A Saturnalia of Bunk. H. L. Mencken
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by popular vote (instituted by the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913), the initiative and referendum, and even the very existence of a state legislature—because any augmentation of governmental power over the citizenry would inevitably result in limiting the freedom of thought and action of the “minority” by means of onerous laws passed through the influence of an ignorant and morally obtuse majority. Mencken’s seemingly audacious proposal to repeal the Fifteenth Amendment, which had granted African Americans the right to vote, rested on the belief that a substantial majority of whites did not deserve the vote either: “the franchise is a thing a citizen must earn by his ability and his industry.” There would inevitably come a time for “the frank disfranchisement of those whose incapacity for reason is palpable and undisputed.”
Is it, then, a paradox that Mencken persistently advocated woman suffrage throughout his Free Lance column, and would continue to do so until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920? Mencken did not see any difficulty in doing so. His remarkable essay on woman suffrage, spanning six columns between 1 and 7 February 1912, systematically destroyed all the then-fashionable arguments against allowing women to vote: that many women don’t want the vote; that women are too “refined” to engage in the rough-and-tumble of politics; that women could not “enforce” the laws they pass by brute strength; that working women can rely on already existing laws (passed by men) to protect them.8 Mencken was pointing out that the paradox, if any, rested on the side of those who professed to support the principle of democracy: prohibiting a large class of citizens from voting merely on the basis of sex was a subversion of the essence of democracy. Let it pass that Mencken later came to oppose woman suffrage: perhaps he, like many supporters, experienced a certain disillusionment when women voters proved themselves no less subject to folly and chicanery than their male counterparts.
Mencken devoted a large proportion of his Free Lance column to battling individuals and organizations who were seeking the moral reform of the city and the nation in such areas as prostitution, alcohol consumption, and cigarette smoking. Here again Mencken’s libertarianism and his scorn of popular opinion come to the fore. While recognizing that these things may in fact be vices, and while he himself had no desire to engage in any of them except the moderate consumption of alcohol, he was averse to granting the government a heavy hand in their suppression. Nor was he about to concede the moral high ground to the crusaders: he in fact referred to them as “incurably immoral” for their intellectual dishonesty, their bigotry, and their intolerance. As a signal example he held up Charles J. Bonaparte, a former attorney general of the United States who maintained that anyone who opposed the complete eradication of prostitution from the city of Baltimore must be deriving profits from the trade or seeking to make brothels more accessible to those who wished to patronize them. Such outrageous suggestions of bad faith on the part of one’s opponents was, in Mencken’s view, typical of the methods of vice crusaders.
Mencken was also well aware that moral legislation was almost invariably unsuccessful. In his Free Lance columns he took delight in showing how ineffective were the various state prohibition statutes in preventing the widespread sale and consumption of alcohol. His argument against the attempt to wipe out prostitution (which on occasion he, as was common during this period, referred to by the euphemism “the social evil”), as expressed in a double-length Free Lance column of 7 November 1912, rested on the practical ground that such an attempt would only scatter brothels throughout the city rather than restricting them to a known red-light district. One of his later columns takes note of the formation of the Baltimore Vice Commission designed to look into the issue of prostitution in the city. He reported on the findings of the commission in three separate articles in late 1915, after his column had come to an end. His conclusions were simple: that it is impossible to obliterate prostitution, because the desire (sexual activity) it seeks to satisfy is a natural and not a pathological one; that segregating prostitutes has a more beneficial effect in the real world than the attempt to eliminate them altogether; and that the real problem with prostitution is not its actual practice but its engendering of venereal diseases—a purely medical problem that can, in principle, be solved.9
The issue of prohibition brought down even greater fulminations from Mencken: he came to believe that the imposition of a state, and even a national, prohibition statute was inevitable, but he was no less unrelenting in his opposition for all that. Alcohol was indeed a vice, but is it not the essence of freedom to allow people to engage in a vice, “so long as the enjoyment it produces is not outweighed by the injury it does”? There were already statutes on the books against public drunkenness; was there really a need for the entire elimination of alcohol from the fabric of the nation—an elimination that, in any event, could never be even approximately complete? Here again Mencken relied on his standard distinction between the civilized minority and the boorish majority: prohibition was being fostered only by those who could not use alcohol in moderation, and hence they sought to take it away even from those who could. In this argument—pressed repeatedly both in his Free Lance columns and throughout the long years when the Eighteenth Amendment was in effect—Mencken came close to employing exactly those ad hominem attacks he criticized in others. In the end, of course, he was proven right, but only after the nation had been put through thirteen years of government corruption and unrestrained criminal activity that proved, if any further proof were necessary, that morality could not be legislated.
It was no accident that Mencken took repeated potshots at the clergy, for it was they—especially the leaders of the Baptist and Methodist churches—who took the lead in prohibition and other moral crusades, whether under the aegis of such lobbying organizations as the Anti-Saloon League or on their own hook. Mencken’s careful reading of the Bible allowed him to demolish a local preacher’s assertion that the prohibition of alcohol was scripturally based; he argued, cleverly, that such a prohibition was not in fact Christian but Muslim. Mencken may not have been a full-fledged atheist, but his anticlericalism—once again derived at least in part from the atheist Nietzsche—was scarcely ever in abeyance. He boldly declared that preachers should get out of the business of politics—not because they should not concern themselves with political (or even moral-political) issues, but because “their training does not give them any appreciable fitness for judging politicians.” It was the clergy that repeatedly advocated the retention of archaic laws on the statute books, notably the Sunday laws that, in the Baltimore of Mencken’s day, prohibited such harmless activities as baseball, golf, or even a symphony orchestra performance on Sundays. Late in life he came to believe that such an issue as the reform of restrictive divorce laws could not be effected “until the discussion is purged of religious consideration.”10
When the evangelist Billy Sunday’s histrionics garnered public attention in the early 1910s, Mencken saw in him a symbol—not of Christian revival, but of the “decaying corpse of evangelical Protestantism” heading toward its ultimate dissolution in the United States. In this prediction he was sadly off the mark, although it could well be said that his participation in the Scopes trial of 1925 was instrumental in causing fundamentalism to go underground for half a century. Mencken cannot be held responsible for the recrudescence of an aggressive and intolerant Christianity in our day, but he can be credited with prescience in his comment that “the ideal Christian of today [is] . . . one who pursues his brother with clubs and artillery.”
Purely literary matters rarely come up in the Free Lance columns: that was the preserve of his Smart Set review column, which, in the course of fifteen years, all but established a canon of contemporary American literature, with Theodore Dreiser at the pinnacle and other such worthies as Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, James Branch Cabell, and F. Scott Fitzgerald not far behind.11 But on occasion Mencken did write on general issues relating to language, literature, and art. Several columns anticipate his vigorous advocacy of an “American language” starkly different from standard (British) English—something he extensively codified decades later in The American Language (1936) and its successors. One column reprinted here (11 December 1914) anticipates his famous “Sahara of the Bozart” article (in Prejudices: Second Series), condemning the cultural deficiencies of the South. On occasion he wrote brief reviews of some new books, and he also took occasion to skewer the many hopeless poetasters of his day, usually by the simple expedient of quoting the choicest of their lame verses with a minimum of comment.
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