The Mount Rushmore of Editorialists: H.L. Mencken

This week, I am starting a series on the great American editorialists This is part one.

A great editorialist can be many things: insightful, sometimes witty, frequently pithy, prudent, and most of all perceptive. Back in the days of newspapers, after scanning the front page for news, and maybe after reading the comics, the editorialist was one of the most frequently sought after pages (usually in the back of the front section of the newspaper). But a great editorialist is the one who puts a smile on your face just seeing they have a column in today's newspaper. The equivalent for children of the internet age might be going to your favorite news website and noticing a certain editorialist has posted his "column" today. Regardless, we know a great editorialist when we see one, and he/she makes us happy just to know we get to read them today.

But if there was to be a Mount Rushmore of editorialists, whose faces would go up there?

The fist face should be Henry Louis Mencken, better known as H.L. Mencken.

(hat tip to Wikipedia for the pic)

Mencken started out as a writer for the Morning Herald in 1899, which became the Baltimore Morning Herald in 1900. and which eventually became the The Baltimore Sun, where he wrote until 1948, after suffering a stroke.

As any great editorialist, Mencken had controversial views on many of the topics of his era: He opposed both World Wars, as well as President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs. Mencken once said of Roosevelt in 1936:

If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.

Although Mencken was anti-semitic, he also attacked Roosevelt for refusing to admit Jewish refugees into the U.S.:

There is only one way to help the fugitives, and that is to find places for them in a country in which they can really live. Why shouldn't the United States take in a couple hundred thousand of them, or even all of them?

Add racist to adjectives of Mencken, yet he showed contradictions there too. He was openly opposed to lynchings. He once said of a lynching in Maryland:

Not a single bigwig came forward in the emergency, though the whole town knew what was afoot. Any one of a score of such bigwigs might have halted the crime, if only by threatening to denounce its perpetrators, but none spoke. So Williams was duly hanged, burned and mutilated.

Mencken opposed segregation, while at the same time felt blacks were inferior.

But Mencken's flawed views were typical of his era. Where Mencken truly shined was in his open disregard for democracy, where his various editorials still ring true today:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights. 

The strange American ardor for passing laws, the insane belief in regulation and punishment, plays into the hands of the reformers, most of them quacks themselves. Their efforts, even when honest, seldom accomplish any appreciable good. The Harrison Act, despite its cruel provisions, has not diminished drug addiction in the slightest. The Mormons, after years of persecution, are still Mormons, and one of them is now a power in the Senate. Socialism in the United States was not laid by the Espionage Act; it was laid by the fact that the socialists, during the war, got their fair share of the loot. Nor was the stately progress of osteopathy and chiropractic halted by the early efforts to put them down. Oppressive laws do not destroy minorities; they simply make bootleggers.

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. 

No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. 

Mencken did not write to praise the common man, but rather to remind us of his many failings. In the American democracy, the common man was the majority tyrant, and Mencken was only doing what so many great editorialists do: He was speaking truth to power, even if that power was looking back at us from our mirrors.