Evicting Mr. Mencken

 A few days ago the Enoch Pratt Free Library dedicated the DeWayne Wickham Room of Maryland Journalism, housing the papers and honoring the career of the veteran Black Maryland journalist. The Wickham Room was formerly known as the H.L. Mencken room, and the Mencken Collection has been transferred to the Pratt's Special Collections Department. 

I have no beef with Mr. Wickham and do not intend in the least to disparage his work as a journalist or deny him the recognition that is his due. But I would like to speak briefly for Henry Mencken. 

I was eighteen years old when I first read Mencken's work and was intoxicated by the vigor and sweep of his prose and liberated by his scorn for the stodginess and philistinism of American culture. 

As I became more familiar with his work over the years, I was more deeply impressed by what he had accomplished. He made his mark on American journalism as a reporter and columnist at The Evening Sun and on American literary culture as editor successively of The Smart Set and The American Mercury, where he gave many writers, including several young Black writers, a platform for their work. His essays, published in six installments of his Prejudices series, sum up American culture of the 1920s. His late memoirs, published as Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days, are affectionate, relaxed, and delightful. Had he written nothing else during his long and astonishingly productive career, The American Language would make his memory worth honoring. 

But. 

But Mencken went into eclipse in the 1930s because of his strenuous opposition to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal put him at odds with many of his former admirers. And the publication of extracts from his diaries in 1989 revealed many ugly attitudes. 

There are a couple of things to be said in mitigation (not excuse). The diaries were written in a dark and bitter time of his life when he was mourning the loss of his wife to tuberculosis and was politically on the outs. The other things to understand is that, perhaps because of the influence of Nietzsche during his youth, he esteemed individuals and despised groups. That is, he wrote antisemitic statement but many of his closest friends, such as Alfred A. Knopf, were Jewish. He condescended to women but was a devoted husband to his wife during their brief marriage. He had a low opinion of Blacks but published Black writers. Don't imagine that he thought highly of many white people, either, including those in Appalachia who are my people. There are not, I think, many writers who could withstand the retroactive application of our current standards of virtue. 

Let the record show that I am an old white guy, and old white guys remain the diminishing group of Mencken fans. Tastes change, and reputations rise and fall. It's surprisingly easy to topple statues from pedestals. 

But despite his faults, H.L. Mencken's accomplishments in journalism, literature, and philology--and for Baltimore--are not trivial. I think he merited a room with his name on the door at the Pratt Library, and I regret to see him evicted from it.