Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

I have read this book off and on for a decade i suppose. A topical selection of his newspaper columns- arranged by Presidents, food, music, Scopes trial, Baltimore miscellany and so forth. Consistently great, if cranky reading. Has great charm in the 1st draft of history way - that is about Harding and Coolidge and Hoover and Roosevelt before they had established their reputation (none of that inevitability of history that retrospective history books necessarily use). Cranky, but light hearted - he often strikes me as a man who is paid for his opinion and even if he doesn't have a strong opinion will devolve on one - immediately - to serve his purpose (the writing of the article). Fair enough. Great writer- one wonders how he was so popular when he is insulting his readers almost constantly. I know we all see ourselves as part of the rarefied group - with Mencken, of course- who see through bunk and rise above the rabble he so disparages.… (plus d'informations)

One quote that really struck me, both an example of Mencken's perspicacity but also his blindness. Hearing William Jennings Bryan at the Democratic National Convention in 1904, he wrote:

As Bryan began to speak, Mencken observed how a hush fell over the crowd, and how he was cheered and jeered in turn by the excited hall. “He knew that the swift way to get things done in this country was not to argue for an idea, but to arouse a hatred,” Mencken wrote later, “and that is exactly what he set out to do, dramatically and ruthlessly…. He knew, too, the subtle power of religious reminiscences and suggestions—its power to enchant and to arouse ancient and deep-lying passions, its power to sentimentalize even as dull a thing as a problem in political economy. In a word, he knew how to make the crowd run amuck…. The people were not brought in to decide a problem, but merely to slaughter a villain." With some heat, Mencken noted, "Such a mountebank as the Hon. William Jennings Bryan, with his astounding repertoire of bogus remedies, would be almost unimaginable in Germany."

Germanophile that he was, he failed to recognize what was to happen in Germany some thirty years later. His myopia in that regard, and refusal to admit to the appalling depredations against the Jews, was to lose him many friends during the years leading up to WW II. This myopia is only partly ameliorated by his defense of the black community, an unpopular stance. He was dismayed by the lynching of a man and incurred the enmity of the "eastern shore" residents for his editorials that cost the Sun a lot of advertising revenue. As late as the thirties, while in Germany, Mencken failed to appreciate the dangers faced by Jews in Germany as he considered Hitler a harmless buffoon. His naïveté was extreme and remarked upon by his friends who could see that Germany by this time was a schizophrenic mess of economic success and terror.

Mencken's support for unpopular causes was legendary. The suppression of free expression under Wilson during WWI was appalling. Anything and everything German or even suspected of being sympathetic to anything German was subject to arrest. One debt of gratitude we owe Mencken was his resistance to suppression of free thought which was rampant Palmer raids.
Mencken was heavily involved in the strategy for taking on Bryan during the Scopes trial. It was his idea to put Bryan on the stand, according to Rogers, although I was unable to confirm that anywhere else. Indeed, Mencken left to return to Baltimore before the famous climax of the trial. (On a side note, if you have not seen Inherit the Wind starring Spencer Tracey and Frederic March, go do that right now. The 1960 version, not the 1988 film with Kirk Douglas and Jason Robards. That one is junk.)

On the nomination of Warren Harding: The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

He thought Prohibition was abominable. While some viewed agitation against alcohol and tobacco a simple nuisance, Mencken believed such attitudes actually endangered individual liberty. “The Free Lance” bristled with indignation at the pretensions of a moral mania that was chipping away at man’s basic freedoms; his right to smoke a cigar, for example. A moralist could challenge him to a debate on smoking, he declared, even denounce him as a sinner, “but when, not content with this, he proceeds to snatch my cigar out of my mouth, or to belabor me with a club from behind, or to have a law passed condemning me to 30 days in jail, then he goes beyond my rights, and I am fully justified in calling him names, in pulling his whiskers and blacking his eyes. And whether I am justified or not, I am going to do it.”

Mencken could be quite Randian, years before she articulated the individualism he subscribed to: "He scorned the mob man or the believer, what he later called the “booboisie,” versus the first-rate man of the civilized minority—in other words, the iconoclast, whose mission it was to “attack error wherever he saw it and to proclaim truth wherever he found it. It is only by such iconoclasm and proselytizing that humanity can be helped.” Unfortunately, some of that thinking resulted in a favorable view of social Darwinism.

While I generally enjoyed the book, I found the numerous sections on his multiple girlfriends --it took him years to settle on Sara -- to be a bit tedious. I was not aware that he had done so much for the literary community, especially black writers, almost by himself bringing black writers to the attention of the country. His studies of the American language were epic and justifiably famous.… (plus d'informations)