A Saturnalia of Bunk. H. L. Mencken
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Mencken published nothing in either the Sun or the Evening Sun from 29 March 1917 until 9 February 1920, when his weekly editorials began appearing every Monday. He occasionally sat in on editorial meetings, but no article bearing his name appeared. Of course, he was still writing his book reviews for the Smart Set, and some of his most distinguished early volumes—A Book of Prefaces (1917), the first volume of Prejudices (1919), and The American Language (1919)—appeared to good notices. Mencken had grand plans to write a multivolume work on American involvement in the war, but they came to nothing.16
By the time his Monday editorials began in 1920, The Free Lance appeared to be ancient history. A number of books produced during this period, including A Book of Burlesques (1916), Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918), and even the monograph In Defense of Women (1918), had been largely assembled from newspaper and magazine work, but for reasons still not entirely clear he chose, with the one exception previously noted, not to use any of the Free Lance material therein. Was Mencken himself overwhelmed with the bulk of his writing? What is not in doubt is his own realization of the lasting benefits of the column. In speaking of the influence of the column on his subsequent work as author and editor (especially in one of his most visible roles, the editing of the American Mercury, 1924–33]), Mencken writes:
My belief is that running the column was very beneficial to me, professionally speaking, for it not only rid me of the last vestiges of executive work, but also served to clarify and organize my ideas. Before it had gone on a year I knew precisely what I was about and where I was heading. In it I worked out much of the material that was later to enter into my books, and to color the editorial policy of the American Mercury.17
The best of the Free Lance material ranks with the best of Mencken’s journalism overall—in its satirical pungency, its rapierlike strokes of logic, its deadpan exposure of fallacy, hypocrisy, and absurdity, and its intellectual cogency as the reflections of a man who had worked out his philosophy of life both in broad parameters and in the smallest details. His trenchant and chilling column (4 January 1913) on witnessing a hanging must rank as one of the most pungent examples of his journalism. It is true that on many occasions Mencken lapses into language that today would be considered highly objectionable (such as his repeated and half-jocular references to African Americans as “niggeros,” “darkies,” and “blackamoors”); but this is part and parcel of a linguistic exuberance—exemplified by frequent use of German idioms (“katzenjammer,” “geheimrat,” etc.), esoteric terms (“xanthiate,” “saprophytes”), and slang—that Mencken deliberately employed to convey his point as vividly as possible.
The argumentative sparring in which Mencken engaged in his Free Lance column stood him in good stead when he came to tackle the opaque rhetoric of Warren G. Harding, the fundamentalist obfuscation of William Jennings Bryan, and the labored pomposities of the puritans, charlatans, and crusaders with whom he tangled in the 1920s. Even if many of the individuals against whom he battled in the Free Lance columns have now lapsed into merited oblivion, the issues he dealt with remain with us: To what degree should religion influence politics? How can unpopular minorities be protected in time of war? Can democracy survive if the electorate is, by and large, ignorant and dishonest? Is America, indeed, the land of the free or merely a haven of intolerant conformity? Mencken’s answers to these and other questions, whether we agree with them or not, are undeniably those of a man who has thought long and hard about what it means to be a free citizen, and how much would be lost if we ceased to utter what seems, at the moment, to be the truth.
A NOTE ON THIS EDITION
In compiling this relatively slim volume of selections from a million and a half words of Mencken’s The Free Lance column, I have perforce made some emendations that result in a somewhat different reading experience from that presented by the original material. First, I have removed the horizontal rules that separate every paragraph from beginning to end of the column’s existence; second, I have affixed titles (which I hope I are in keeping with the spirited and satirical tone of the text) to Mencken’s discussions of a given subject. I have supplied the date of publication of the excerpt at the conclusion of the selection; I have not felt the need to include page numbers, as all the Free Lance columns appeared on the editorial page of the Baltimore Evening Sun, almost invariably on page 6, but occasionally (especially toward the end of the series) on page 8.
Given that Mencken is such an inveterate name-dropper, I have, as in my previous editions of Mencken’s work, prepared a glossary of names to present background information on those individuals, many of whom are now obscure, whom Mencken cites. Such a glossary reduces the need for footnotes and allows readers to look up only those individuals with whom they may be unfamiliar. Names that an educated person can be expected to know are not included, except to draw attention to Mencken’s writings about them. Other points are clarified in a section of notes.
I am under a considerable debt to Vincent Fitzpatrick, curator of the H. L. Mencken Collection at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, who supplied some texts that were unavailable to me and assisted in the transcription of some items. I secured microfilm copies of most of the Free Lance columns from the McKeldin Library of the University of Maryland, College Park. I am grateful for the general support and friendship provided by Richard J. Schrader, Ray Stevens, Oleg Panczenko, Louis B. Hatchett, Jr., and other devoted Menckenians. And I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my wife, Mary K. Wilson, whose diligent and meticulous proofreading of this book has saved me from many errors.
I
ON BEING A FREE LANCE
A SATURNALIA OF BUNK
WHY NOT A permanent organization in Baltimore for warring upon stupidity, flapdoodle and buncombe? The fakes and the fanatics, the boneheads and the balderdashians, who swarm here as in few other cities of Christendom, have scores and scores of clubs and unions, and these clubs and unions pour a constant stream of nonsense into the public ear. Pick up a newspaper any day and you will quickly see that nine-tenths of the proposals and propositions before the people are frankly and unequivocally ridiculous. On the one hand, the City Council proposes to build a $2,000,000 tunnel under the harbor at a place where there is not enough business to support a single ferry-boat. On the other hand, the Lord’s Day Alliance1 proposes to make the Baltimore Sunday even more horrible than it is. On the third hand, as it were, the Hon. Mahoni Amicus strikes affecting attitudes in the spotlight, a “martyr” to newspaper “conspiracy.” On the fourth hand, various camorras of ignoranti come forward with absurd “proofs” that the Pasteur vaccine will not cure hydrophobia. On the fifth hand, some tinpot “improvement” association—what hatcheries of prominent Baltimoreans those parochial parliaments are!—bawls loudly for a new park where none is needed. On the sixth hand, the Health Department sophisticates the mortality returns and claims praise for the deed. On the seventh hand, a half dozen booming bureaux fight one another, announce a multitude of grandiose plans—and never carry one of them out. On the eighth hand, Jake Hook and the Super-Mahon denounce the merit system on the ground that it would force them to employ niggero clerks. On the ninth hand, the common people are anæsthetized by a microscopic lowering of the tax rate and then plundered of their savings by a staggering increase in water rents and special assessments. On the tenth hand, public commissions discuss interminably the paving of streets—and no streets are paved. On the eleventh hand, the improvement of the water supply is constantly and tediously debated—and the water remains putrid and poisonous. And on the twelfth hand (to make an end of this centimanual enumeration), political rabble-rousers burst eternally with schemes for saving money, and yet out of every dollar paid in taxes, either to city or to State, fully 50 cents are wasted, lost, misspent, grafted or stolen.
An endless saturnalia of bunk, of bluff, of stupidity, of insincerity, of false virtue, of nonsense, of pretense, of sophistry, of parology, of bamboozlement, of actorial posturing, of strident wind music, of empty words—even, at times, of downright fraud. If the City Council is not flinging its legs about in some new debauch of clowning, then some faction or other of the boomers is launching a new and extra-preposterous scheme for “saving” the town from imaginary disaster, or some new and useless board is being created by the Legislature,