editor" is that he was a lifelong Germanophile & took great pride in his forbears. He viewed Germany as the height of civilization and Hitlerian German was counterfactual to that mindset. By the time WWII was over he was a warn out intellectual with health on decline until the strokes & final bow in early 1956.
Did he say anything bad about his fellow Germans? Honest question.
I find his quote about pogroms unforgiveable. Even for its time. He knew it, too, which is why he wrote it.
As for the "his best friends were Jews," aren't they just the kind of Jews that Zionism wanted to send to the dustbin of history? Someone who would put career ahead of honor? Mencken was a cash cow.
He rarely if ever said anything negative about Germans – either those in America or in Germany. Most of those he praises as “first-rate men” in his writing (as opposed to the great mass of second- and third-raters, in his view) just so happen to be German or of German extraction.
But I don’t think any of this has to do with money – it would have been more profitable to go along with the anti-German sentiment that was raging in America during and after WWI
Mencken was always a lifelong Germanophile & anti English & was quite pissed off at the Versailles Treaty and treatment of Germany ever after. But his big hay day came after WWI with editorship of The Smart Set and afterward his own magazine co-founded with George Jean Nathan, The American Mercury. Until a break with the Baltimore Sun over WWII he was an editor for the Evening News. Beyond that he was a fixture at the Algonquin Round Table as well as--from time to time-- in Hollywood; the screenwriter Anita Loos being one of his friends.
One of Mencken's greatest legacies (for better or worse, depending on your politics) was introducing the young Ayn Rand to the American publishing establishment IIRC.
Based on your article, his report from Mandate Palestine read very journalistically. His description of Arab and Jew seemed objective and very accurate. He was not the first to report on these characteristics.
Great essay on the old curmudgeon. I really needed it! For me, I never judge history by today’s standards. Or for that matter, even by the standards of that era. We all have our flaws, which get magnified over time if we become famous enough. Otherwise, our shortcomings get swallowed up in the sands of time. Enjoy Mencken for his provocative skills. Don’t get discouraged by his sins of omission.
Wow, love your article. It is wonderful to learn about Mencken. I’ve only encountered snatches of his life to date. Your work fills in his picture. Thank you.
Thanks, Darren! And not exactly – it’s more that I found these articles during my research for my book but never did anything with them. And that I had already read pretty widely about Mencken out of my own fascination with him (and clearly too much time on my hands)...
Nice piece. I discovered Mencken when my history teacher in school (in Switzerland) showed an episode of Alistair Cooke's documentary on America. At the next occasion I purchased a book of his columns (I still have it). That was in 1975... I have, like yourself, read pretty much everything, whereby a fair amount of his writing while fun (hyperbole) and acidic, does get tiresome. The broad brush strokes are dull. But overall he nails the USA perfectly, and some of his observations are prescient. The problem of overpaying reporters, for example, and the incredible reports from the Scopes Trial,... he even warns about evangelical hatred of everything modern, suggesting we keep an eye on them because otherwise they will "devour us." The "mountebank" Bryan (who "radiated hate like heat from a stove") was a slightly more sincere Trump figure....
So Mencken and the Jews... well, there's also the discussion of Mencken and racism. The jury is out, whereby I myself wrote once about Mencken saying he is an "equal-opportunity insulter." What he disliked was the kind of moral groupthink that many religious and political communities. His incredible writing was compulsive, he read many things, commented on all sorts of subjects, spotted talent and was a great reporter with an eye for details that others would not see or would not report on out of some false sense of decorum. My criticism: He seems to have stopped mostly at Nietzsche when it came to thinking. With Nietzsche, he found a lane, and hardly every got out of it.
Having said that: When election time rolls around, I always read my Mencken. He spotted Donald Trumps and Copelands and RFK Jrs all over the place. He had the courage to write hilarious lines about Aimée McPherson (one of the earliest scammers of the prosperity gospel), noting discreetly the prurience of her thick auburn hair and her hips... He had no fear of being politically incorrect... he did not give a damn about the "moral gaze" of others, and maybe that is what we need today.
Very well put! And good point about Trump. Many Trump fans seem to think that Nietzsche would have approved of him as some kind of übermensch. The truth is that both Nietszche and Mencken would have found him a buffoon. And that’s despite Mencken’s weakness for all things of German derivation (which Trump also is, despite past efforts to claim the family as “Swedish.)
Thanks, yes... Nietzsche had a great deal to say about authenticity, and being, or becoming, authentic, and Trump, in spite of what many say, is authentic as a pretender (I have a stack on the pretend Fascist). He plays the role of a fascist to the hilt, and I suspect he's taking himself seriously now...
I owe a great deal of my views to a fellow I dare call a friend, professor of philosophy who is quite brilliant in his analysis of the media world.
As for Mencken, he saw through the "buffoons" and the spectacle of American elections. And he also often criticized Americans for their timorousness and their tendency to follow fads... he coined that wonderful term: "The Booboisie."
He was eminently quotable, of course, "Puritanism, the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy." ... Or "Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right."
Interesting to think about this famous (and reclusive) pundit of 90 years ago in comparison to some of the more colorful personalities on Substack, podcasts, or YouTube.
Would not describe Mencken as "reclusive" by any measure.
I think “homebody” is more accurate than reclusive. He was happiest in the Baltimore home where he spent almost his entire life, until he married late, at 50.
But he was certainly “colorful!”
It's not like Mencken didn't travel. He paled around with Anita Loos & some other Hollywood types...visited the group around the Algonquin Round Table and did visit the continent. At home he had his Saturday Night Club and lunched out regularly and hosted beer bashes at his house. His work as a news reporter and editor took him all over the country too. For example covering the "Monkey Trials." So Mencken got around.
Look, Mencken said bad words about every ethnicity. What he said & did personally were something else. He handed quarters to the black kids playing behind his house; when his black housekeeper took ill he paid her hospital & doctor bills; he published black authors when no other mainstream publication would. He stuck with Knopf as publisher, Nathan as Smart Set partner and fought deportation for Emma Goldman's and paid her medical bills. People are hypocrites and often bounce from one stance to another. Take to heart this Yiddishism: If you look close enough, everything is treif.
I agree with everything you wrote. There’s a great Mencken Memorial Lecture here by Larry Gibson: “Mencken: Racist or Civil Rights Champion?” https://live.prattlibrary.org/494
And yet, speaking of what he “did personally,” one thing he never did was write or say anything of substance about Hitler – even after visiting Germany in 1938 – or anything at all on the Holocaust, ever. As I write in the piece, to me that’s the part that’s unforgivable.
Agreed. Is silence on Hitler & the Holocaust, especially with his a well-respected national platforms is egregious. My take from the biographies, and his writings in the diaries & "My life as author and editor" is that he was a lifelong Germanophile & took great pride in his forbears. He viewed Germany as the height of civilization and Hitlerian German was counterfactual to that mindset. By the time WWII was over he was a warn out intellectual with health on decline until the strokes & final bow in early 1956.
Did he say anything bad about his fellow Germans? Honest question.
I find his quote about pogroms unforgiveable. Even for its time. He knew it, too, which is why he wrote it.
As for the "his best friends were Jews," aren't they just the kind of Jews that Zionism wanted to send to the dustbin of history? Someone who would put career ahead of honor? Mencken was a cash cow.
He rarely if ever said anything negative about Germans – either those in America or in Germany. Most of those he praises as “first-rate men” in his writing (as opposed to the great mass of second- and third-raters, in his view) just so happen to be German or of German extraction.
But I don’t think any of this has to do with money – it would have been more profitable to go along with the anti-German sentiment that was raging in America during and after WWI
Are you saying he was a little bit radioactive during WW1?
My impression is that he was always massively successful.
Mencken was always a lifelong Germanophile & anti English & was quite pissed off at the Versailles Treaty and treatment of Germany ever after. But his big hay day came after WWI with editorship of The Smart Set and afterward his own magazine co-founded with George Jean Nathan, The American Mercury. Until a break with the Baltimore Sun over WWII he was an editor for the Evening News. Beyond that he was a fixture at the Algonquin Round Table as well as--from time to time-- in Hollywood; the screenwriter Anita Loos being one of his friends.
One of Mencken's greatest legacies (for better or worse, depending on your politics) was introducing the young Ayn Rand to the American publishing establishment IIRC.
Better. That is interesting about Rand. Thank you for that.
Based on your article, his report from Mandate Palestine read very journalistically. His description of Arab and Jew seemed objective and very accurate. He was not the first to report on these characteristics.
Great essay on the old curmudgeon. I really needed it! For me, I never judge history by today’s standards. Or for that matter, even by the standards of that era. We all have our flaws, which get magnified over time if we become famous enough. Otherwise, our shortcomings get swallowed up in the sands of time. Enjoy Mencken for his provocative skills. Don’t get discouraged by his sins of omission.
Wow, love your article. It is wonderful to learn about Mencken. I’ve only encountered snatches of his life to date. Your work fills in his picture. Thank you.
Awesome piece. Seems like enough sources here to suggest you are working on a bigger thing about Mencken…?
Thanks, Darren! And not exactly – it’s more that I found these articles during my research for my book but never did anything with them. And that I had already read pretty widely about Mencken out of my own fascination with him (and clearly too much time on my hands)...