H.L. Mencken

by Glenn N. Holliman

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public - H.L. Menchen


My college mate of long ago, Dave McIntyre of Tennessee, has been gently downsizing as we both creep (sometimes literally) deeper into our senior years. In my post office box this week arrived a mysterious package from him, a book by one of the most stimulating writers of  the first half of the 20th century, H. L. Mencken. Very famous and controversial in his time, Menchen's work for years enhanced the pages of the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

"Neat", I thought upon unwrapping the thick white packaging and glancing at the title and author's name.  Then to my delight I found the copy was signed by the author and included two letters to Menchen's friend and another provocative writer, 
Harry Elmer Barnes (1889-1968).  

Barnes is largely forgotten today but in the 1930s he was controversial for writing that France and Russia, not Germany, were primarily responsible for World War I. His school of thought was labeled revisionist.  

Barnes, pictured on the left, taught history at Columbia University, and later became a freelance writer and professor at smaller schools.  His 100 essays, 30 books and 600 articles and reviews made his one of the most prolific authors of his time.  He lost much of his reputation in the late 1950s when he help create the Holocaust denial movement.

Like Barnes, Menchen (1880-1956) was an iconoclast, one whom we might say thought outside of the conventional box. One who dared call a fool, well, a fool.  

This 'Sage of Baltimore' gained notoriety in the 1920s with his sarcastic reporting on the Dayton, Tennessee anti-Darwin 'Monkey Trial'.  He was skeptical of religion, populism and representative democracy.  His major work was a multi-volume  study of American English entitled The American Language.

Today his Baltimore home in the Union Square neighborhood is a museum and his papers scattered in various libraries.  The major collection resides in the Mencken Room at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library.

My plans are this volume and the letters scanned below will eventually find their way to that collection.

Where did Dave find this literary treasure?  Probably, he said at a yard sale or antique fair, really not sure. Thanks, old friend of my college days when the world was young, our cynicism was non-existent and all lay before us.

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

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