If there is one cultural critic that was able to capture early 20th-century America’s structure of feeling, H.L. Mencken is it. His iconoclastic, skeptical, caustic, and pessimistic critiques probed into the everyday life of the emerging middle class and, despite his comical assessments, took it seriously. Inspired by Matthew Arnold, Mencken turned his attention toward the spirit of his country, especially the dearth of “sweetness and light” emanated by the masses.

While Mencken was a voluminous writer, much of his criticism was directed towards American culture, from the commoner up to its political institutions. Uninterested with academe, the young writer began reading and commenting on the rich social world that was developing around him. At 18 years old, he circumvented a college education and showed up to the Baltimore Morning Harold ready to write columns, although he was inexperienced and not invited to do so. He persistently showed up to the local newspaper asking to write until he was finally given a shot nearly a month later. With his unmistakable talent, Mencken worked his way up to landing a columnist gig for the Baltimore Sun and eventually had his own nationally syndicated column. While he was first and foremost a journalist, Mencken wrote nearly three dozen books. I’m interested here in how he characterized America’s national consciousness. His book The American Language and his essay “On Being an American” stand out as two of his most famous works on the subject. Through these texts, Mencken offers us a vivid portrait, and often times a stinging critique, of how America looked at the turn of the 20th century.

The American Language offers a genealogy of how American English, or as he truncates it, “American,” became a distinct dialect from its mother tongue across the Atlantic. By tracing neologisms and novel idioms from the colonial period up until the early 20th century when he was writing, Mencken takes the reader through history of how our common tongue, in so far as there is a coherent tongue, was (and continues to be) developed. Up until this publication, there had been few sustained studies on American English as it was commonly spoken. Instead, most of the literature available was produced by academics with the intent to reproduce a standardized form of English that bore little relation to everyday talk. He regarded these efforts, in literature and the schoolhouses alike, as attempts to make the general population “bilingual.” This “notorious failure” to prepare students to clearly express themselves primarily served as an elitist tool of social distinction rather than a practical tool for those learning it. “The American,” Mencken insists, “likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meet the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative” (The American Language). It is this notion of living language, born of raw experience and inspired by a distinctly American attitude, that Mencken elaborates on throughout this volume.

Mencken lauds linguistic novelty. As a critic of cultural conservatism in general, he challenges the reader to get in touch with everyday reality and celebrate the transformation of culture towards conventions that better reflect it. This is, in part, why Mencken holds “American” in such high regard – because of its “greater pliability and resourcefulness,” its impulse towards simplicity, its vividness, and its ability to meet “the ever changing needs of [a] restless and iconoclastic people” (The American Language). Aside from intonation, he holds this dialect to be far superior to the orthodox tongue across the water. It is a language that naturally tends away from convention by constantly accreting words and phrases from the cultures it mingles with, “agglutinating” (compounding) words into evocative descriptors, and imaginatively conceiving neologisms, many of which are vetted into the national nomenclature. It often retains the vulgar spirit of the American consciousness, which is marked by inhibition and a general suspicion towards authority. Despite the expansive collection of distinct “American” vocabulary Mencken laces throughout this volume, the hallmark of the dialect is its playfulness in pronunciation and idiom. What is stated is less important than how it is stated - speech affects (and Mencken’s evocative writing is a testament to this). All of these features, he argues, demonstrate its adaptability: “What is old and respected is already in decay the moment it comes into contact with what is new and vivid. Let American confront a novel problem alongside English, and immediately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious” (The American Language). American is adept in responding to “linguistic emergencies,” summing up new situations with vivid, intuitive signs.

Despite the Mencken’s reverence for America’s living speech and its bottom-up development, he remained a scathing critic of the emerging middle class, or, as he commonly referred to the masses, the “booboisie”, and the popular culture that was starting to take shape around it. Keep in mind, he began writing at the turn of the twentieth century and abruptly stopped after suffering a stroke in 1948. Mencken was a witness to the emergence of commercial America, which he at once denounced and viewed as a boundless form of entertainment. He characterized his compatriots as “the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages” (“On being an American”). In the new America, as it were, anyone from country bumpkins to “peasant” immigrants could make a comfortable living and congeal into and unsophisticated class of commoners that rule the national culture. Succinctly put, “the United States is essentially a commonwealth of third-rate men—that distinction is easy here because the general level of culture, of information, of taste and judgment, of ordinary competence is so low” (“On Being an American”). American culture as we know it was only in its infancy when Mencken made these unmerciful claims, and he saw all these characteristics as signs of impending decay. He paints a picture of an infantilized nation where the sovereignty to chase self-interests and easily stake claim to a decent living was producing a culture of mediocrity. “Capitalism,” he predicted, “will win the United States,“ because of its deep embeddedness in national ethos and “antipathy to the dreams of man” (On Being an American).

While he spent plenty of time punching down to the “Homo Boobus,” the U.S. government was also a typical recipient of Mencken’s critique. He described the institution as generally “ignorant, incompetent, corrupt… disgusting” and mob led. A thoroughgoing libertarian himself, he picked apart conservative and socialist ideas alike, and for the most part, view American politics as huge charade. Presidential politics was the quintessence of this political theatre: “I hold that this elevation of politics to the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that nowhere else on this disreputable ball has the art of the sham-battle been developed to such fineness.” Such critiques, rife with witticism and satire, make is seem like Mencken was hardly serious in his evaluations. He was, however, what made him tick was the spectacle and mirth that was constantly churned out by society. Even though he disparaged his fellow men (and especially women) and produced volumes of blistering critiques about his government, he was happy to be an American, even a self-admitted chauvinist. Its ignorance and shortcomings were a steady source of amusement to him. “[H]ere in the very citadel of democracy,” he boasts, “we found and cherish a clown dynasty!” (On Being an American). Mind you, these assessments were published in the 1920’s prior to any of the imagistic conventions that rule our current political ecology. We can expect Mencken would have gotten a kick out of the current political burlesque playing out on American soil. Trump’s anti-intellectualism and rapport with the Christian right would be enough to animate Mencken’s pen, leave aside the celebration of general boobery that characterizes Trump’s populist rhetoric.

Mencken was a sharp critic of Christian leaders and the detrimental influence evangelicals had in America more so than the irrationality of Christianity itself. One of his most notable subjects of scorn was William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential hopeful who, just before his death, became the voice of the anti-evolution movement. Bryan served as the attorney representing the plaintiff in the “Scopes Monkey Trial” of 1925, a name coined by Mencken in his extensive coverage of the legal battle that has stuck in the American vernacular for nearly a century. Mencken skewered Bryan for his anti-intellectualism and Southern parochialism, even after Bryan passed away mere days after the trail ended. Sharply dismissing the tendency to sensationalize the dead, he wrote that “[Bryan] was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.” One can hardly dismiss the possibility of Mencken’s influence on the caustic atheist, Christopher Hitchens, when he derided the recently deceased evangelical Jerry Falwell on Anderson Cooper 360 in May of 2007:

Cooper: Christopher, I’m not sure if you believe in heaven, but if you do, do you think Jerry Falwell is in it?

Hitchens: No, and I think it’s a pity there isn’t a hell for him to go to. 

His style was consistently withering, no matter what topic or figure his pen touched. Heavily influenced by Nietzsche, Mencken critiqued culture with a hammer, smashing conventions that characterized the national ethos, pulling nails out of the basic assumptions that democracy was the optimal form of government, and swinging face and claw on both sides of the political aisle. As William Cain points outs, his iconoclastic critical equity was called out by critics unpleased with his tendency to scrutinize subjects without offering alternative solutions. However, Mencken believed "the truth is that criticism, if it were thus confined to the proposing of alternative schemes, would quickly cease to have any force or utility at all, for in the overwhelming majority of instances no alternative scheme of any intelligibility is imaginable, and the whole object of the critical process is to demonstrate it.” (Qtd in Cain). Criticism is first and foremost a tool of challenging what typically glides along with seeming innocence. While he may have come off as grandiloquent in his writing, he did not posture to have the answers to all the social ills and fixities that he thought necessary objects of critique. He was an “equal opportunity despiser” that was willing to fry individuals (like Bryan) and total collectives (like Americans) alike (Greenberg), yet avoided alienation of his reader via the aura of satire that encapsulated from his works.

            Style, indeed, is the hallmark of his corpus. His contemporary, Walter Lippman, noted the significance of his rhetorical prowess in a book review for Mencken’s Notes on Democracy:

Mr. Mencken is so effective just because his appeal is not from mind to mind but from viscera to viscera. If you analyze his arguments you destroy the effect. You cannot take them in detail and examine their implications. You have to judge him totally, roughly, approximately, without definition, as you would a barrage of artillery, for the general destruction rather than for the accuracy of the individual shots.

This essay has been laced with extensive quotations of Mencken for this very reason. Bracket out the attitude from his works and you are largely left with disdain. Despite the fact he offered few alternatives for all the institutions and conventions he torched with his typewriter, Mencken was a proponent of cultural change. He sought to shatter social conventions based on the actual effects they were having on culture, which for the most part was keeping the masses ignorant and impulsive. Where tension was absent, he created it in hopes that the public would shed their parochial views and renounce their boob-hood.

References:

Cain, William E. “A Lost Voice of Dissent: H. L. Mencken in Our Time.” The Sewanee Review,

vol. 104, no. 2, 1996, pp. 229–47. JSTOR.

Greenberg, Paul. “Opinionists Ponder H.L. Mencken’s Lasting Relevance.” The Masthead, 22

Dec. 1996, https://link-galegroup- com.libproxy1.usc.edu/apps/doc/A19226282/AONE?sid=lms.

Lippman, Walter. “H.L. Mencken.” Lippman on Mencken,

www.mencken.org/text/txt001/lippman.walter.1926.h-l-mencken.htm.

Mencken, Henry Louis. "On being an American." Prejudices: Third Series (1922): 63-4.

--. The American language: An inquiry into the development of English in

the United States. Vol. 2. Alfred a Knopf Incorporated, 1945.