For a boisterous and manly ego, there’s nothing like being a dissident in a free country. The risks are few and the rewards can be magnificent. Rush Limbaugh has made himself a millionaire many times over by saying, many times over, what he thinks is unsayable. Noam Chomsky has been playing a similar role for many years, though to a much smaller crowd. He hasn’t gotten rich, but he has achieved a kind of political sainthood, which may be the equivalent at his end of the spectrum. Our greatest dissident, however, and our first truly modern one, would have to be Henry Louis Mencken. As showman he was funnier than Limbaugh, a mere virtuoso of the cheap shot, and as crackpot he was saner than Chomsky, about whom there hangs the distinctive smell of the church basement from which he arose. (I refer to the eminent linguist as radical avenger, of course, and not as a man of science.) Yet the Sage of Baltimore, as he was known, had more than just a clever wit and a clear head. Mencken, simply put, had style.
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Mencken was such a master of derision that Menckenians are often tempted to wish the Sage were still on hand to jeer at so-and-so or such-a-one. The sentiment is appealing, but perhaps one Mencken was enough. It’s true that most of the soul savers, right thinkers, and boob bumpers he escorted through his personal shooting gallery are long forgotten, but his chief concern was never with that particular parade of half-wits anyway. First and last, his real target was America itself. And it must be proof of his aim that nearly half a century after he fell silent he’s still so esteemed as a native guide–and so reviled. There isn’t much he could add today, since America seems so little changed in the ways that mattered to him. Is it any more puerile, for example, to slander Mark Twain as a racist because the characters in Huckleberry Finn call Jim a “nigger” than it was to denounce Theodore Dreiser as an agent of the kaiser because he wrote a novel, Sister Carrie, about a fallen woman and failed to kill her off in the first ten pages? Is Bill Clinton a greater knave than Warren G. Harding? Is carrying a picket to free Larry the dolphin any sillier than sitting down to dinner in the nude? Is the puritanism of today–whether it puts a flag on its lapel, a ring in its nose, or a bow tie around its neck and then works up a sweat hollering about humanism in public schools, or the image of lesbians in movies, or the conspiracy to kill off an entire race through the importation and sale of narcotic drugs–any more buffoonish and repellent than the one that put on a boiled shirt and wailed about the rum demon?
In Mencken’s eyes America was being ruined by democracy, which lifted the values and aspirations of the masses to the level of national culture, and by a moral code, largely Christian, that helped keep those masses in check but was also a perpetual affront to men of principle and honor. This philosophy was hard enough to swallow back then; it’s even harder now. But if our costumes today are showier and more diverse, the burlesque is in essence the same.
Mencken couldn’t win that war, but he had a grand time anyway. The 20s belonged to him. He was the country’s most vocal opponent of its most preposterous delusion, Prohibition; he was impresario of the Scopes evolution trial, the first and arguably still the greatest trial of the century; he was editor of the American Mercury, the leading journal for highbrows. Already famous, he put himself at the center of a storm by arranging to be arrested in front of a crowd in Boston for publishing an allegedly pornographic story; he won the case. When he traveled across the country to visit Hollywood, newspapers covered his every move. He called the Ozarks “one of the great moron reservoirs of the United States,” and the folks in Arkansas responded with a “Show Mencken” dinner of strawberries, sweet potatoes, and country hams. He called O. Henry a jailbird, and the San Quentin Bulletin came back with a list of great men who’d been in stir, starting with John the Baptist. He even had the pleasure of seeing three of his bitterest foes die one after the other: Stuart Sherman, an English professor (Illinois) who attacked him and Dreiser for being of German descent, drowned accidentally; J. Frank Chase, who had banned him in Boston, was exhausted by Mencken’s tenacity and contracted a fatal case of pneumonia; and William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted Scopes, expired just five days after the trial. It was already hot down in Dayton, Tennessee, and when Bryan decided to testify as an expert on the Bible he was boiled alive by Clarence Darrow, who lured him into a heated declaration that man is not a mammal. (Try to imagine Marcia Clark cross-examining Johnnie Cochran Jr. on the subject of racism in America and you’ll see why the monkey trial still takes the prize.) Mencken’s sympathy can be gauged by his obituary of Bryan–“the simian gabble of the cross-roads was not gabble to him, but wisdom of an occult and superior sort”–and by his summary of events years after the fact: “Well, we killed the son-of-a-bitch.”
Like many before him, Hobson also runs through the long list of Jews who were among Mencken’s best friends and closest colleagues. When an intelligent and disinterested biographer resorts to a hackneyed defense like that it’s probably just a measure of how far the issue has come to be governed by the touchiness of the anti-anti-Semites. Consider Garry Wills, the Sage of Evanston, whose review of Mencken’s diary five years ago in the New Republic demonstrates how that kind of correctness–a Mencken word, by the way–can send the most able historian off the rails. Wills was indignant, so he granted himself a license for the most unseemly speculation on the frequency of Mencken’s intimate contact with his wife (“There seems to have been little if any sex”) and even on the depth of his love for her: “his warmest tribute in later years said, ‘Marriage is nine tenths talk.’” Is it possible that Wills failed to notice the section of photographs in the middle of the book he was reviewing? There, in the original typescript, is an entry written by Mencken five years after the death of his wife that says in part, “It is amazing what a deep mark she left upon my life–and yet, after all, it is not amazing at all, for a happy marriage throws out numerous and powerful tentacles. They may loosen with years and habit, but when a marriage ends at the height of its success they endure. It is a literal fact that I still think of Sara every day of my life, and almost every hour of the day.” Even more damaging, and more dishonest, is the way Wills imputed to Mencken a flagrantly Nazi ethos. Citing an article Mencken wrote on Nietzsche at the start of World War I, Wills offered this paraphrase: “Efficiency is bought at a price. Inferior beings cannot be allowed to infect their superiors.” Mencken wrote nothing like that; but placed before a passage he did write about a German campaign to wipe out typhoid fever (“penning up the population of whole villages and condemning whole watersheds”) Wills’ gloss leaves the most sinister impression: if Mencken said nothing about the Holocaust 30 years later it must have been because he approved of it.
