The Life and Times of the Bad Boy of Baltimore
by Marian Elizabeth Rodgers

Reviewed by Glynn Wilson
Editor and Publisher
LocustFork.Net

Courage.

That was the one virtue H.L. Mencken admired most in humans, especially newspaper and magazine reporters and editors.

His long-time publisher, Alfred Knopf, said as much in a radio interview not long before the so-called "Sage of Baltimore" died on January 29, 1956, less than a year before I was born.

Courage is a virtue that is lacking more than ever in the country Mencken fought to rescue from prejudice, propaganda, censorship and demagoguery for the first half of the 20th century in the heyday of newspapers, magazines and American democracy.

Newspapers and democracy are once again at their deathbed, although Mencken predicted their demise in the 1930s, which just goes to show you that newspaper reporters tend to be less than prescient in their prophesies.

While even an affable skeptic like Mencken would admit that the world needs heroes, he was called an iconoclast. It was a title he embraced.

An iconoclast is someone who attacks and seeks to overthrow traditional or popular ideas or institutions, according to one dictionary, although I take it to mean someone who spends more time breaking down false myths than building them up.

He scorned "the mob" and "the believer" and coined the term "boobosie" to describe them. He saw it as his mission as a journalist to "attack error wherever he saw it and to proclaim truth whenever he found it."

Mencken was a throwback in may ways. With my own similarity in outlook, I have been called a "throwback" myself. Perhaps there is some truth in it. Somewhere in my DNA there is a bit of H.L. Mencken.

While he said some things in his life that led some to believe he was a racist and even anti-Semitic - well before the days of political correctness - Mencken is one of the heroes of American journalism and literature. No doubt about it.

He rescued American journalism from the Victorian Puritanism of the late 19th century.

This biography by Ms. Rodgers, in the works since she first stumbled onto a box of Mencken letters in 1981 at Goucher College, attests to the fact that Mencken was not at heart anti-black or anti-Jew any more than he was against the rights of women or anti-freedom of religion. He was a critic through and through and not afraid to say and publish what he thought. Bloggers could take a lesson from that.

It is true he didn't much like the British. This account would have been stronger if it included more on Mencken's views about Monarchy.

Then of Arabs, Mencken once said, after a trip to the Middle East, they were "the dirtiest, orneriest and most shiftless people who regularly make the first pages of the world's press."

He was pro-freedom to the core. Pro Bill of Rights. Freedom of speech and of the press above all. And that included the freedom to express an individual opinion - no matter how wrong or disgraceful to polite society. That is what the world lacks now - except in certain comic personalities seen on HBO.

What makes Mencken a worthy hero for today's journalists – whether they publish the results of their work on a printing press, on the radio, TV or even on a blog on the Web – was his courage and belief in the search for scientific truth. He was a Huxley agnostic to the end. (That would be Darwin's "Bulldog" Thomas Huxley, who coined the term).

But no biography of a human being would be complete without revealing some warts and disappointments. What disappoints about this particular hero is that his German ancestry colored his objectivity on the Nazi threat to the world and Jews, a story he completely missed. He was also a major critic of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which caused me to seriously question whether I wanted to consider this writer a hero or not.

In the final analysis, however, what he did not like most about Roosevelt was primarily his manipulation and censorship of the press.

As a true libertarian Democrat of his time, Mencken also railed against Roosevelt's social-democrat policies such as Social Security. But that could be expected from someone who lived his entire safe economic life in Baltimore, a product of the upper middle class of the Northeast who never felt the pangs of hunger during the Great Depression. His own combined journalism and literary careers protected him from poverty.

At least he was equally critical of big business, which he once said, "is almost wholly devoid of anything even poetically describable as public spirit."

He also hated the South. And rightly so, for it was and is a region of rubes and morons even now. His views on the South were largely drawn from experience covering the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925.

Ms. Rodgers' account only gives passing credit to Roosevelt for ending Prohibition, and only mentions Hugo Black once in the context of getting the job over a candidate Mencken supported publicly. Mencken should have recognized both Roosevelt and Black's contributions to the individual liberties he crusaded for all his life.

Then again, the only woman he ever married was Montgomery, Alabama, debutante and writer Sara Haardt, so you have to give him credit for that.

And the fact is, he helped many Jews and African-Americans personally and fought for anti-lynching laws harder than anyone alive at the time, including anyone at the much vaunted New York Times.

Ms. Rodgers' biography is exhaustively researched and well written. The only recognizable flaws are perhaps too much attention on Mencken's love affairs, which the man himself did his best to conceal from historians, and only scant mention of Mencken's views on Charles Darwin and evolution. You would think a man who attained so much fame from covering the "trial of the century" would have had more to say about evolution.

Mencken's views on science are made clear on every other front, especially the health sciences. But the reader is left wondering where Mencken would come down today on the debate over the separation of church and state in the struggle over "intelligent design" versus evolution in American public school classrooms. It is easy to imagine Mencken railing against the "morons, hypocrites and homo boobiens," especially the gay, pedophile priests of the Catholic church and especially members of the Kansas City School Board.

Alas, his views on these subjects are not fleshed out in enough detail for a modern reporter to hang his fedora on.

Perhaps it was a weakness of Mencken's that he spent more time contemplating the works of Nietzche, a mere philosopher. For his views on objectivity based on science are clear enough.

Ms. Rodgers reports that "science gave him the basis for objectivity."

"I believe fully only in what may be demonstrated scientifically," Mencken wrote on the subject. He said more than once that he was concerned only with "the world as it is, and not with the world as it might or should be."

He was against jingoistic nationalism, which would no doubt put him at odds with the Republican Party of today, even in the wake of 9/11.

Mencken was probably the first major critic of American journalism itself. He published numerous articles on the subject in his American Mercury magazine. This biography makes several mentions of Mencken's negative views on the drive toward professionalism. More of an explanation of that would also have been interesting.

Finally, Mencken wrote more column inches against prohibition than any other writer of his time, helping to stop the madness that was the 18th Amendment, which kept beer, wine and liquor illegal and underground for more than a decade, from 1919 to 1933.

Perhaps if he were alive and writing today he would spend as much time railing against marijuana laws, which do more to corrupt the U.S. legal system than anything with the possible exception of the hyper-graduation rates of American law schools.

His views on beer are clear enough. He was for it.

Hear! Hear! And Cheers!

Then there is one other point of view I share whole heartedly with Mencken. He absolutely hated Christmas time . . . Bah, Humbug!