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NOTE The Elitist Individualism of H.L. Mencken

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The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach.

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Lest the month get away from us before we have done all that is fitting, we should note that September 2010 marked the 130th anniversary of Henry Louis Mencken's birth.

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He was born in Baltimore, September 12, 1880, grew up there, went to school there, and took

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up newspapering there around the turn of the 20th century, when he was a teenaged high

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school graduate with a large talent and perhaps even larger aspirations.

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He did well at newspapering, moving quickly from the lackluster Baltimore Morning Herald

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to its bigger rival, the Baltimore Sun, but writing for a daily paper didn't begin to

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to exhaust his prodigious energy.

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He began writing books on the side and freelance magazine pieces, too.

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Somewhere along the way, he began signing himself H. L. Mencken instead of Henry Louis

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Mencken or Henry L. Mencken.

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The first of his books to come out under the H. L. Mencken byline he eventually stuck with

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is dated 1912, by which time he was in his early thirties and had been writing professionally

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for more than a decade.

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He published three other books during that first decade of professional writing, an inconsequential

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collection of verse and two works of serious non-fiction, a short study of George Bernard

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Shaw and his contributions to the theatre, and a significantly longer study of Friedrich

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Nietzsche and his philosophical books.

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During this time Mencken travelled to New York frequently to establish and maintain

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and Editorial Contacts, and also to sit at the feet of the legendary James Gibbons Hunicker,

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who wrote with equal facility about music, theatre, literature, painting, and ideas,

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who had single-handedly introduced a couple of generations of Americans to contemporary

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European arts and letters, who had advocated the most advanced ideas in the pages of all

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The best magazines throughout the 1880s and 90s and who was now in his 40s and early 50s,

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in his prime really, going back and collecting the best of these pieces along with new ones

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and re-publishing them in a brilliant series of books.

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Hünecker's biographer Arnold T. Schwab describes the bright young men who regularly gathered

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around Hunicker at Sheffal Hall or Lukoff's to hear the spiced, sparkling pronouncements

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on art and life that were already legendary, and to marvel at his ability to identify every

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known brand of beer by the slightest taste.

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For, as one British student of Hunicker's life and times has put it, James Gibbons'

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Hunicker's broad conception of culture accorded significant attention and respect to the arts

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Tips of Food, Beer and Conversation

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As a visiting bright young man, Mencken met other young journalists on the rise.

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Carl Van Vechten, for example, who had come from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, by way of the University

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of Chicago, and was now with the New York Times, and George Gene Nathan, who had come

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from Fort Wayne, Indiana, by way of Cleveland and Cornell, and was now with the New York

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Harold, and freelancing furiously for the magazines.

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In the course of meeting his fellow bright young men Mencken formed relationships that

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would figure large in his later career.

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He and George Jean Nathan particularly hit it off.

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They became fast friends, drinking buddies, and eventually co-editors of two magazines.

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First in 1914 there was an intellectual magazine with a somewhat literary focus.

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Man, poetry, essays, literary and theatrical criticism.

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It was called The Smart Set, a magazine of cleverness.

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Then a decade later, Mencken and Nathan founded and co-edited an intellectual magazine with

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more of a focus on current ideas and issues.

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It was called The American Mercury, and there were those who would say that it was the most

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influential American intellectual magazine of the 1920s.

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Both Mencken and Nathan had started out in newspapers as general assignment reporters.

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He in Baltimore, Nathan in New York.

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But both had moved on to more interesting jobs pretty quickly.

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Nathan to theater reviewing, Mencken to book reviewing and editorial writing and commentary

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on recent news and recent trends in the world of ideas.

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He wrote incessantly, compulsively, for the Baltimore Sun Papers, of course, but also

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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A little old-fashioned long division will tell you that that reflects an average output of about 100,000 words per year, enough words to fill every page of a 333 page volume every year for 50 years, a shelf of books at least 6 feet long.

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Makin wrote in 1848 that a good deal of the five million words he had ushered into print

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were devoted to journalism pure and simple, dead almost before the ink which printed it

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was dry.

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But I certainly do not regret that I gave so much of my time and energy, especially

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in my earlier years, to this journalism, for I had a swell time concocting it, and in its

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day it got some attention.

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But it certainly did.

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By the time he was 40 years old in 1920, when his career as a professional writer was scarcely

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two decades old, his writing had already made his name a household word.

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He had been publicly denounced from pulpits and state legislatures all over the country

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as a destroyer of American civilization, and he had received more than a few threats of

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lynching if he so much as set foot in certain states or parts of states.

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By 1925, when he was 45, college and university students nationwide were debating the proposition

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that the school of thought typified by Mencken is a harmful element in American life.

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By 1928, his writings had brought such a deluge of denunciation down upon him that he could

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collect the most vituperative and splenetic of the lot into a book of more than 130 pages

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and publish it to his personal profit under the title Manconiana, a Schimpflexicon.

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And what was the doctrine Mancon espoused, the doctrine that aroused his critics to such

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spluttering paroxysms of uncontrollable rage, the doctrine that scalded the sensitive palates

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and raised hives on the delicate skins of clergymen and teachers and literary critics

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and Public Officials from Bangor to Seattle and from San Diego to Miami.

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What ideas of his so filled them with fear and loathing when they contemplated the possibility

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that Walter Lippmann had been right in saying at the end of 1926 that Mencken was the most

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powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people.

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I suppose you might call it elitist individualism.

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It's the sort of individualism that is focused on self-realization and self-expression, and

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Macon never makes any secret of the fact that he is primarily concerned with the self-realization

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and self-expression of what he calls the superior man, that is, the individual of substantially

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above average intelligence.

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There are minds which start out with a superior equipment and proceed to high and arduous

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Deeds," he wrote in 1926, in the very book Walter Lippmann was reviewing, when he called

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Mekken the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people.

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On the other hand, there are minds which never get any further than a sort of insensate sweating,

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like that of a kidney.

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Of one mind, we may say with some confidence that it shows an extraordinary capacity for

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for Function and Development, that its possessor, exposed to a suitable process of training,

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may be trusted to acquire the largest body of knowledge and the highest skill at ratiocination

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to which homo sapiens is adapted.

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Of another, we may say, with the same confidence, that its abilities are sharply limited, that

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no conceivable training can move it beyond a certain point.

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In other words, men differ inside their heads as they differ outside.

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There are men who are naturally intelligent and can learn, and there are men who are naturally

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stupid and cannot.

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Moreover, some men can learn almost indefinitely.

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Their capacity goes on increasing until their bodies begin to wear out.

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Others stop in childhood, even in infancy.

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They reach, say, the mental age of 10 or 12, and then they develop no more.

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Physically, they become men and sprout beards, political delusions and the desire to propagate

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their kind, but mentally, they remain on the level of schoolboys.

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Mencken's individualism was an elitist individualism because Mencken believed that some men were

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better than others, though not on account of their race or their color or their nationality

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or their religious background or their socio-economic class.

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He believed that some men were better than others because some were more competent and

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creative than others.

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But he believed in freedom for everybody.

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He believed that progress was possible only if superior men are given absolute freedom

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to think what they want to think and say what they want to say.

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And he saw that the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.

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Mencken saw the implications of where his thinking was leading him, and he acknowledged

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those implications frankly.

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I am, he wrote in the Smart Set in 1922, a libertarian of the most extreme variety.

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He was, he said, against jailing men for their opinions, or for that matter, for anything

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else.

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He considered that the ideal government would be one which lets the individual alone, one

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which barely escapes being no government at all.

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He believed, he said in 1930, that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily

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make war upon liberty.

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But he was not sanguine about the prospects for actually getting rid of government, or

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even for reducing it to a tolerable minimum.

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The ideal of a government which barely escapes being no government at all, he said, will

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be realized in the world twenty or thirty centuries after I have passed from these scenes

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and taken up my public duties in hell.

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By the way, before I go any further, did that last bit, the bit about libertarian goals

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being realized two or three thousand years after Mencken's death, did that seem joyous

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to you?

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How about some of those earlier parts I quoted from his 1926 book Notes on Democracy, say,

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the bit about the minds who never progress in their intellectual development beyond a

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sort of insensate sweating like that of a kidney?

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Did that seem joyous to you?

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I ask because a man for whom I have a great deal of respect, Murray Ann Rothbard, published

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an essay on Mencken many years ago called H. L. Mencken, The Joyous Libertarian.

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This essay has introduced at least two generations of young libertarians to the work of one of

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the most important individualist writers of the 20th century.

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It played a part in convincing me early on of Mencken's importance in the larger picture

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of the libertarian tradition.

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Yet I could never unequivocally accept Murray's notion that joyous was the right word to describe

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Mencken's spirit.

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Joyous?

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I didn't think so.

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Playful at times, certainly, but more often acerbic, disdainful, contemptuous.

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His positive doctrine was individualism, but he spent much of his time focusing on the

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negative, singling out his enemies for abuse, ridiculing them, pointing out their stupidity,

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and make no mistake about it, it was this spirit of mockery and ridicule, not any spirit of joyousness that got Mencken denounced coast to coast and made his reputation.

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He was denounced not for how joyous he was, but for how contemptuous, how derisive, how comically disrespectful he was.

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He was denounced because his scorn was so withering.

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As Lord Chesterfield reminded his son way back in 1746,

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there is nothing that people bear more impatiently or forgive less than contempt,

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and an injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.

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Eventually, though, Mencken's insults were forgotten.

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He is best known today not for his libertarianism or for his dismissive attitude toward those of limited intelligence

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and their various foibles and follies, but for his 1919 book on the American language,

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and for his memoirs, written during the late 1930s and early 1940s for the New Yorker,

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and collected later into three volumes under the titles Happy Days, Heathen Days, and Newspaper

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Days.

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He is also fairly well remembered as a historical figure, as the cynical scoffing journalist

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Mencken scoffed cynically all the way up to the fall of 1948, when, at the age of 68,

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He suffered a stroke that left him unable to read or write and able to speak only with

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great effort and difficulty.

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He spent the last seven years of his life in this unfortunate condition, dying finally

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in January of 1956 at the age of 75.

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I was a schoolboy at the time, in the middle of fourth grade.

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I had begun reading the newspapers by then, but I remembered no significant reaction to

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Mencken's passing.

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He was not an author we were assigned to read in school in the late 1950s and early 1960s,

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nor was he ever assigned to me in my undergraduate years in the middle and later 1960s.

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On the other hand, if you were in the habit of browsing libraries and second-hand bookstores

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as I was, Mencken was impossible to miss.

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Whoever he was, he had written plenty of books.

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I finally began getting into Mencken myself during my junior and senior years as an undergraduate

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when I began specializing in American literature and focusing a great deal of attention on

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the 1920s.

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It proved to be impossible to read about the 1920s in American literature without stumbling

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over Mencken's name every time you turned around.

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It proved to be necessary to come to terms with who Mencken had been and what he had

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done if I wanted to master my chosen subject matter.

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Then I began seeing the recommendations of Mencken's work by Rothbard and other libertarian

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writers.

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One thing led inexorably to another, and still another.

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And today, here I am, convinced that H. L. Mencken is among the very greatest of all

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American writers, and disposed to recommend him to everyone, and especially to libertarians.

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So what are you waiting for?

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You've received my recommendation and a little basic information on Mencken.

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If you haven't read him already, get busy.

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Believe me, you'll be glad you did.

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This is Jeff Rigenbach.

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The Theory of Money and Credit