Mencken: The American Iconoclast MARION ELIZABETH RODGERS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Mencken H. L. Mencken, 1926. Photograph by Edward Steichen. Reprinted with permission of Joanna T. Steichen. Mencken The American Iconoclast marion elizabeth rodgers 1 2005 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2005 by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rodgers, Marion Elizabeth. Mencken : the American iconoclast / Marion Elizabeth Rodgers. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-507238-9 ISBN-10: 0-19-507238-3 1. Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis), 1880–1956. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Journalists—United States—Biography. 4. Editors—United States—Biography. I. Title PS3525.E43Z79 2005 818′.5209—dc22 [B] 2005047786 Permission to quote H. L. Mencken has been granted by the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, in accordance with the terms of the bequest of H. L. Mencken. 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To Leon Livingstone and Jules Witcover THE ICONOCLAST: The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by . fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries. —H. L. Mencken Fifty years ago I spent my mornings reading to an old man who suffered, as I now suffer, from a series of strokes. He was a writer. He was H. L. Mencken. I have never known a kinder man. But when he unsheathed his typewriter and sharpened its keys, his prose was anything but kind. It was rollicking and it was ferocious. Witty, intellectual polemicists are a vanishing breed today. Their role has been usurped by television boobs whose IQs measure just below their body temperatures. Some journalism schools even warn their students to shun words that may hurt. But sometimes words should hurt. That is why they are in the language. When terrorists slaughter innocents, when corporation executives betray the trust of shareholders, when lewd priests betray the trust of little children, it is time to mobilize the language and send it into battle. When Mencken died in January 1956, he was cremated. That was a mistake. He should have been “rolled in malleable gold and polished to blind the cosmos.” I still miss him. America misses him more. —William Manchester (1922–2004) CONTENTS Prologue: Boston, 1926 1 PART ONE: 1880–1914 11 1. The Citizen of Baltimore 13 2. The Eternal Boy 32 3. August Mencken & Bro. 41 4. Baltimore and Beyond 54 5. Terse and Terrible Texts 62 6. Plays and Players 70 7. The Great Baltimore Fire 80 8. A Man of Ability 94 9. A Young Man in a Hurry 102 10. Broadening Horizons 113 11. The Bad Boy of Baltimore 121 12. Outside, Looking In 131 PART TWO: 1914–1919 139 13. The Holy Terror 141 14. Mencken, Nathan, and God 145 15. Round One! 152 16. Berlin, 1917 162 viii Contents 17. The Prevailing Winds 175 18. Over Here 190 19. The Infernal Feminine 200 PART THREE: 1920–1930 209 20. The Dry Millenium Dawns 211 21. Of Politics and Prose 221 22. That Man in Baltimore 229 23. The Duel of Sex 241 24. Old Discord and New Alliances 256 25. The Scopes Trial 271 26. In the Crucible 295 27. Banned in Boston 300 28. The Great God Mencken 306 29. A Sentimental Journey 316 30. The German Valentino 325 31. The Sea of Matrimony 340 32. Variations on a Familiar Theme 351 PART FOUR: 1930–1935 357 33. The Tamed Ogre of Cathedral Street 359 34. Hard Times 371 35. “Happy Days Are Here Again” 379 36. Maryland, My Maryland 387 37. The Tune Changes 393 38. The Late Mr. Mencken 399 39. A Time to Be Wary 406 40. A Winter of Horror 414 PART FIVE: 1936–1940 425 41. Baltimore’s Friendly Dragon 427 42. Mencken as Boss 437 43. Berlin, 1938 448 44. Polemics and Prejudices 456 45. Triumph of Democracy 464 PART SIX: 1941–1948 471 46. The Weapon of Silence 473 47. On the Home Front 479 Contents ix 48. Mencken and the Guild 486 49. Friends and Relatives 493 50. The Man Who Hates Everything 505 51. The Great Upset of 1948 516 PART SEVEN: 1949–1956 529 52. The Last Days 531 Epilogue: The Passing of an Era 547 Acknowledgments 554 Notes 559 Bibliography 634 Index 648 “Mencken was our god.” Holding the Maryland flag aloft with cheering students at Harvard University, 1926. H. L. Mencken Collection, Enoch Pratt Free Library. Prologue BOSTON, 1926 n the morning of April 5, 1926, a multitude of Harvard and Boston University undergraduates, reporters, and the curious gathered at OBrimstone Corner in Boston. Students, many of them clutching maga- zines, awaited the Baltimore journalist and editor H. L. Mencken. Boston newspapers had already announced his impending fate. One headline blared: Famous Editor Defies Police: Wants to Make Test Case in Courts Another said: Mencken, Ready for Jail, Selling Magazines Here From curb to curb, the crowd awaited the man who had famously derided Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” For more than a quarter of a century, he had assaulted it in a variety of publications, from the Baltimore Herald and the Baltimore Sunpapers to his popular magazines, the Smart Set and the American Mercury, in his forty books, and in his defense of such authors as Theodore Dreiser. Along the way, he had battled the mentality that had caused Huckleberry Finn to be banned from local libraries.1 Mencken was a believer in liberty “in its wildest and imaginable sense,” as he put it, “liberty up to the extreme limits of the feasible and tolerable.” It was Mencken who had convinced Clarence Darrow to defend John Scopes in the 2 mencken: the american iconoclast infamous Monkey Trial the previous hot summer. At issue was not simply Darwin’s theory of evolution but freedom of speech itself, a matter of concern to no one more than Henry Mencken. In a long and varied career as reporter, columnist, author, and literary and social critic, his very existence was committed to the free expression of ideas, no matter how controversial and unpopular. “The two main ideas that run through all my writing,” he explained, “whether it be lit- erary criticism or political polemic, are these: I am strongly in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.” Freedom had always been an issue with Mencken: first, at an early age, free- dom from his father’s choice of a career; later, as he began to develop as a critic, from the Victorian Puritanism that stifled literature and every aspect of American life; then, from governmental laws that violated civil liberties for whites and blacks; finally, during the two world wars, from censorship of the press. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Mencken believed, were sacred documents that set up clear lines of demarcation that no government should trespass. Now Mencken, as editor of the American Mercury, was embarking on another battle against censorship in a challenge to freedom of speech that the New York Times had likened to a second Scopes Trial. Accompanied by Arthur Garfield Hays, counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union, and with a peddler’s license in his pocket, Mencken was about to do battle with the Reverend J. Franklin Chase, secretary of the New England Watch & Ward Society, over one particu- lar article in his magazine. Since its earliest days Boston had had a history of literary bigotry. Items that Chase censored from Massachusetts readers included Boccaccio’s Decameron, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, even lyrics by John Dryden. Among modern publi- cations, they included works by Eugene O’Neill, Theodore Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson. As Chase said, “A whole high school class of unwedded mothers may be the result of a lascivious book.” Chase’s tyranny and oppression were indomitable. He seldom appeared in public, simply notifying his committee that he believed certain passages in a given magazine or book were illegal. His influence over the local courts had saved him from ever having to name the offending passages. Consequently, hundreds of volumes were shelved, their authors never given the opportunity to be heard in court. Chase became so adept in his tactics that merchants obeyed the Watch & Ward Society with scarcely a question; the press did not dare criticize the censor. Chase now focused his ammunition on an innocuous but true story that appeared in the April 1926 issue of the American Mercury, written by Herbert Asbury. It told the tale of a prostitute called “Hatrack” from Farmington, Missouri. Its theme was Christian hypocrisy. Each Sunday night Hatrack would attend church, hoping to be treated as a Christian lady; each Sunday she would be spurned. After church she then would take customers to one of the two town cemeteries—the Protestants to the Catholic cemetery and the Catholics to the Masonic burial ground.