Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and start slitting throats.
- H. L. Mencken
A man of mixed enlightenment
H.L. Mencken was a smart man, sometimes. I find myself agreeing with a lot of what he had to say, and he talked about a lot of things.
He was, of course, an insufferable elitist - he was of the opinion that democracy was the domination of superior men by their inferiors. Anybody who feels that way almost necessarily puts themselves in the former category, but in some cases, he was. He opposed among other things organized religion, creationism, anti-intellectualism, bigotry of all stripes, and in a great case of "one of these things is not like the others", at least superficially, chiropractic medicine. He was also an outspoken defendant of the First Amendment as well as a pianist and a member of a musicians' club.
As someone vehemently opposed to injustice, at least injustice as he saw it, he certainly did some flag-hoisting of his own; in 1926, he deliberately and publicly violated the Comstock laws of Boston, Massachusetts, in order to provoke an arrest as a form of civil disobedience.
The American Mercury and civil disobedience
Mencken was the co-creator of the now-defunct magazine The American Mercury, an early issue of which included the article Up From Methodism, by Herbert Asbury. It was a purportedly true story of a small-town prostitute who wished to repent, but was shunned from the local church and so backslid.
This enraged Rev. J. Frank Chase of Boston's Watch and Ward Society, a group devoted to aggressive censorship of literature and art, who lobbied successfully to have that issue of The American Mercury banned in Boston. A newspaper vendor was arrested for selling the banned issue, which provoked Mencken to arrange a media circus involving the public sale of a copy of the banned issue to Rev. Chase himself, who smiled and posed for the press cameras.
Mencken ended up spending over $20,000 (more than $244,000 in 2010 dollars) on legal defense, a lawsuit against Rev. Chase for illegal prior restraint of the press, and a series of court cases and appeals attempting to overturn the Federal Comstock Acts, as well as expenses for lost sales and advertising.
While ultimately unsuccessful in most of his legal battles, he was absolutely committed to overturning unjust and unconstitutional laws which were later successfully struck down.
Elitism, bigotry, and anti-Semitism
He was an unabashed elitist, and preferred to treat democracy, in his writings, with an amused contempt. He was a strong follower of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and believed in an absolutely impartial government by the elite minds of any given community.
He spoke and wrote strongly against bigotry, and wrote at least one article summarily dismissing the concept of racial superiority, particularly Anglo-Saxon superiority. His 1923 essay, "The Anglo Saxon", not only dismissed the idea of a pure race, but, in a heavy paraphrase, claimed that even if there were such a thing as a pure Anglo-Saxon, that the race would be defined by inferiority and cowardice. The most famous quote from this essay is,
"The normal American of the 'pure-blooded' majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed and he gets up every morning with a sickening fear that his underwear has been stolen."
Though an admirer of German culture, likely due to his infatuation with Nietzsche, there is strong, though somewhat conflicting, evidence that he did not share anti-Semitic feelings with many of his like-minded contemporaries. Indeed, he was vigorously defended by progressive Gore Vidal,
Far from being an anti-Semite, Mencken was one of the first journalists to denounce the persecution of the Jews in Germany at a time when the New York Times, say, was notoriously reticent. On November 27, 1938, Mencken writes (Baltimore Sun), "It is to be hoped that the poor Jews now being robbed and mauled in Germany will not take too seriously the plans of various politicians to rescue them." He then reviews the various schemes to "rescue" the Jews from the Nazis, who had not yet announced their own final solution.
Syndicated columnist, prolific writer
Besides national syndication for the various columns he wrote across his career, he was the author of over 21 works in 29 volumes; 7 chapbooks; and a library of posthumous collections, letters, and unreleased works. His topics ranged from coverage of the Scopes monkey trial to commentary on the plays of George Bernard Shaw and analysis of selected works of Nietzsche.
He was also the perpetrator of the famous bathtub hoax, a completely fictitious account of the invention of, and the introduction into the United States, of the bathtub. Published during WWI, and intended as a simple joke, it was republished, referenced, and accepted as fact in such varied circles as journals of medicine and encyclopedias. He was admittedly astonished at the wide circulation it received, and to this day it is referenced erroneously as fact.
- The Bathtub Hoax and Other Blasts and Bravos, Alfred A. Knopf (1958) (Full transcript of the original article here)
- S. L. Harrison aka H. L. Mencken: Selected Pseudonymous Writings ISBN 0-9708035-4-0.
- H. L. Mencken. Prejudices: A Selection ISBN 0-8018-8535-3
- Disturber of the Peace, William Manchester (1951)
- The Impossible H.L. Mencken ISBN 0385262078