An Equal Opportunity Offender

Both organizations lay claim to Mencken’s writing—his irreverent, iconoclastic, and side-splitting essays and columns about the foibles of everything American, from relations between the sexes to the follies of urban politics. The Club is edgy, though, in ways that the Society is not, thanks to the degree to which it also identifies with Mencken’s cussedness. At the subdued Mencken Society, we are content to hear people speak about Mencken; the Club prefers to echo the Baltimorean’s contrarian tone. That difference highlights the problem of Mencken for a time when tweets and videos use provocation to go viral and campus administrators try to protect students from hurtful ideas.

The Mencken Club has been in the news lately thanks to the White House’s termination of speechwriter Darren Beattie. His offense was speaking at the Mencken Club in 2016 alongside the alt-right journalist Peter Brimelow. Richard Spencer, one of the chief leaders of the alt-right, has also spoken at the Mencken Club. Beattie denies having anything to do with Brimelow’s or Spencer’s extreme views. His 2016 talk was on “The Intelligentsia and the Right,” and he stands by his remarks, which contained in his estimation “nothing objectionable.” His mere presence at the Mencken Club was deemed guilt by association, though.

Beattie’s career aside, this incident is another dent in the fender of Mencken’s reputation. Commentators on the firing were all too happy to associate Mencken with the alt-right, white nationalists, and racists. The problem for those of us who want to protect what is left of his stature is that Mencken gained his standing precisely by shocking the gatekeepers of good taste. That was by no means all Mencken did, of course. His corpus runs to roughly 50 books—and even these do not include all his columns, articles, and literary criticism. His six volumes of Prejudices—many of his best essays from the 1910s and ’20s about American life—have been republished in the Library of America series, a just canonization. In the 1930s, as the country suffered through high unemployment, food lines, and bank foreclosures, Mencken’s contrarianism did not seem nearly as witty and his reputation faded. Thanks to Harold Ross’s encouragement at the New Yorker, Mencken got a second wind writing articles about his Baltimore boyhood. These led to his popular 1940s memoirs, the so-called “Days Trilogy” (Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days).

A severe stroke kept Mencken from reading and writing for the last eight years of his life (he died in 1956), which left the fortunes of his reputation to the publishing industry. Had he written poetry or fiction (he tried at both and failed), the professors might have kept him alive. But journalism rarely qualifies as literature or history. His contemporaries knew Mencken to be disagreeable and at times offensive. Walter Lippmann, who rivaled Mencken as one of the nation’s leading columnists, acknowledged that when the “Holy Terror from Baltimore” calls you “a swine, and an imbecile,” he “increases your will to live.” But they also recognized his gifts. Joseph Wood Krutch, another gifted midcentury literary critic, wrote that Mencken was the best prose writer in 20th-century America, someone who employed a “vocabulary and a rhythm” that in anyone else’s hands would have been “vulgarity.”

One of the charms of Mencken’s outlook was that no subject was safe, not even himself—his memoirs were successful partly because of their self-deprecation. He began Happy Days by observing that the “science of infant feeding,” when he was born in 1880, “was as rudimentary as bacteriology or social justice, but there can be no doubt that I got plenty of calories . . . even an overdose.” For evidence, Mencken referred to a photograph of himself as a baby that “the milk companies” could well have used in the Sunday papers to whoop up “zeal for their cows.” Ever a hearty eater and drinker, Mencken noted that if “cannibalism had not been abolished in Maryland . . . I’d have butchered beautifully.” Such self-deprecation was not enough to keep an audience after Mencken died. According to Terry Teachout, the author of a superb 2002 biography, between 1956 and 1990, Mencken “seemed little more than a nostalgic relic . . . no more to be taken seriously than Calvin Coolidge.”

What was left of Mencken’s stature in the worlds of journalism and letters took a precipitous dive in 1989 with the publication of his diaries. Fred Hobson, who wrote another excellent biography of Mencken, noted the diaries returned “to center-stage the sharp-tongued commentator of the 1920s” and gave the hook to the “1940s chronicler of childhood.” Owing to hostile remarks about Jews and African-Americans (for starters), Mencken went before the court of public opinion on charges of anti-Semitism and racism. Witnesses varied. Garry Wills in the New Republic called Mencken an “ugly American.” For the defense, Joseph Epstein countered in Commentary that Mencken was “no anti-Semite.” The verdict came, in a foretaste of the contemporary felling of Confederate monuments, when the National Press Club removed Mencken’s name from its library.

Jonathan Yardley, longtime book reviewer at the Washington Post, wondered why anyone who had ever read a writer who compiled six volumes of Prejudices was shocked or surprised by adverse opinions in his private writing. No one had been safe in Mencken’s gaze. He was an equal-opportunity offender. His column about Warren Harding’s inaugural address is a good example:

Whether the Mencken Club is a white supremacist organization or not, its invocation of the writer owes much to the reception of his diaries. Paul Gottfried, the Jewish-American political philosopher who first gathered the Mencken Club (and who coined the term “alt-right”) hardly qualifies as an anti-Semite. He explained his choice of Mencken in 2008 in the context of a feud among conservatives; his hope was to form a right that was an alternative to neoconservatives and libertarians. The Mencken Club is less about restoring Mencken’s reputation than reviving his assault on all establishments.

For those of us who belong to the other group, the Mencken Society, the trick is to downplay the writer’s prejudices to attract members and readers. After all, Mencken issued still-relevant opinions about a whole range of human activities—from how to cook soft-shell crabs to the merits of various German composers. In reporting on a presidential campaign, he might mix with local farmers and write of their hospitality that they served “sound country wine, as thick and rich as mine-strone.” On the next stop he could worry that “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.” Throughout his writing, wit and insight ran alongside vitriol and scorn.

This mélange leaves Mencken an acquired taste. John Rossi, a La Salle University history professor, recently predicted in the American Conservative that even though Mencken “was a brilliant stylist and changed American journalism much in the way that Hemingway transformed American fiction,” his reputation would never recover from a “raw cynicism” that is “no longer acceptable.” Such aversion to Mencken even makes sense to Kevin Williamson, a journalist whose quick wit and clever words were themselves punished by a quick exit at the Atlantic. In a piece at National Review on the politics of hate, Williamson conceded that although Mencken and Twain could be charming and “uproariously” funny, “at the bottom of each man’s deep well of humor was a brackish and sour reserve of hatred.”

Perhaps the best way to account both for Mencken’s outlook and the way Americans remember him is to follow Joseph Epstein’s advice. He acknowledged Mencken’s comic affect; he “lifts the spirit” and is one of the few modern writers to make readers “laugh aloud.” But comedy was not the point, Epstein argued. It was a means for reckoning with human existence. Mencken’s humor, he wrote, always possessed a “tragic sense of life,” and the writer had the capacity to “look into the pit of existence without flinching or whining,” even to the point where skepticism produced “a certain humility.”

“It’s complicated” is a favorite explanation these days for everything from health care to intersectionality. The decline in Mencken’s reputation suggests that if Americans admit life’s complexity, they have little room for writers who mirror our own complications—or hold them up strenuously before our eyes.