A Saturnalia of Bunk. H. L. Mencken
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or of literature. Here again the lust of an intolerant majority to take away the pleasures of the civilized minority was the central issue, and it was encapsulated in the figure of the redoubtable Anthony Comstock, who in his half century of lobbying against “obscene” books caused the suppression of thousands of books and magazines and, worse, the self-censorship of many authors and magazine editors who feared prosecution and the destruction of their reputations. As the 1920s advanced, the burgeoning Modernist literature of the period found in Mencken a valuable ally against puritanical attempts to suppress it, and by 1930 Mencken could take justifiable pride in believing that Comstock’s notorious legacy had come to naught.
It should not be assumed that The Free Lance is entirely devoted to dour reflections on the weighty issues of the day; indeed, even when discussing substantial topics Mencken is careful to leaven them with pungent wit and satire. He remarked, “My Free Lance job was the pleasantest that I had ever had on a newspaper . . . and I enjoyed it immensely,”12 and there is no reason to think that his readers were any less entertained. Some of his most engaging columns treat what he called quackery—astrology, Christian Science, the New Thought (a fuzzy mix of mysticism and self-help), patent medicines, antivivisection, antivaccination, and the like. But once again, Mencken’s fundamental principles come into play: these quackeries enjoy such widespread popularity because they appeal to the limited understandings of the common people, who—especially in the realm of medicine, where such tremendous strides had been made that the field was now hopelessly beyond the comprehension of the layman—are always quick to seek a simple answer to a complex problem. Quackery, indeed, is the inevitable product of democracy: “the ultimate adjudication of medical controversies, as of all other controversies, lies with the ignorant and unintelligent mob, and . . . this mob is animated by that chronic distrust of learning which always marks the lower orders of men.”
Medicine was a particularly sensitive issue with Mencken, who had a touch of hypochondria. He counted among his friends several of the leading figures in the Johns Hopkins Medical School, and he repeatedly defended them against frauds and charlatans—such as those who had organized the National League for Medical Freedom that sought to question their authority and to advance the claims of such dubious professions as homeopathy, osteopathy, and chiropractic. In the case of antivivisection, Mencken had no sadistic desire to carve up defenseless animals but recognized that animal testing was a crucial and indispensable aid in the treatment of human diseases; he also exposed the antivivisectionists in numerous instances of bad faith and bad science. The issue of public health was also a great concern to Mencken: throughout his Free Lance column he would print the standings of what he termed the National Typhoid League—a grisly parody of baseball standings in which the leading cities of the nation were ranked by the number of annual typhoid deaths; Baltimore was, lamentably and shamefully, near the top of the list for years.
Where Mencken parted company with nearly all his Evening Sun readers, even those who were sympathetic to his belaboring of clerics, his lampooning of astrologers, his broadsides against public officials, and his nose thumbing of vice crusaders, was in his screeds in the first year of the Great War. Mencken claimed, perhaps a bit disingenuously, that his advocacy of the German side of the war had little or nothing to do with his own German American heritage: “I was born in Baltimore of Baltimore-born parents; I have no relatives, near or remote, in Germany, nor even any friends (save one Englishman!); very few of my personal associates in this town are native Germans,” and so on. One suspects that Mencken was protesting too much. Although, as his biographer Fred Hobson has pointed out, Mencken wrote several editorials in 1910–11 critical of Germany,13 there is more to his fervent defense of Germany and his unrelenting, at times abusive, denunciation of England and the Allies than mere contrarianism or a desire for fair play.
Perhaps central to Mencken’s stance in the war was the fact that both English and American propagandists almost immediately blamed the outbreak of war on Germany’s absorption of militaristic ideas from the baneful Nietzsche. Mencken, for whom Nietzsche always remained an intellectual mentor, was not about to stand by and see his idol abused. Far from denying such a Nietzschean influence on modern-day Germany, he embraced it: Kaiser Wilhelm was, as his detractors claimed, no democrat, and it was good that he was not; England, in turn, had fallen into decay precisely because it had allowed the democratic principle to run amok and raise such demagogues as Churchill and Lloyd George to power. The bold, courageous Englishmen who had established a worldwide colonial empire had given way to sniveling cowards who drafted other nations to do their fighting for them. And as for Americans, who were theoretically neutral in the early stages of the conflict, their half century of peace since the Civil War had engendered both a military and a moral softness that made them ill-equipped to take a place on the world’s stage.
A detailed analysis of the causes of the war—and even a brief analysis of Mencken’s views on the causes of the war—is not possible in this space. Let it suffice to say that Mencken’s assertions that Germany’s rapid augmentation of its military might in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was purely defensive are both largely false and to some degree disingenuous. There is no reason to believe that, even given Germany’s increasing economic rivalry with Britain and its threat to match Britain’s superiority as a naval power, a confrontation between the two nations, let alone a world war, was inevitable. Mencken’s claim that “Germany was doomed to battle for her very life” is mere bluster and after-the-fact exculpation.
Mencken’s fanatical support for Germany led him into increasingly untenable positions as the war progressed. He wrote a plangent lament for France, but when he turned his attention to Belgium he shocked readers by declaring flatly that its fate was merely “academic and sentimental”—that, as a weak country, it was destined to be overrun by the strong. When Germany’s campaign of submarine warfare began, Mencken was once again an ardent advocate. He argued that commercial or passenger liners that failed to pull up when hailed by a U-boat were themselves to blame if they were subsequently sunk when pursued—an argument that conveniently ignored those numerous instances when vessels had been sunk without any advance warning. Mencken’s most notorious column was published the day after the sinking of the British liner Lusitania on 7 May 1915; among its 1,200 dead were 128 Americans. But as with other such incidents, the Lusitania had, in Mencken’s view, brought about its own destruction by being an armed vessel. Americans’ outrage over the incident—exacerbated by Germany’s unexpectedly belligerent response to President Wilson’s demand for an explanation and apology—came close to plunging the United States into war. Such an eventuality was Mencken’s (and Germany’s) worst fear, for he knew that Germany could not stand up to the united forces of England, France, Russia, and the United States. Americans’ isolationism quickly reasserted itself, however, and Wilson won his reelection campaign in 1916 chiefly on promising to keep the United States out of the war.
But that was more than a year in the future; for the time being Mencken had to face the overwhelming obloquy that his Free Lance columns were engendering. In Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work he states that his cessation of the column on 23 October 1915 was purely a result of lack of time: in the fall of 1914 he and George Jean Nathan had taken over the editorship of the Smart Set, and he goes on to state that “when I gave up the Free Lance in October, 1915, it was on my own motion entirely.”14 And yet, Mencken had to face the brutal fact that his war views were opposed not only by the generality of Baltimore citizens but by the Evening Sun itself, which was resolutely supportive of the Allied cause. One of his last columns furiously condemns his own paper for “bogus neutrality” and for arousing hostility against German Americans by printing lies about the Germans. Two months after this column appeared, the Free Lance was silenced—though whether by his own decision, or by a joint decision by Mencken and the Evening Sun’s editorial board, it is now difficult to know.
Matters would get worse for Mencken before they got better. Although he resumed writing separate articles for the Evening Sun in 1915–17, he resolutely refused to discuss the war. The United States’ entrance into the conflict in April 1917 caused him to withdraw from the paper altogether, since he felt that newly imposed censorship regulations would prevent him from writing freely about the war. (The situation was worse than he knew: a thick file on his wartime activities, such as they were, was kept by the Justice Department,