Marion Elizabeth Rodgers - Mencken: The American Iconoclast

Mencken

H. L. Mencken, 1926. Photograph by Edward Steichen. Reprinted with permission of Joanna T. Steichen.

The American Iconoclast

MARION ELIZABETH RODGERS

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Copyright 2005 by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rodgers, Marion Elizabeth.
Mencken: the American iconoclast / Marion Elizabeth Rodgers.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-507238-9
ISBN-10: 0-19-507238-3
1. Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis), 18801956.
2. Authors, American20th centuryBiography.
3. JournalistsUnited StatesBiography.
4. EditorsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title
PS3525.E43Z79 2005
818.5209dc22 [B]
2005047786

Permission to quote H. L. Mencken has been granted by the Enoch Pratt Free Library,
Baltimore, in accordance with the terms of the bequest of H. L. Mencken.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

To Leon Livingstone
and
Jules Witcover

THE ICONOCLAST: The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries.

H. L. Mencken

Fifty years ago I spent my mornings reading to an old man who suffered, as I now suffer, from a series of strokes. He was a writer. He was H. L. Mencken. I have never known a kinder man. But when he unsheathed his typewriter and sharpened its keys, his prose was anything but kind. It was rollicking and it was ferocious. Witty, intellectual polemicists are a vanishing breed today. Their role has been usurped by television boobs whose IQs measure just below their body temperatures. Some journalism schools even warn their students to shun words that may hurt. But sometimes words should hurt. That is why they are in the language. When terrorists slaughter innocents, when corporation executives betray the trust of shareholders, when lewd priests betray the trust of little children, it is time to mobilize the language and send it into battle.

When Mencken died in January 1956, he was cremated. That was a mistake. He should have been rolled in malleable gold and polished to blind the cosmos. I still miss him. America misses him more.

William Manchester (19222004)

Mencken was our god. Holding the Maryland flag aloft with cheering students at Harvard University, 1926. H. L. Mencken Collection, Enoch Pratt Free Library.

O

N THE MORNING OF APRIL 5, 1926, a multitude of Harvard and Boston University undergraduates, reporters, and the curious gathered at Brimstone Corner in Boston. Students, many of them clutching magazines, awaited the Baltimore journalist and editor H. L. Mencken.

Boston newspapers had already announced his impending fate. One headline blared:

FAMOUS EDITOR DEFIES POLICE: WANTS TO MAKE TEST CASE IN COURTS

Another said:

MENCKEN, READY FOR JAIL, SELLING MAGAZINES HERE

From curb to curb, the crowd awaited the man who had famously derided Puritanism as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. For more than a quarter of a century, he had assaulted it in a variety of publications, from the Baltimore Herald and the Baltimore Sunpapers to his popular magazines, the Smart Set and the American Mercury, in his forty books, and in his defense of such authors as Theodore Dreiser. Along the way, he had battled the mentality that had caused Huckleberry Finn to be banned from local libraries.

Mencken was a believer in liberty in its wildest and imaginable sense, as he put it, liberty up to the extreme limits of the feasible and tolerable. It was Mencken who had convinced Clarence Darrow to defend John Scopes in the infamous Monkey Trial the previous hot summer. At issue was not simply Darwins theory of evolution but freedom of speech itself, a matter of concern to no one more than Henry Mencken. In a long and varied career as reporter, columnist, author, and literary and social critic, his very existence was committed to the free expression of ideas, no matter how controversial and unpopular. The two main ideas that run through all my writing, he explained, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic, are these: I am strongly in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.

Freedom had always been an issue with Mencken: first, at an early age, freedom from his fathers choice of a career; later, as he began to develop as a critic, from the Victorian Puritanism that stifled literature and every aspect of American life; then, from governmental laws that violated civil liberties for whites and blacks; finally, during the two world wars, from censorship of the press. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Mencken believed, were sacred documents that set up clear lines of demarcation that no government should trespass.

Now Mencken, as editor of the American Mercury, was embarking on another battle against censorship in a challenge to freedom of speech that the New York Times had likened to a second Scopes Trial. Accompanied by Arthur Garfield Hays, counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union, and with a peddlers license in his pocket, Mencken was about to do battle with the Reverend J. Franklin Chase, secretary of the New England Watch & Ward Society, over one particular article in his magazine.

Since its earliest days Boston had had a history of literary bigotry. Items that Chase censored from Massachusetts readers included Boccaccios Decameron, Sternes Tristram Shandy, even lyrics by John Dryden. Among modern publications, they included works by Eugene ONeill, Theodore Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson. As Chase said, A whole high school class of unwedded mothers may be the result of a lascivious book.

Chases tyranny and oppression were indomitable. He seldom appeared in public, simply notifying his committee that he believed certain passages in a given magazine or book were illegal. His influence over the local courts had saved him from ever having to name the offending passages. Consequently, hundreds of volumes were shelved, their authors never given the opportunity to be heard in court. Chase became so adept in his tactics that merchants obeyed the Watch & Ward Society with scarcely a question; the press did not dare criticize the censor.

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