One must be awful careful these days when bringing up H. L. Mencken. The “Bard of Baltimore” was an inspiration to a generation of plain-talking columnists long before Molly Ivins or Maureen Dowd were even born—or before anyone in journalism worried about hurting people’s feelings. Mencken’s specialty was puncturing the pomposity and pointing out the peccadilloes of the privileged. However, he was no great champion of the common man. He reviled ignorance even more than he did corruption. As he said, “All professional philosophers tend to assume that common sense means the mental habit of the common man. Nothing could be further from the mark. The common man is chiefly to be distinguished by his plentiful lack of common sense: he believes things on evidence that is too scanty, or that distorts the plain facts, or that is full of non sequiturs.”
According to Mencken, the main cause of ignorance was religion, especially the kind practiced by an “auctioneer of God,” i.e. a Protestant Bible-thumping tent revivalist—or, if you will, today’s television evangelist. Indeed, he maintained that one of the most destructive acts in the history of man was translating the Bible into the vernacular, thus making its fables accessible to the uncritical, uneducated vulgarian. These translations amounted to putting the Bible’s interpretation into the hands of the auctioneers instead of keeping it within the exclusive circles of the learned clergy of the Latin Church, which, “despite its frequent astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem.”
While he had utmost disdain for bombastic preachers, Mencken reserved a special place on his skewer for those who, like William Jennings Bryan, made their political fortunes by pandering to the religious rubes. Mencken’s accounts of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925 are entertaining for their piquant descriptions of the hypocrisy rampant among the citizens of Dayton, Tennessee. (It’s almost as if he, Jeremiah-like, foretells the “auctioneering” that would come from the likes of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker two-thirds of a century later.) But the obituary he composed for Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate who led the prosecution of Scopes, and died five days after the end of the trial, is unique in its venom, not just for Bryan himself, but for his natural constituency: the inhabitants of “every country town in the South and West.”
Here’s my favorite excerpt: “[Bryan] felt at home in such simple and Christian scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range … he was obviously happy.” In case you missed the “primate” reference, there’s another one further on: “The simian gabble of the crossroads was not gabble to him, but wisdom of an occult and superior sort. In the presence of city folks, he was palpably uneasy.”
But, even more damning than the mere fact of Bryan’s consorting with the rednecks, were his reasons for doing so. Mencken explained it like this: “He [was] deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty and fine and noble things … He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine … His one yearning was to keep his yokels heated up—to lead his forlorn mob of imbeciles against the foe.”
I keep a book of Mencken’s essays by my bedside and page through them when I’m bored with what I’m currently reading, or extremely tired of the predictability of those pale simulacra of Mencken who pass for newspaper columnists today. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to open a paper one morning and see what Mencken would have to say about Dennis Hastert and his “American Values Agenda,” or Hillary Clinton and her flag-burning legislation, or Michele Bachmann and gay marriage?
Not that I believe today’s newspapers would dare print anything so vicious.
Besides, what would really be the point? No one has yet improved upon Mencken’s assessment of such politicians: “The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.”
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