H. L. Mencken

From Philosopedia

Mencken, Henry (Louis) (12 September 1880 29 January 1956)

“As for religion, I am quite devoid of it,” Mencken declared in Minority Report (1956).

• The act of worship, as carried on by Christians, seems to me to be debasing rather than ennobling. It involves groveling before a Being who, if He really exists, deserves to be denounced instead of respected.

He also wrote,

• The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

Mencken, one of the best-known journalists of his day, wrote, “The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother’s milk.” In Smart Set (1920), he explained, “To sum up: (1) The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute; (2) Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it; (3) Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.”

His skepticism about religion is scattered through nearly all of his writings, and his most important works are The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), Treatise on the Gods (1930), and Treatise on Right and Wrong (1934). The second of the three discussed Huxley, who was one of his heroes, and agnosticism.

Mencken - the curmudgeon, anti-Semite, and Prussophile - is not the household name he once was, but in 1992 Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, who had edited Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters (1988), published The Impossible H. L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories (Doubleday, 1992). John Updike, known to some as the stereotypical Anglo-Saxon Protestant, reviewed it in The New Yorker, much as in earlier times it would have been covered by an ASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant is now considered redundant). Updike, for example, negatively criticized the following Mencken observation: “The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable. . . . The cosmogonies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought. It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or to the city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci.” What this all amounts to, he continued, “is that the human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes . . . a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them. . . . The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only.”

Two posthumous works, Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work and My Life as Author and Editor (1993), were not published at his specific request until thirty-five years after his death. The latter contained not only his impressions of Theodore Dreiser, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Eugene O’Neill, Frank Harris, George Jean Nathan, Anita Loos, and Scott Fitzgerald but also included ethnic slurs, usually about Jews, for which he had long been known. Of Alfred Knopf, he wrote that the publisher “showed a certain amount of the obnoxious tactlessness of his race.” He described Stelle Golde, who was Smart Set’s editorial secretary, as “a grotesque Brooklyn Jewess.” Of Dorothy Thompson, Sinclair Lewis’s second wife, Mencken wrote, “She was the true daughter of her Methodist pa - a tinpot messiah with an inflamed egoism that was wholly unameliorated by humor.”

Yet, Mencken was the one who exposed a Baltimore hotel’s refusal to permit the African American poet Countee Cullen to speak. He fought against injustice wherever he found it, as in the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti or the deportation of Emma Goldman and other Jewish radicals following World War I when the Great Red Scare occurred. Mencken coined many neologisms, including Bible Belt, booboisie, smuthound, and Boobus americanus.

He so delighted in skewering Baptists and Methodists that he was dubbed “the Anti-Christ of Baltimore,” although he was more “the Anti-Christian of Baltimore” and held that what Christians needed to do was practice the teachings of their Christ.

He also targeted American society, with which he maintained a love-hate relationship: “There’s no underestimating the intelligence of the American public” and “Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.” Asked why he stayed in the country if he found so much that was unworthy of reverence here, he quipped, “Why do men go to zoos?”

As for God, Mencken the caustic rationalist wrote, “It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just, and omnipotent God.”

As for his early religious experiences, he stated, “What I got in Sunday School . . . was simply a firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities and the Christian God preposterous.”

And as for his faith, he said, “Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”

(See entry for Neo-Humanism, which Mencken attacked; and a review of James T. Farrell's book about Mencken.)

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