‘Fifty-seven Varieties Lower Than a Turkey Buzzard’

The recent publication of H. L. Mencken’s diary caused the kind of furor that the curmudgeon of American letters would have loved. A good deal of this post-mortem controversy has to do with Henry Louis Mencken’s status as the patron saint of journalists.

It has been generally pointed out in the saint’s defense that he was uncomplimentary not only about Jews and blacks, but practically everybody under the sun, including fellow journalists. The point that gets lost is that the offensiveness of some passages in the long-withheld diary looks tame when compared with the avalanche of vituperative invective hurled at this independent thinker during most of his career.

In 1928, two years before Mencken began writing his diary, Alfred A. Knopf, his regular publisher, brought out a small volume of “Menckeniana--A Schimplexicon,” meaning (in German) “a lexicon of abuse.” It contained selections from editorials, reviews and general hate mail printed about Mencken when he was in his mid-40s.

The title is misleading, since the reader might have expected the quotes to have been authored by Mencken himself, while attributing them to newspapers and individuals who had attracted his scorn. He was certainly capable of perpetrating such a hoax: The celebrated fabrication about the introduction of the first American bathtub--how it had been banned in Boston, except on medical prescription, and how Virginia imposed a $30 tax on each tub, etc.--still is remembered as a practical joke on the order of Orson Welles’ radio version of “War of the Worlds.” Mencken had written the piece to amuse his readers during World War I, but these “historical facts” came to be reprinted in reference books and countless articles for decades despite the author’s repeated attempts to expose his own fraud.

“During the single year of 1926,” the publisher points out in a prefatory note to Menckeniana, “more than 500 separate editorials upon the sayings and doings of Mencken were printed in the United States, and at least four-fifths were unfavorable. Himself given to somewhat acidulous utterance, he has probably been denounced more vigorously and at greater length than any other American of his time, not even excepting Henry Ford, Robert M. LaFollette, Clarence Darrow, and Sacco and Vanzetti.”

From the vast amount of material, contained in 30 volumes of scrapbooks, Mencken and the future Mrs. Mencken, Sara Powell Haardt, made an “expurgated edition.” According to the publisher, some were “chosen for their wit--for there are palpable hits among them!--and some for their blistering ferocity, and some for their charming idiocy.” A few of these deserve to be remembered, to provide a context for readers of “The Diary of H. L. Mencken” and also for themselves, as examples of lively invective rarely found in our tamer days.

Mencken was “a literary stink-pot,” according to the Raleigh Times; “a tavern brawler, drunk on adjectives,” (the Nashville Tennessean), and as “a scribbler plethoric and thinker vacuous,” the Memphis Commercial Appeal concluded, “what he writes is bilge.”

These are just three of the appreciative comments about the man who is now chiefly remembered for his monumental work about the American language. He had few defenders even among intellectuals and literary types. The New Republic called him a “Cinderella with flat feet”; the Chicago Literary Times dubbed him a “Dionysus sitting on a piece of flypaper,” and a magazine of the University of Mississippi writes about “the cynical, putrid-souled H. L. Mencken . . . wallowing in a self-created atmosphere of filthy literary stench. . . .”

Mencken himself rarely lowered himself to such direct ad hominem smears, content to attack whole classes of people, such as the unrelenting war he waged on the “booboisie”--a term he applied not just to the bourgeoisie but to all humanity. During the famous “Monkey Trial” of 1925, he kept up a barrage of derision against the backwardness of the South. His gloating obituary of William Jennings Bryan, the fundamentalist demagogue who was chiefly responsible for bullying the state of Tennessee into prosecuting John Thomas Scopes for teaching evolution, certainly did not win Mencken any friends.

“In the not very remote past,” wrote Nannie H. Chestnutt in the Nashville Tennessean, “a wiggle in the mud got alive, and in the course of time, became maggot, gadfly, cockroach, wasp, tobacco worm, scorpion, bat, English sparrow, cow-bird, buzzard, polecat, hyena, jackal, monkey, jackass and eventually evolved Mencken.”

The Cincinnati Inquirer called him a “stormy petrel of unbalanced mental potentialities,” and Howard Hammond, writing to the St. Michaels Comet in Maryland, showed as little respect for Mencken as for the English language: “Disappointed, dishonest, distruthful, disgraceful, degraded, degenerate evolute of a species fifty-seven varieties lower than a turkey buzzard.”

The circus metaphor also was popular, and even big-city newspapers happily joined in the chorus. “When Mr. Mencken tries to be humorous,” opined Percy A. Hutchison in the New York Times, “he has all the subtlety and grace of a trick elephant dancing on an inverted tub.”

From evolution, it was a short step down into the gutter of indiscriminate racist attacks. Mencken hailed from a prosperous Baltimore family of German descent. The Danville Register in Virginia associated his “patronymic with a sinister Hunnish sound,” while the Los Angeles Times ventured that “Mr. Mencken is a typical Hun in his criticism.” One paper accused him of being a “former subject of the Kaiser”; another called him “a British toady,” and the Vancouver Sun told its readers that in his “veins runs unsullied the pure blood of Hungary.”

The St. Louis Mirror thundered that “as the pure blood will tell, the erstwhile Bright Boy of Baltimore has in time evolved into the super-Boche of our American culture . . . “ Harold N. Coriell, in the New York Herald Tribune, thought Mencken “an offense in the nostrils of all Americans who love the ideals and best traditions of their country.” Ditto the New Haven Union: “Mencken, obviously of foreign name, is a treacherous alien sapping at the vitals of America’s proudest and most essential institutions, an indecent buffoon wallowing in obscenity as he howls with glee.”

Out of the empty West came this: The Montana American in Butte pictured Mencken, a continent away, as “a Jewish expert screwing the microscope into his jaundiced eye,” and “shaking his head over all the jewels proffered in America by Americans.” In the light of the few racist comments found in the diary, the following 1920s quotes are noteworthy:

“We are not fully informed as to Mencken’s color and race,” editorialized the Tampa Tribune, “but his remarks about Negro superiority in the South lead us to believe that he must be a Negro by inclination if not by birth. He is, as a matter of fact, far inferior to the average Southern Negro.” Arabella Jameson, in the Raleigh News and Observer, takes a different tack: “Away with the inhibition of inferiority this clever Hebrew would wish upon us!”

No less a literary figure than Gilbert Keith Chesterton joined the lynch mob from England, managing to damn him and Americans in the same breath: “Mr. Mencken is a clever and bitter Jew, in whom a very real love of letters is everlastingly exasperated by the American love of cheap pathos and platitude.” Even if Mencken had been Jewish, he would have found that community less than welcoming. “He appears to be a Jew of the ‘dirty bird which fouls its own nest’ variety,” The American Israelite tried to analyze him, “probably acting in this manner to show that he is different and of finer clay than his fellows.”

Mencken hardly ever responded to this endless stream of abuse. He seemed to delight in it. His revenge was to make money from publishing Menckeniana. Almost 30 years after that, he finally did have something to say--in private. His last seven years laid waste by a stroke, and welcome death approaching, Mencken’s parting words to a visiting friend were: “Remember, write what you damn well please. But be sure to tell ‘em I’ve always been a Christian. And a patriot.”

He died on Jan. 29, 1956. May he never rest in peace--because he never wanted to.