The Sun turns on H.L. Mencken

 When on February 18 The Baltimore Sun published an apology for its history of racial prejudice, its editorial board took a swipe at H.L. Mencken, the most distinguished journalist in its 185 years of publication. 

While allowing that Mencken had opposed lynchings in the 1930s, the board chose to focus on the "deep-seated racism and antisemtism" that came to light when his diary was published in 1989 and said that the posting of a quotation from Mencken in the lobby of the paper's Calvert Street offices revealed "a lack of self-awareness and sensitivity."

Perhaps the board was not aware of Mencken: The American Iconoclast by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, which recounts Mencken's efforts with the NAACP over four years in the 1930s to oppose lynchings, including his testimony in 1935 before the Senate Judiciary Committee in favor of the Costigan-Wagner anti-lynching bill. The last article he published before his stroke called for desegregation of the tennis courts in Druid Hill Park. 

It seems also possible that the board was unaware of The Sage in Harlem by Charles Scruggs, which says that "more than any other critic in American letters, black or white, Mencken made it possible for the black writer to be treated as a fellow laborer in the vineyard," including the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson. 

And despite dismissal of him as an anti-Semite, one of Mencken's closest friends was Alfred Knopf, his publisher, with whom he traveled to the Bach festival in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, another a rabbi from Oheb Shalom, and, still more, musicians with whom he played in his Saturday night group, according to a lecture by David S. Thayer delivered in 2015 at the Pratt Library's annual Mencken Day event. 

People working as journalists might recall his fierce opposition to censorship, his ridicule of the Babbittry of the Harding-Coolidge years, or his support of John T. Scopes and Darwinian evolution during the Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. 

But the diary entries are there in public view and cannot be whitewashed. You can say that his wife's death had darkened his view, as his political views as a Grover Cleveland Democrat had gone into eclipse during the New Deal. Understanding that does not wipe away or excuse the ugly stuff. 

Mencken in his youth was much influenced by reading Nietzsche and as an adult he was a thoroughgoing libertarian. I realized this in reading his article on chiropractic, which amused me as a teenager as typical American exaggeration for humorous effect, and which I later came to think he meant seriously. 

At one point in the essay he muses that medical quacks may perform a useful public service, because they "suck in the botched, and help them on to bliss eternal." If you are a Nietzschean believer that some individuals have the strength of mind to construct their own characters and that most people don't, you can befriend similarly exemplary figures while dismissing the groups they come from with contempt. And if you are a thoroughgoing libertarian, you can say complacently that all people make choices and that stupid people who make bad choices get what is coming to them. 

I don't hold those views myself, but understanding them helps me to see why Mencken wrote what he did. That understanding makes it possible to see Mencken in a broader and more complex manner than simply resorting to the labels of "racist" and "anti-Semite" (applied to him by a paper that has been coasting on his reputation for decades). 

Understanding can go beyond retroactive virtue. We need to see that there is something about America in the 1619 Project, and also in the Enlightenment perspective of the founding, that the Founders often owned slaves but also gave us a vision of a better functioning republic. We can see that Franklin Roosevelt is not defined by his signing of the order to intern Japanese Americans. We can see that Lyndon Johnson carried water for Southern segregationists for years before he became the great civil rights president. We can try to see people as a whole. 

We can see Henry Mencken as a man capable of writing vile, bitter things that were not worthy of his best work, work which we can still honor. 

Two warm days, before the cold returns

 Yesterday, on a walk with Kathleen and a neighbor, we passed a house with a yard full of crocuses to which bees were giving their attention. 

Daffodils are visible on the south side of our house, though they have not yet bloomed. 

That morning, standing out a window at five, I saw a mature red fox trot down the sidewalk in front of the house.

On a walk this morning, I saw that the maple tree at the bottom on the hill next to the bridge over Herring Run was preparing to come out in bloom, and the deciduous magnolias on the west side of our house are about to follow suit with the first of their messy droppings. 

Also this morning, the neighborhood was full of robins, which I expect will soon swarm over our holly tree to consume the berries, as they do every year. 

This year I will not be at The Sun's offices at Port Covington to witness the blooming of the locust trees at the back of the property, or smell their fragrance to remind me of my childhood in Kentucky.

The rain is beginning now, and the thunderstorms  and cold front are on the way, but I have had two days to sit on the porch in fair weather to read in a book Daniel Okrent's posts as public editor of The New York Times, raising issues for journalism that remain current, and reading on my cellphone dispatches from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which also tell an old story that has not gone away. 

Spring in the third year of the pandemic will come, though I want it to come faster. I hope that The Sun will husband its strength under its new corporate owner and that The Baltimore Banner will soon launch as a fresh journalistic voice for the city. I hope that Ukraine will survive the brutal battering that is coming and that the West will help preserve it. 

I want to see the robins eat those holly berries and show me that life sustains. 

To correct and serve

 For many years at The Baltimore Sun my hands were the ones through which corrections moved into the paper. 

Errors of fact, either identified internally or through readers' complaints, were written by reporters or editors, approved by the managing editor, and sent to me for final examination before publication. We were scrupulous about this because, despite the nighttime telephone calls denouncing us as a filthy liberal rag, factual accuracy was important. 

And yes, we had errors of fact. Names misspelled, the fundamental error in journalism. Math lapses. (Always calculate the percentage yourself.) I sent through the correction on a features story that informed readers that carbon MONoxide would stop hiccups. (Technically, of course it will, but ...)

There is a widespread superstition among newspaper people that the original error cannot be repeated in the correction--probably an extension of the sound judgment that in apologizing for a libel it is good not to repeat the libel. But after we ran a correction telling no more than that a photo caption the previous day was of the wrong sea turtle, the editor decreed that we must repeat the error when it is necessary to make the correction comprehensible. 

The Sun took collective responsibility for errors rather than name the person responsible, which irritated reporters when an editor had been at fault: "It's my byline on the story, and readers will think I made the error." While I was sympathetic to the complaint, it remains a fact that what is published is a collective work, and reporters don't mind taking credit for stories that have been improved in editing.

(I once saw a story that passed through so many hands in repeated bouts of editing that the version sent to the copy desk for publication may not have contained a single sentence as originally written by the reporter. I was briefly tempted to write after the reporter's byline "as told to The Baltimore Sun." And no, I am not naming names. My entire career was devoted to concealing writers' and editors' shortcomings, and it is too late to start now.) 

From time to time, the paper was moved to publish a clarification rather than a correction. The point of a clarification is that while the published article was factually accurate, it had been written in a way that permitted an inaccurate inference.

Errors of grammar and usage of infelicities of prose were not subject to published corrections. They were instead dealt with in the in-house newsletter that I wrote, Publish and Be Damned.

In the case of this blog, and the one I published for years at baltimoresun.com, I had no copy editor, so crowdsourcing identified my lapses. I always promptly and gratefully accepted corrections. (There was one point late in my tenure at The Sun when I pissed off one of my masters and was instructed to have another editor vet my posts, but the supervision was cursory.) 

The unvarying form of the correction always ended with "The Sun regrets the error." And so did I. 

Corpora Punishment: A Grammar Noir Tale

Part 1: An editor walks into a bar

The day was leaking sunlight all over Baltimore at three o'clock, but that was not doing me any good. I was taking the healing waters in a dark saloon with a group of congenial barflies, discussing the finer points of demurrage and maritime law, when a seedy character crept in, put his hat on the bar, and ordered a beer. 

The tapster set down a brimming beaker, and the seedy character said, "Hey, don't splash it on my fedora."

"It's a trilby," I said. 

"What?"

"Those stingy-brim hats are called trilbies, named for the headgear of the eponymous heroine of George du Maurier's novel. Fedoras, which have wide brims and a center crease, were named for the hat Sarah Bernhardt wore as she played the eponymous heroine of Victorien Sardou's drama." 

"You must be a copy editor. Nobody else knows that kind of stuff. Hey, are you the one that upstart publication lured out of retirement?"

"I own the soft impeachment. What's your game?"

"You're the guy I came to see. They told me you hang out with these tosspots all the time. But, like, it has to be confidential."

"All right," I said. "Let's step into the back room for a minute."

We repaired to an even darker corner. He looked around guardedly and turned a sweaty face to me.

"Spill it," I said.

He whispered, "The peeververein are consolidating."

"Usage cranks? Consolidating"?

"Yeah. Different groups coming together. The Decimate Means 10 Percent crowd and the Kids Are Goats group have formed Etymology Is Destiny. Then they hooked up with the Two Spaces After a Period mob, the Over/More Than element, and the Standard English Is the Only English alliance." 

"And?"

"They're calling their organization Make English Great Again."

"So what? They can't do anything beyond infesting social media and talking among themselves."

"You're wrong, I'm tellin' ya. They've consulted Nevile Gwynne and Jacob Rees-Mogg. They mean business."

"What kind of business?"

He looked around again and bent close to my ear.

"Their goons got Paula Froke."

Part 2: The plot that failed

I gave him a look of disbelief that would credit a managing editor looking over a foreign correspondent's expense report. "What in the name of Henry Watson Fowler do they think they're going to do with the editor of the Associated Press Stylebook?

"They're going to slap her up in a secure facility at the University of Austin and make her revoke all the changes she's made since becoming editor, and then they're going to start dictating new rules to her." 

"Where are they holding her now?"

"They got her in a ballroom at the Hotel Pedantry."

"Drink your Smithwick's. I've got this."

The cabbie who dropped me off at the hotel half an hour later gave a fishy look at my bow tie, but my tip kept his mouth buttoned. 

I entered the lobby and walked up to the muscle standing at the ballroom door.

"No admission," he said. 

"Listen, sunshine," I said, "I used to be an assistant managing editor, and I don't take any guff from reptiles like you."

He went pale and swung the door open.

I walked up to some dimwit standing in front of a MEGA banner and gassing on about the split-verb rule, and took the microphone from him.

"Listen, you mugs," I told the crowd, "this little escapade is as pointless as reverse body type. Writers don't pay any attention to the AP Stylebook. They've never opened one. The only people who care about the stylebook are the copy editors, and the copy editor has been snuffed out like the dodo, the passenger pigeon, and the moderate Republican."

They gasped. 

"Now scram, the lot of you. I've got an autographed copy of Dreyer's English, and I'm not afraid to use it."

They scuttled away like an op-ed columnist who's seen a fact checker.

As I untied the ropes holding Froke in a chair she opened her mouth to begin thanking me, but I said, "Skip it, sister. There's still enough afternoon left to take the healing waters. Come along and I'll buy you a drink."

She likes Manhattans. 

The End

I have to say it again: English ain't algebra

 Yesterday brought a Twitterspat in which I engaged, probably unwisely, with a woman who commented that logic governs English grammar and punctuation. 

This misconception rises because people become literate and are taught English grammar and stylebook conventions of punctuation, but are never taught the language, that is, the principles of language that linguists have discerned. (Neither was I taught linguistics in school or college, and I've had a great deal of catching up to do.)

Take punctuation. It doesn't require deep thought to see that its conventions are arbitrary. In American English, we put commas and periods inside quotation marks; British English does the opposite. I have seen people indulge in online disputes over which convention is more logical, but you can argue one side and then argue the other side until the cows come home. 

Punctuation is more fashion than logic, as you can see in Making a Point, David Crystal's history of English punctuation, or Keith Houston's Shady Characters The Secret Life of Punctuation Symbols & Other Typographical Marks. (Crystal here.)

As to grammar, we know many principles on which it operates, but they too are arbitrary, often accidents of cultural development. Old English collided with Norman French after A.D. 1066, and the Middle English that developed shed most of the inflections of Old English and the gendered nouns of the French. Other languages, though, maintain inflections and gendered nouns; are they more or less logical than English?

We know that the fundamental syntactical pattern in English is subject-verb-object. That isn't necessarily the case elsewhere. We know the order of adjectives, the deep grammar that enables us to talk about the little gray stone church and to see that the stone gray little church isn't right. They are principles, but logic has nothing to do with them. And neither does it seem logical that English should harbor a clutch of words called contranyms, like sanction, which bear opposite meanings. 

Places where reliable information about English grammar can be found are Don't Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari and The Joy of Syntax by June Casagrande. (Shariatmadari here; Casagrande here.) Then you will see that logic is useful for argument but irrelevant for grammar. 

The person in the Twitterspat was a lawyer who took it ill when I mentioned Samuel Johnson's observation that we are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction. I think I deserve some credit for not quoting what Dr. Johnson said about lawyers.