Mencken the Teuton

Mencken: The American Iconoclast

The Life and Times of the Bad Boy of Baltimore

by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

Oxford, 662 pp., $35

THIS MONTH MARKS THE 50TH anniversary of H.L. Mencken's passing. Recently described by the New York Times as "the premier social critic of the first half of the 20th century," Mencken poured out more than 70 million words worth of columns, essays, and books over the five decades of his working life. At the height of his influence in the 1920s, Mencken's reputation fatted on the inanities of Prohibition, blue-nosed book-banning, and the Ku Klux Klan, all of which he saw as works of the "boobus Americanus." His broadsides against Prohibition, posturing preachers, and anti-evolutionists made him a hero to generations of college students. But his true quarry was American democracy and the American people, whom he defined as a "rabble of ignorant peasants."

Mencken's mockery of American mores made him, as Walter Lippmann said in 1926, "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people." And even now, 75 years after his heyday, Mencken's assaults on the hypocrisy of conventional morality resonate in the political and social debates between red and blue states. He taught his heirs, on both the left and right, how to be narrow-minded with an air of superiority.

Mencken, who was a master of self-promotion even as he mocked corn-fed, 100-percent American "go-getters," made sure that he would not be forgotten; indeed, he saw to it that the controversies around his life would continue well after his death in 1956. In accordance with Mencken's will, the author's extensive literary correspondence was shielded from public view until 1971. His diaries were opened a decade later--again, at his direction--and when a selection from them was published in 1989, they relaunched a longstanding dispute about Mencken's anti-Semitism.