Mencken, H. L.

Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956), better known as H. L. Mencken, was America's most famous newspaperman in the first half of the 20th century. He began his newspaper career as a reporter and editor with the Baltimore Herald in the early years of the century and then moved to Baltimore's more prestigious Sunpapers in 1906, where he maintained a 42-year association as an editor and columnist. However, journalism could not contain his intellectual energies. As an essayist, literary critic, author of more than 20 books, and magazine editor, the astonishingly prolific Mencken commented on the American scene in a lively, boisterous writing style [Page 458]that commanded readers' attention and brought them back for more, even when they strongly disagreed with his polemics on the nation's political, religious, and cultural beliefs and behavior. The popularity in the 1920s of his second magazine venture, the American Mercury, along with his widely publicized involvement in controversial events such as the 1925 Scopes trial (over Tennessee's banning of the teaching of evolution), made him a public personality. At the same time, he quietly wielded influence within America's literary circles. To many, Mencken represented the new, sophisticated, irreverent modern American of the 1920s, who stood in opposition to the conservative cultural forces of the fading 19th century.

Mencken was born in 1880 in Baltimore. When he was 3 years old, his family moved into a three-story, red brick row house facing a pleasant square in west Baltimore, where he lived nearly the rest of his life. Although he traveled regularly to New York City for many years to handle editorial responsibilities for his magazines and journeyed around the country on professional and personal business, Mencken remained fiercely loyal to his hometown. Ever willing to scathingly criticize local leaders and popular prejudices, he nonetheless compared his Baltimore favorably time and again to newer, rapidly growing industrial cities like Cleveland or Pittsburgh, which he derisively labeled overgrown freight yards. Baltimore's (and Maryland's) culinary delights, musical scene, and German ethnicity, to which Mencken subscribed, provided a civilized prospect that—in his view—few other cities could match.

In his weekly “Monday Articles” column for the Baltimore Evening Sun and in numerous essays, Mencken depicted many aspects of American urban life, filtered through his own prejudices and expressed in rambunctious language. He routinely targeted local businessmen—the Babbitts and boosters, booboisie, as he famously dubbed them—who clamorously boomed the latest fads and developments irrespective of the damage they might cause to their city's fabric. Mencken speared corrupt politicians who spouted high-sounding rhetoric while busily feathering their own nests, and he railed against the power of unsympathetic rural-dominated state governments to ignore urban needs. Having never owned an automobile, Mencken lamented the proliferation of motor vehicles in city centers and advocated the expansion of mass transit. He even espied the racial change of residential areas, which resulted from a process decades later called blockbusting. Although the American city that Mencken described has long since vanished, his insights into American political behavior and cultural beliefs have retained relevance long past his death in 1956.

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